PCIe M.2 card with a good SATA controller?

[sremick]

So I'm trying to investigate ways to move off from a USB flash boot drive. I am using all on-board SATA ports on my motherboard, but I have one PCIe slot available.

My idea is to get a PCIe card with an M.2 connector on it (although I suppose an older mSATA would also be fine) then pick up a quality M.2 SSD.

Problem #1 is that 99% of the M.2 SATA PCIe cards out there actually use a passthrough SATA connector that you tie back to a free SATA port on your motherboard (!!!). Obviously worthless, but it's hard to filter all those out while searching.

I've found a few no-name cards with unknown chipsets... I'm trying to find out what they have, but it's probably nothing quality.

StarTech has the PEX2M2 which uses the ASMedia 1062 chipset. Supposedly this is supported by FreeBSD, but no one seems to think highly of it. And my goal is to move off from USB for the sake of stability and driver support, so going with a questionable SATA chipset would defeat that purpose.

So my question to the forum hive-mind is: does anyone know of a PCIe M.2 add-on card that has its own on-board SATA chipset, and a chipset that is "quality" (Intel?) or otherwise has solid FreeBSD/FreeNAS support?

 

[Johnnie Black]

StarTech has the PEX2M2 which uses the ASMedia 1062 chipset. Supposedly this is supported by FreeBSD,

Asmedia 106x are supported by FreeBSD and FreeNAS with the starndard AHCI driver, and in my experience they work very well, there's always some risk if you buy one from a cheap chinese manufacturer that the rest of the controller is garbage and you get CRC errors, etc, but the Asmedia chipset itself is very good, much better than Marvell for example.

 

[sremick]

Asmedia 106x are supported by FreeBSD and FreeNAS with the starndard AHCI driver, and in my experience they work very well

Thanks, good to know (as well as to avoid Marvell). So I basically have 3 possibilities that are all reasonably priced. Interested in thoughts:

Option A: Regular SATA controller card (ASM1061) + SATA DOM (16GB). Downsides are SSD size (going to 32GB is a huge price jump) and having to run power to the SATA DOM (?)

Option B: mSATA controller card (ASM1061) + mSATA SSD. Reasonable sizes start as cheap as $38 for brand-name 120GB.

Option C: m.2 SATA controller card (ASM1062) + m.2 SATA SSD. This is the most-expensive option, unless I come across some freebie m.2 SATA RAM by scavenging parts. But interestingly this is a newer version of the ASMedia chipset. Not sure if there are benefits...?

Costs aside, technical thoughts?

 

[Stingray88]

Thanks, good to know (as well as to avoid Marvell). So I basically have 3 possibilities that are all reasonably priced. Interested in thoughts:

Option A: Regular SATA controller card (ASM1061) + SATA DOM (16GB). Downsides are SSD size (going to 32GB is a huge price jump) and having to run power to the SATA DOM (?)

Option B: mSATA controller card (ASM1061) + mSATA SSD. Reasonable sizes start as cheap as $38 for brand-name 120GB.

Option C: m.2 SATA controller card (ASM1062) + m.2 SATA SSD. This is the most-expensive option, unless I come across some freebie m.2 SATA RAM by scavenging parts. But interestingly this is a newer version of the ASMedia chipset. Not sure if there are benefits...?

Costs aside, technical thoughts?

Hey sremick, I have almost the exact same FreeNAS build as you do. Same motherboard, case, HDDs, just a different CPU (i3 instead of Xeon). I was looking into the PEX2M2 and was wondering if you ended up going with it in the end.

 

[sremick]

Hey sremick, I have almost the exact same FreeNAS build as you do. Same motherboard, case, HDDs, just a different CPU (i3 instead of Xeon). I was looking into the PEX2M2 and was wondering if you ended up going with it in the end.

I did not. I picked up a card off eBay for less than 1/2 the price ( think it was ASM1061 based). I have the SSD mounted in it but I have not cut over to it yet as I haven't taken my FreeNAS box offline for an extended enough period to work that in. I've sort of been shelving the migration to it until I'm doing a lot of other work (such as replacing a bunch of drives, which I'll probably be doing soon).

 

[sremick]

A long time coming, but as promised I wanted to follow up with an update. I finally got through the big HDD upgrade in my NAS so once the dust settled with that I tried the PCIe card. Happy to say that it's working just great... in fact, the cheapo Silicon Power 128GB M.2 SATA drive I got apparently has 2 micro status/activity LEDs built into it which is kind of cool (MOAR BLINKENLICHTEN!)

 

[pschatz100]

Glad you got it all working OK. There are a couple of folks that have had some success using a small SSD connected through a USB to SATA connector as an alternative to a USB flash drive. I haven't done this myself, so I cannot say anything about long term reliability.

 

[Andrew32]

I know this is an old thread, but I ran into the same problem.

I have an HP DL380p G8 with 16 drives (two LSI controllers) and one internal SATA connector (for slow CDrom). I wanted to not waste two nice SAS/SATA slots for a boot drive. USB is too slow on these servers and there's no other internal controller or space. The old G8 systems won't boot NVMe.

I could have used the onboard P420 with a special data and power cables but I could not use it on other servers and I would still need to have internal "drives" somewhere. Yes there are PCIe cards with SATA connectors and SAS expanders and other funky solutions but that gets ugly.

With some PCIe slots open I looked for a reasonable/cheap dual M.2 PCIe card that supported SATA B-Key SSD modules and had an on board AHCI SATA controller chip the system can use for booting from BIOS. There are plenty of Intel DC SSD cards with PLP that are cheap and fast.

Everything I found (and ordered many of them) used the Marvell or mostly the ASMedia chipset. Nothing was perfect...

The QNAP QM2-2S-220A card supports dual 2280 or 22110 SATA M.2 B-key cards and includes a full heatsink and fan. It uses the ASMedia 1062 chipset which supports PCIe 2.0 at x2. Not the cheapest or fastest, but good enough for mirrored SATA 6G boot drives. The HUGE problem I have with the card (and all ASMedia cards I tested) is it ships with very old BIOS/Firmware that cause boot failures. It will boot the first time but after a warm boot/reboot it can't find the SSD cards any more, so reboot fails. This may be a problem limited to the HP G8 servers, but that's where I need it to work.

QNAP was no help as they said there was no firmware update for the card. ASMedia offered no response.

I found that others had this problem too. Sometimes a MB or card BIOS or firmware upgrade helped. Looking harder I started to find uploaded BIOS/Firmware updates for the ASMedia chipset but most would not install. As I was looking I started to see a pattern of which ones could be installed (and did not brick the card) and then found the magic solution. The newest (latest?) BIOS/Firmware version worked! The ASMedia 1062 card boots correctly every time now! I don't know why it took them 5 years to solve the problem but it works for me now.

I now use this QNAP ASMedia 1062 card for both TrueNAS and XCP boot drives in HP DL360p/DL380p G8 servers. The latest version that I found is the ASM1062 Firmware Version 201105 and BIOS version 1.80 (A23 update, from Nov-2020 I assume).

NOTE: Upgrade at your own risk, not all cards or all versions will support these updates.

Wayback Machine

​

 

[Andrew32]

Here's a 2021 firmware update: Wayback Machine

Tested/Works/Boots correctly with the Ableconn PEXM2-122 and QNAP QM2-2S-220A cards.

NOTE: Upgrade at your own risk, not all cards or all versions will support these updates.