PCIe SSDs supported

[airflow]

Hi!

I currently have a FreeNAS-installation running with a raid-z2 volume consisting of 4 disks. Additionally, I use an SSD for jails (for those I don't need high availability, but enjoy the better I/O performance).

As I have to expand the volume for another 2 disks (resulting in a new raid-z2 volume consisting of 6 disks), and my mainboard has only 6 SATA ports, I will have to trash the SSD. I don't want to buy a SATA-controller.

I can just move the jails to the main volume, which will certainly be an option. But I think about equipping the free PCIe-slot with an PCIe-SSD, for example http://www.asus.com/Storage_Optical_Drives/RAIDR_Express_PCIe_SSD/.

Is this supported with FreeNAS? Is it recommended?

Thanks,
airflow

 

[mjws00]

Last I looked most of these had some Marvell controller that bsd didn't like. But perhaps progress has been made. At some point the pcie ssds have to be viable... but it is early days. If they worked well many of us would throw down, but that hasn't happened yet. I'd verify carefully that it works, or just stuff it in my workstation if it isn't ripe for FreeNAS yet.

 

[airflow]

Last I looked most of these had some Marvell controller that bsd didn't like. But perhaps progress has been made. At some point the pcie ssds have to be viable... but it is early days. If they worked well many of us would throw down, but that hasn't happened yet. I'd verify carefully that it works, or just stuff it in my workstation if it isn't ripe for FreeNAS yet.

Thanks for your feedback. Well, I don't have any use for such a card except in my FreeNAS-box! And I don't want to buy it for nothing... So I'll wait until someone else can shed some light on this.

 

[mjws00]

I was looking for a similar solution a while ago. So far most of the consumer cards have proprietary drivers, and odd controllers. Intel's NVME 3700 is coming online. I think kernel support made 9.3. The drivers have been around for a while. But I keep hoping someone will pop up with one that works.

 

[marbus90]

Theres also a Intel P3600, a bit cheaper as the P3700 and still fine for most workloads.

 

[airflow]

I'm just researching about this again... What do you think about the Intel P3500, with about 600€ it would be the cheapest variant of the Intel PCIe SSDs. Is it also supported in in FreeNAS 9.3?

 

[jgreco]

I've got a Samy XP941 coming in soon to play with. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

 

[thermite]

I've got a Samy XP941 coming in soon to play with. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

Did you ever get a chance to test pcie ssd's on freenas?

 

[Ericloewe]

All vaguely standard PCI-e SSDs work. NVMe, AHCI... Hell, even Intel's oddball SSD with four SAS controllers hanging off of an LSI SAS 2008 HBA with custom firmware apparently works.

 

[Stux]

All vaguely standard PCI-e SSDs work. NVMe, AHCI... Hell, even Intel's oddball SSD with four SAS controllers hanging off of an LSI SAS 2008 HBA with custom firmware apparently works.

Until you cross-flash it to an HBA ;)