Changing SATA ports of a pool

[ertank]

Hello,

I am a total newbie on using PCIe expansion cards, but I am in a position to use one now.

My motherboard has only 4 SATA ports and all of them are used. I am forced to use USB for booting and it gives me trouble about twice a year. I ordered a 256GB NVMe drive for booting my system from.

Unfortunately, my motherboard utilize one of the SATA ports if I am to insert a NVMe drive on it. In order to overcome this issue, I am willing to order this PCIe expansion card and move all my SATA drives on it.

I have following questions in my mind though:
1- Can I find this pre-flashed for FreeNAS PCIe card delivered not from China (because of virus problem)? That is for about same price of course.
2- I do not know what kind of cable(s) I need to buy. Any purchase links are welcome.
3- Do I need to take any additional steps before physically moving all my drives on this card? I do not know, maybe system will identify them as a different device name etc. I do not want to get myself into trouble.

Thanks & regards,
Ertan

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

My motherboard has only 4 SATA ports and all of them are used. I am forced to use USB for booting and it gives me trouble about twice a year. I ordered a 256GB NVMe drive for booting my system from.

Unfortunately, my motherboard utilize one of the SATA ports if I am to insert a NVMe drive on it. In order to overcome this issue, I am willing to order this PCIe expansion card and move all my SATA drives on it.

Two quick things. First, while not a deal breaker using M.2 drives as boot drives is a bit of a waste of the speed of the port if it is an NVMe drive. If you're adding an HBA anyway to get more SATA ports you could boot off SATA SSDs. This isn't a HUGE deal but it does preclude you from putting a SLOG device in there in the future which would benefit from the speed.

The second point is that, according to your motherboard's manual (assuming you're using the AsRock H310M-ITX as in your signature), that M.2 slot will disable SATA_0 IF a SATA drive is in the slot. It is typical for many boards to have M.2 slots which support SATA or NVMe. NVMe typically uses 4 PCIe lanes, so sometimes you will see some PCIe slots unavailable if using an NVMe M.2 card. NVMe cards typically do not affect the SATA ports. I mention this because you may want to check that the M.2 drive you have is an NVMe drive, and if it is check in the bios if you need to configure the board to use NVMe rather than SATA. What is the model of the M.2 drive you have?

1- Can I find this pre-flashed for FreeNAS PCIe card delivered not from China (because of virus problem)? That is for about same price of course.

I typically recommend one similar to this one. I find that seller reliable and many of their cards are already flashed to IT mode.

2- I do not know what kind of cable(s) I need to buy. Any purchase links are welcome.

Check out this useful resource about SAS. There is a bit in there about cables and compatibility with SATA.

3- Do I need to take any additional steps before physically moving all my drives on this card? I do not know, maybe system will identify them as a different device name etc. I do not want to get myself into trouble.

Your system identifies the disks by the partition UUID, not by the port it is plugged in to. You should be fine powering down the system, moving the cabling as you require, and powering back up.

 

[ertank]

The second point is that, according to your motherboard's manual (assuming you're using the AsRock H310M-ITX as in your signature), that M.2 slot will disable SATA_0 IF a SATA drive is in the slot. It is typical for many boards to have M.2 slots which support SATA or NVMe. NVMe typically uses 4 PCIe lanes, so sometimes you will see some PCIe slots unavailable if using an NVMe M.2 card. NVMe cards typically do not affect the SATA ports. I mention this because you may want to check that the M.2 drive you have is an NVMe drive, and if it is check in the bios if you need to configure the board to use NVMe rather than SATA. What is the model of the M.2 drive you have?

That is indeed my board. I keep my signature updated.
I am not sure that I get all details provided. In basic words what I understood is; If it is a NVMe drive and not M.2 drive it will not disable any SATA slot at all. That might be completely wrong my understanding though.
Anyway, Drive I am expecting to arrive from cargo is this.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

I am not sure that I get all details provided. In basic words what I understood is; If it is a NVMe drive and not M.2 drive it will not disable any SATA slot at all. That might be completely wrong my understanding though.

M.2 is the physical interface, SATA and NVMe are both protocols which are supported on various interfaces. It is confusing because there is a common physical interface we call SATA as well that refers to the data port on your drive. Your board supports both SATA and NVMe in that M.2 slot. You can think of it this way. Your board supports at most 4 SATA devices. It has 4 SATA ports and an M.2 port which support SATA devices. If you plug SATA devices into all 4 SATA ports AND the M.2 slot your system is overloaded. It cannot run 5 SATA devices, only 4.

NVMe on the other hand uses PCIe lanes not the SATA bus. Your chipset and CPU support a maximum number of PCIe lanes. Though uncommon on ITX boards, it is common on larger boards with many M.2 slots and PCIe slots that if you have an NVMe drive in an M.2 port it may turn off one of your PCIe 3.0 x4 slots. Your board has only a single PCIe slot and plenty of lanes to drive both your PCIe 3.0 x16 slot AND an M.2 card so you shouldn't have this issue. Using an NVMe drive should allow you to use all 4 SATA ports AND the NVMe drive.

Not all M.2 drives are made equal. Some support SATA only. Some support NVMe. I don't know anything about the specific drive you listed. It says it supports NVMe but the listing is a bit hard to follow. On some motherboards you have to tell it whether the M.2 card should be used in SATA or NVMe mode. Check your motherboard's manual to know for sure.

That is indeed my board. I keep my signature updated.

it is worth putting your hardware in your post. As your hardware changes your old posts will have out of date information.

 

[ertank]

I don't know anything about the specific drive you listed. It says it supports NVMe but the listing is a bit hard to follow.

I have checked again drive specs and it is written in the explanations that;
- Drive has PCIe Gen3x4 interface
Also in the listing there is an item that says
- It is PCIe/ NVMe, *not* compatible with Sata III interface

Once I receive the drive I am going to see BIOS for specific setting and test it to see if it blocks the SATA port. However, I am almost certain that I will have NVMe and 4 drives working all together in the end. There won't be any need for PCIe expansion card in this case. Though I will have the need in the future when I plan on adding new drives to my pool in 1-1.5 year.

Thank you.

 

[ertank]

I have received my XPG ASX6000PNP-256GT-C Ssd 256Gb Sx6000 Pro Pcie M.2 2100/1200Mb NVMe drive. It works as 5th drive on my 4 SATA port AsRock H310M-ITX/ac mainboard without any problem now. Though I had some problems at the beginning;

I installed FreeNAS 11.3-RELEASE on NVMe drive and run system for the first time. Then I uploaded my backup config from browser. System restarted and NVMe drive is not recognized by BIOS after restart. Power re-cycle did not help either. However, it is recognized If I insert my FreeNAS installation USB in any port. But, it did not respond to kernel commands in 20 seconds and a panic happened (I do not took a picture nor remember the message completely).

At that point I searched for a newer BIOS version. There were quite a lot versions released on top of my installed BIOS version and I flashed my mainboard to latest available.

After flash I see NVMe drive can be identified fine without any FreeNAS installation USB attached to system. It boots and can be used by the system fine. So I let config to do its job. System restarted and again BIOS failed to detect my NVMe drive. But this time power re-cycle did help and BIOS recognizes the drive.

When everything is up to date. I again tested with a system restart and NVMe drive is not detected. It did almost immediately run after a power re-cycle.

I have installed FreeNAS on my NVMe in UEFI mode. I am not sure if that maybe a reson. In anyway power re-cycle works fine and I can live with that considering my problems with USB boot drives so far.