Single card 10GBe + NVME

[riktam]

Hi all ,
I have a Asrock c2750d4i and I would like to have 1 NVME SSD and 10Gb ethernet and this would be the way to have them on a single pci-e slot.

Does anyone has a Synology E10M20-T1 or a QNAP QM2-2P10G1TA working with Freenas?


It looks like both cards have a Aquantia AQC107 Network chip (there are freebsd drivers but not on freenas yet) but I don't know if the PCIe NVME switch is supported.

Do you know of any other alternatives?

Thanks.

 

[sportq]

Similarly I'd like to add one to my HP Microserver Gen 8 running TrueNAS. Like the ASRock above, it only has a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.

Does anyone know if TrueNAS 12RC1 (FreeBSD 12.2) has the drivers?

 

[Ericloewe]

The QNAP card says SATA on it. I'm not sure it supplies PCIe to the M.2 slots.

As for the Synology card, I imagine it's using a standard PCIe switch, which is something common that requires no special drivers.

I believe someone recently filed a bug report to confirm that the Aquantia drivers were updated/integrated in TrueNAS 12.x, I recommend checking Jira.

 

[HoneyBadger]

There's different QNAP cards - some have a SATA controller behind their PLX chip, others just have the lanes going straight to the M.2 slots for NVMe use.

QM2-2S10G1TA - SATA (can't determine chipset, but I'll guess ASMedia)
QM2-2P10G1TA - PCIe/NVMe

A couple notes here though.

1. The QNAP card is only PCIe 2.0 x4 with 6 lanes behind it (x2 for 10GbE, x2 for each NVMe M.2 slot) vs. the Synology which is PCIe 3.0 x8 but doesn't specify the number of lanes granted to each NVMe slot. Under heavy parallel workload you should expect this oversubscription to eat into the total throughput.

2. The presence of a PCIe switch will impact latency because all of the traffic needs to be switched there. Impact degree depends on the quality/speed of the PLX chip itself, and based on the comparative results of the Samsung PM961 on the QNAP card vs. results I've found from searching the web seems to suggest that the QNAP card's PLX chip is not up to par. (The Samsung is also limited to PCIe 2.0 x2 on the QNAP, vs PCIe 3.0 x4 natively.)

Both the PCIe oversubscription and the overall throughput results can be seen in ServeTheHome's mini-review here:

https://www.servethehome.com/qnap-qm2-2p10g1ta-adapter-general-purpose-mini-review/