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2 comments of this product found across Reddit:
amp8888 /r/freenas
3 points
1970-01-19 17:39:42.017 +0000 UTC

I'm using one of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D6XSZN

Yeah, that thing looks like it's...not ideal.

  1. Give PCIe passthrough a try, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.
  2. I've never personally used the 9240-8i before, but it looks like you can crossflash it to the IT mode firmware for the 9211-8i and use it as an HBA with FreeNAS. This may be worth pursuing. If that crossflashing works then it should be a better option than the HBA you're currently using, giving you a similar level of performance you could expect to get from the 9205-8i/9207-8i I recommended above.
  3. As long as the SATA controllers on the board are good this should be a fine option too. You shouldn't see any real performance difference between the SATA II and SATA III ports with mechanical drives, outside of the (relatively) tiny 256MB cache on your drives. SATA II is good for about 270 MB/s sequential performance in the real world, which should be more than enough.

Whether the PCIe SSD cache would be beneficial depends on your workload. General advice is that you should increase the amount of RAM available to FreeNAS first and then only consider adding an L2ARC if your primary ARC hit ratio is too low. In some instances adding an L2ARC is said to have a negative impact on performance, since maintaining the L2ARC itself consumes some resources. That all depends on your specific workload though, so it's something you may have to experiment with to come to the correct conclusion.

natebluehooves /r/freenas
1 point
1970-01-19 17:39:39.476 +0000 UTC

I'm using one of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D6XSZN

  1. excellent idea passing a card through instead of individual drives. never thought of that, but i've already done pcie passthrough on this server, so that's an excellent avenue to go down.
  2. I have a spare sas HBA that I could use if you think it would help. it's an LSI SAS 9240-8l, and our only SSDs are direct pci express cards (sun F80 accelerators flashed into IR mode to show up as one 800gb SSD)
  3. If I were to do a bare metal installation, how much of a performance impact on the mechanical drives would it be if I were to use the onboard SATA for the 5 drives? the board i'm looking at using for that would only have 4 8x pcie slots, and one of them is needed for 10gbe networking, leaving only three for the three pcie solid state drives I have. For reference, the onboard sata is 2x sata 3 and 3x sata 2, though i'm not sure how much that performance would matter on mechanical drives.

basically if I do a bare metal install, if i'm able to use the onboard SATA ports, that allows me to place a 400gb pcie SSD as cache for the array. not sure if that's a net positive overall.