Patricks Building a TrueNAS Core 8-bay mATX ZFS NAS

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Dec 1, 2012
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Hi all,

I am looking at building a NAS based off either TrueNAS Core or CentOS with OpenZFS using the Silverstone CS381. I currently have acces to both the ASRock Rack D1541D4U-2O8R and the Supermicro A2SDi-16C-HLN4F. The NAS will primarily be a NAS for photo's and backup so planning a pool of SSD's and a pool of spinning disks. That said I would also like to experiment with high speed storage if possible since my primary NAS physically cannot do that.

The only advantage I can see in using the Asrock over the Supermicro is that I could potentially connect say a higher speed NIC and an Optane drive for example. Whereas the Supermicro could have realistically only have higher speed NIC connected to the PCI-E slot or the Optane (but you only have 1gb ethernet onbaord) since the M.2 slot is only X2 and would get the potential for Optane. A dissapointing aspect is that the Asrock does not support bifurcation so I see having two PCI-E slots as somewhat useless in that I dont believe you could connect up any higher speed storage solutions that play well with ZFS such as those mutli m.2 cards.

Can anyone advise what useful use cases they have seen for a storage only setup with the ASRock Rack D1541D4U-2O8R - how would the two PCI-E slots be useful?

Thanks,

Adam
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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A dissapointing aspect is that the Asrock does not support bifurcation
Contact their support and ask them if the manuals are outdated. Xeon D platforms support bifurcation, maybe asrock can provide an updated bios that enables that feature.
such as those mutli m.2 cards
I think there were some cards for 4x m.2 cards with a pcie switch, but they were pretty expensive (and limited to pcie 3.0)
 
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