Setting up a new TrueNas box using the C3558D4I-4L

Joe Goldthwaite

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 12, 2016
Messages
38
I have an existing box that I built back in May of 2016 using the ASRock Intel Avoton C2750. That box was an upgrade of a previous Freenas box. It was using some really old 2tb drives. Some of them going back to 2010.

The box was a backup of a backup meaning that I have a Freenas main box and a secondary backup box that I periodically update with the data from the main one. Finally, every once in a while I update the third one with the old 2tb drives.

Well the poor old thing died. The C2750 will no longer boot up so I decided to do some upgrades and make it my main box. I'll rotate the older boxes to backup 1 and backup 2.

I figured since it's been five years there should be lots of options to replace the C2750. I really like that it's low power and I've had no issues with the performance. I figured for a couple of hundred dollars I should be able to build a better faster system. WRONG!

After some research I decided on the ASRock C3558D4I-4L. It's the same form factor, has even less power usage and had 13 SATA ports! I ordered it, ordered some ECC memory and some drives and started putting it together.

I decided to use 12 4TB drives in a dual Raid2Z configuration. That means that I needed to use 12 of my thirteen available ports. This is where i ran into issues. Although the board has 13 ports the most you can have active at one time is 9.

This is confusing! The documentation isn't clear unless you already know what it's saying. The IO for the SATA ports is shared by the PCIE 8X slot. There's a configuration setting in the BIOS that determines that works and what doesn't. One of the things that is disabled depending on the config chosen is the PCI-E slot!

The C3558D4I-4L has 13 storage connectors, of which up to 9 can be connected at once. 7 configurations of PCI-E, SAS and Mini-SAS HD Connector are possible. They are:

config1PCI-E x4, 5x SATA9 ports
config2PCI-E x4, 1x Mini-SAS HD (A), 1x SATA5 ports
config3PCI-E x4, 1x Mini-SAS HD (B), 1x SATA5 ports
config4PCI-E x8, 1x SATA1 port!
config55x SATA, 1x Mini-SAS HD (A)9 ports
config62x Mini-SAS HD, 1x SATA9 ports
config75x SATA, 1x Mini-SAS HD (B)9 ports

As you can see, none of the configurations lets me attach 12 drives. The PCI-e slot is only active for configs 1 to 4. I had a 4 port PCI-e card but any configuration that enables the PCI-e slot removes at least 4 ports.

At this point I could return the card and try one of the Supermicro motherboards that people prefer these days but since I already have this together and working I decided to just buy this: Syba 8 Port SATA III Non-RAID PCI-e x4

That gives me 8 ports on the PCI-E slot and I can use config1 to config3 to attach the final 4. I'll probably use config2 and a attach the final 4 drives to the Mini-SAS (A) port.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this in case someone else is searching for help on the C3558D4I-4L so they can avoid my mistakes. I'll post an update when the Syba card comes in and everything is working.
 

Joe Goldthwaite

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 12, 2016
Messages
38
PS. I left out that the board was $366. That was more than I wanted to spend but easier than replacing my entire ecosystem. My other boxes use the same C2750 as the one that died.
 

Etorix

Wizard
Joined
Dec 30, 2020
Messages
2,110
Your writeup may indeed be useful to putative users, but the blame for this sad situation actually lies with Intel for de-featuring the lower tier of Atom C3000 CPUs: The C3558 does not have enough HSIO lines available to drive 12 SATA drives; Intel wants you to buy the C3758 (or higher) for that! ASRockRack tried to work cleverly around the limitations to offer more options than a standard C3558 platform (look at Supermicro A2SDi-4C variants), perhaps too cleverly as it takes a careful reading of the documentation to understand what is going on with the shared resources.
 

Joe Goldthwaite

Dabbler
Joined
Jan 12, 2016
Messages
38
You're probably right but regardless of what Intel is doing, ASRock is the one that wasn't clear about their boards limitations. They could have simply said there was a maximum of 9 usable ports or as little as one depending on the PCI-E configuration. The 13 SATA port specification is what let me to choose that board. I should probably send it back and order something different just so I'm not rewarding that kind of bad marketing behavour. LOL.
 

ddnicast

Cadet
Joined
Mar 3, 2022
Messages
1
Hi Joe and thank you for sharing. I want to buy the same motherboard you have (9 sata drive are more than enough for me) but I didn’t find any resource about hardware compatibility. Did you have any driver issue with this motherboard on TrueNAS?
 

henderbc

Dabbler
Joined
Jul 31, 2015
Messages
26
Are you folks still happy with your ASRock board?
I have a FreeNAS Mini circa 2016 which died over the ASRock/C2750 motherboard fiasco and it was too late to get any help from iXSystems.

I've since moved on to a new Supermicro server of the same form factor, but would like to try to revive the old FreeNAS Mini box with a new motherboard so I can have a backup server. For me, 5 SATA ports is enough. I have two questions for those who made this board work with TrueNAS:

1) What is the power consumption at idle of your system? (and with what drives operating)
2) Does the IPMI/BMC port work well in HTML5 mode? (this was broken on the old FreeNAS Mini and I was forced to use JAVA)

Thanks....
 
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