Hello all,
First and foremost, I apologize if this or a similar topic is being discussed. I was looking through the different threads and I was somehow lost. I couldn't find a good fit for my specific use case. My truenas system is currently made of:
This system was on the base perfect because it fulfilled my requirements, but it never ran stable. I always had strange boot issues (BIOS would hang up on boot unless IKVM remote control is connected, now IKVM is disconnected when power is turned on, disk drives have been randomly appearing and disappearing without an understandable logic, both in TrueNAS as in the BIOS, ...). Interestingly, the drives are randomly detected or not across all controllers, I couldn't find a solid logic. Currently, 4 drives always work and they are split across both the Intel C232 integrated controller as on some ASM1062 chips
The external cases have been even more problematic, so I stopped using them altogether even though the flexibility they could provide was for me important (I can reuse the case flexibly via eSATA on TrueNAS and via USB on Windows computers). I know they are generally not recommended and calling for disaster, but I love the flexibility of moving the case from a computer to another, hook up drives so as to import data to TrueNAS, ... I just want it to work stably on some very short occasions when importing data, not as a main pool.
After several years of increasing instability, I'm giving up. I want a stable system, as cost effective as possible (and thus reusing existing hardware as much as possible), but fulfilling my requirements:
- Micro ITX form factor motherboard to fit in the current case
- IPMI support
- Total of 14 SATA ports
- Support for SATA port multipliers (sorry for insisting...).
Can anybody suggest a MoBo/CPU that could fit and where I could maybe reuse RAM?
Does anybody know a good HBA with support for SATA multipliers? I have seen https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/pub-005851 where "Addressing of multiple SATA targets through an expander" is mentioned... but I'm unsure what this means.
Maybe I should try an ASRock Rack E3C246D2I with current CPU and RAM, add the LSI 9400-8i and see the results?
I'm even considering a QNAP system (TS-873A-8G) where I could eventually fit my RAM and drives, it supports ZFS via QuTS HERO... and which hopefully would support expansion via some QNAP TL-D800C, which I could then move from PC to NAS... It could even hopefully run TrueNAS Core.
Many thanks in advance for any help here...
First and foremost, I apologize if this or a similar topic is being discussed. I was looking through the different threads and I was somehow lost. I couldn't find a good fit for my specific use case. My truenas system is currently made of:
- Silverstone DS380 case (Micro ITX form factor supporting up to 12 drives)
- Asus P10S-I motherboard (Micro ITX including 6 SATA and one M.2 connector, ECC RAM and iKVM)
- Intel i3-8100T CPU (low TDP so as to keep cooling requirements under control in such a small and crowded case)
- 32GB ECC DDR4 RAM
- A relatively large and mixed amount of drives, ranging anywhere from 500GB to 8TB, SSD, HDD; ... for different usage / pools...
- A Toshiba RC100 NVMe M.2 drive for the System dataset.
- Some cheap low profile SATA controller with QUAD ASM1062 chip
- Two external eSATA cases with SATA port multipliers (similar to Silverstone TS431U, i.e. JMB321 based).
This system was on the base perfect because it fulfilled my requirements, but it never ran stable. I always had strange boot issues (BIOS would hang up on boot unless IKVM remote control is connected, now IKVM is disconnected when power is turned on, disk drives have been randomly appearing and disappearing without an understandable logic, both in TrueNAS as in the BIOS, ...). Interestingly, the drives are randomly detected or not across all controllers, I couldn't find a solid logic. Currently, 4 drives always work and they are split across both the Intel C232 integrated controller as on some ASM1062 chips
The external cases have been even more problematic, so I stopped using them altogether even though the flexibility they could provide was for me important (I can reuse the case flexibly via eSATA on TrueNAS and via USB on Windows computers). I know they are generally not recommended and calling for disaster, but I love the flexibility of moving the case from a computer to another, hook up drives so as to import data to TrueNAS, ... I just want it to work stably on some very short occasions when importing data, not as a main pool.
After several years of increasing instability, I'm giving up. I want a stable system, as cost effective as possible (and thus reusing existing hardware as much as possible), but fulfilling my requirements:
- Micro ITX form factor motherboard to fit in the current case
- IPMI support
- Total of 14 SATA ports
- Support for SATA port multipliers (sorry for insisting...).
Can anybody suggest a MoBo/CPU that could fit and where I could maybe reuse RAM?
Does anybody know a good HBA with support for SATA multipliers? I have seen https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/pub-005851 where "Addressing of multiple SATA targets through an expander" is mentioned... but I'm unsure what this means.
Maybe I should try an ASRock Rack E3C246D2I with current CPU and RAM, add the LSI 9400-8i and see the results?
I'm even considering a QNAP system (TS-873A-8G) where I could eventually fit my RAM and drives, it supports ZFS via QuTS HERO... and which hopefully would support expansion via some QNAP TL-D800C, which I could then move from PC to NAS... It could even hopefully run TrueNAS Core.
Many thanks in advance for any help here...