m.2 Adapters

[drsassafras]

Anyone have an idea if m.2 adapters are supported? I have looked through the supported hardware list but it seems to shed very little light on this.

Given I haven't found a list of recommended m.2 adapters, these are the ones I am looking at:

Dual Drive M.2 NVME PCIE3.0 Disk Extension M2 SATA 110mm PCI E Gen3 Double Disk Adapter Extension Card Support NVMe and M.2 Prot - Newegg.com

Buy Dual Drive M.2 NVME PCIE3.0 Disk Extension M2 SATA 110mm PCI E Gen3 Double Disk Adapter Extension Card Support NVMe and M.2 Prot with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

QINDIAN Add On Card M.2 NVME NGFF mSATA Riser PCIE to M2 Adapter with Gold M.2 Heatsink SSD Cooling PCI Express X4/X8/X16 Raiser - Newegg.com

Buy QINDIAN Add On Card M.2 NVME NGFF mSATA Riser PCIE to M2 Adapter with Gold M.2 Heatsink SSD Cooling PCI Express X4/X8/X16 Raiser with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

 

[G8One2]

I think support is more motherboard dependent, rather than software or OS dependant. Your montherboard needs to support bifurication, otherwise, it will only show 1 drive.

 

[tprelog]

I think support is more motherboard dependent, rather than software or OS dependant. Your montherboard needs to support bifurication

I also think this is correct. I can for example, confirm this Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 PCIe Add-On Card works with TrueNAS Core. As mentioned the motherboard must support bifurcation to use the card.

Once installed and bifurcation was enabled, both drives appeared in TrueNAS without any further configuration to OS itself.

 

[Inxsible]

I have to ask why?

What will be the use of those NVMe drives? If only for boot, then a simpler solution of using a $20 SSD would work. Why add another variable in the mix by adding an add-on card? NVMe is not going to provide you with that much more performance for a boot drive over a regular SATA SSD.

If you plan on using it for L2ARC or SLOG, then maybe adding more RAM would be a better idea if you haven't already maxed out.

 

[tprelog]

I wasn't after any kind of performance. I just have these two drives as a mirror that contains my regular user data and jails. These days, my main zpool only contains some large file storage and movies / music.

I already had one nvme drive laying around after an unrelated laptop upgrade, so I bought the second one and addon card to throw in my server.

 

[drsassafras]

Got ya. Great, while I will give it a shot then. Thanks for your help.

 

[drsassafras]

Not for booting. I plan on running them on the IO cage. 500 MB/s vs 3000MB/s . And the m.2 sticks are slightly cheaper as well, so it helps pay for the cost of the card.

 

[drsassafras]

LOL. I have 64MB ram, but my board maxes out at 256... Still have 4 free slots. Not going to hit that threshold any time soon!

 

[sretalla]

I note that there's another thread that discusses experience with more than 2 devices connected this way and seems to expose a big performance problem with the FreeBSD driver (but works fine in Windows or Linux on the same hardware) with an x16 slot shared between 4 NVME drives.

 

[G8One2]

I actually have 3 512Gb M.2 ssd's in one of the supermicro add on cards configured in a stripe. I do this for the speeds nvme drives give you. I just use rsync to mirror the pool on the spinning disks in case I lose it, I have a backup. I only do this for the write speeds so I can data dump media quickly. The rest gets replicated over in the much slower RaidZ2 pool