maniyer
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2019
- Messages
- 19
I’m posting this because I haven’t found much information online or in the forums regarding the compatibility of quad m.2 adapter cards with FreeNAS. Considering the growing m.2 adoption on boards, it makes sense to discuss them regardless of how they are used, also since the newer Gen4x4 are just being released.
For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume the motherboard supports 4x4x4x4 bifurcation (which mine does, and many do now), or that you’re using a bridged adapter which doesn’t require bifurcation (although they are more expensive and possibly slower).
The main concern to me is will FreeNAS see the drives if one of the cards is used. If the motherboard recognises the board and the drives in the bios, will FreeNAS automatically detect them as well? Do any of them need drivers for FreeNAS to recognise them, and are there any drivers already in FreeNAS to support them?
If anyone has one running on their system, please let me know if it works and if anything needed to be done for them to work normally with four m.2 drives.
The few cards I’ve found online (although there are many more):
MSI M.2 Xpander-Aero
Dell Ultra-Speed Drive Quad NVMe M.2
Asus Hyper M.2 Card V2
ASRock Quad M.2 Gen 3
Gigabyte CMT4034
Aplicata Quad 410
For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume the motherboard supports 4x4x4x4 bifurcation (which mine does, and many do now), or that you’re using a bridged adapter which doesn’t require bifurcation (although they are more expensive and possibly slower).
The main concern to me is will FreeNAS see the drives if one of the cards is used. If the motherboard recognises the board and the drives in the bios, will FreeNAS automatically detect them as well? Do any of them need drivers for FreeNAS to recognise them, and are there any drivers already in FreeNAS to support them?
If anyone has one running on their system, please let me know if it works and if anything needed to be done for them to work normally with four m.2 drives.
The few cards I’ve found online (although there are many more):
MSI M.2 Xpander-Aero
Dell Ultra-Speed Drive Quad NVMe M.2
Asus Hyper M.2 Card V2
ASRock Quad M.2 Gen 3
Gigabyte CMT4034
Aplicata Quad 410