Hi all. I'm considering adding an x16 PCIe to quad slot x4 NVME M.2 adapter to my system (for SLOG and possibly read/write caching duty), and I'm trying to find other people who've successfully done the same, but I'm coming up a bit short on examples. I only found one thread where a user reported success with this add-in card, but they were only using one drive, and since properly enumerating devices on a bifurcated PCIe slot can be a bit of a problem, that wasn't much help. I haven't landed on an exact configuration for the drives I'd use in this scenario, but I'm currently considering using mirrored Samsung 480GB SM963 drives for the SLOG (which have PLP and should give reasonable, though not exceptional, performance).
I found a few more cases of people using dual slot Supermicro cards (e.g. the AOC-SLG3-2M2), and they seem to have had success, so the concept at least works with different hardware. I'd like to use a quad slot part (it doesn't necessarily have to be the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16; it could be the ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 instead, for example) to give me more options for expandability. My system (specs in signature) supports PCIe bifurcation.
As with my current LSI 9207-8e HBA, I'd be using the PCI passthrough functionality from XCP-ng 8.0 to pass the M.2 adapter through to FreeNAS, allowing it access to the drives in order to configure and monitor them properly.
So, is there anyone out there who's currently using an ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 add-in card (or other quad slot card) with FreeNAS 11.3? Thanks.
I found a few more cases of people using dual slot Supermicro cards (e.g. the AOC-SLG3-2M2), and they seem to have had success, so the concept at least works with different hardware. I'd like to use a quad slot part (it doesn't necessarily have to be the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16; it could be the ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 instead, for example) to give me more options for expandability. My system (specs in signature) supports PCIe bifurcation.
As with my current LSI 9207-8e HBA, I'd be using the PCI passthrough functionality from XCP-ng 8.0 to pass the M.2 adapter through to FreeNAS, allowing it access to the drives in order to configure and monitor them properly.
So, is there anyone out there who's currently using an ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 add-in card (or other quad slot card) with FreeNAS 11.3? Thanks.
