Motherboard disk controller recommendations

[mitzaotomitza]

Hello There!
I have an Asus Rampage IV Black Edition with six Intel Sata controllers and Four Asmedia Sata controllers.
I am planning:
-one vdev with six disks in ZFS2.
- one 128GB boot SSD
- one 128 GB cache SSD
- one 500GB onboard PCIE nvme drive -for Applications.

The six Intel intel controller has mixed speeds ports. 4-3Gbps and 2-6Gbps
The four Asmedia controller has all 4 ports at 6Gps
My question is :
Should I connect the six ZFS2 disks at the Intel controller ( mixed 3Gbpsx4, 6Gpsx2) and the boot&cache SSD's on Asmedia ports?
or
Connect the 6 disks to a mix of Intel and Asmedia ( all running at 6Gbps) and connect boot&cahe SSD's on Asmedia?

My six ZFS2 drives are WD 7200rpm 6Gbps.
Since I will never reach the lowest Intel 3Gbps transfer speeds, I am inclined to connect all six drives to the Intel controller ( mixed 3Gbpsx4, 6Gpsx2).
The main reason I am asking this is because I read that it is not OK to mix motherboard controllers when you build a ZFS2 pool.
Any Idea is more than welcomed!
Thank you in advance!

 

[joeschmuck]

Asus Rampage IV Black Edition

Does this support ECC RAM? And how much RAM will you have?

Should I connect the six ZFS2 disks at the Intel controller ( mixed 3Gbpsx4, 6Gpsx2) and the boot&cache SSD's on Asmedia ports?
or
Connect the 6 disks to a mix of Intel and Asmedia ( all running at 6Gbps) and connect boot&cahe SSD's on Asmedia?

The cache should go to the faster interface, the rest does not matter. Some will argue it does not matter regardless.

You did not state your Use Case. If for a media server, stuff not really important then you are good. If you are saving important data then you should be using proper server hardware. Just my opinion, I'm not going to shame you into spending money you may not even have.

 

[mitzaotomitza]

Thank you for your response. I have 64Gb of ram non ECC but at least is good quality RAM, GSkill . I tested the system with four10TB on ZFS2 pool on Asmedia 6Gbps SATA ports and everything works fine. I want to add two more 10TB drives and want to make sure I am using the right motherboard SATA ports. I read that it is not a good idea to mix Intel with Asmedia.

 

[joeschmuck]

I read that it is not a good idea to mix Intel with Asmedia.

TrueNAS should work fine. When you connect up the drives, if you are able to use them then your good to move forward. I'm not sure I'd mix controllers if I were looking to build something really special, and then I'd want a dedicated controller.

If you have a link for where someone said it's not a good idea, please provide the link so i can read it. Maybe there is a nuance that you are not understanding.

Tell you what... Try this... Power off your system, move two of the SATA ports on the motherboard from the Asmedia connectors and to the Intel controller. Power up and see what happens. The pool should mount and all should be operational. This is the beauty of TrueNAS/ZFS, portability.