I setup a new TrueNAS system to work with my lab server for storage. The system is running on an older platform an Intel Haswell 1150. The system has 32 GB of ram and as you can see below the system only has 6 sata ports. I put in a Matrox 10Gig card for connecting my server 2022 system to the iscsi target so that left me with one PCI Express port to add a raid card or a card for additional sata ports.
Now I am a big VANTEC fan, I have purchased a lot of enclosures and adapters from them over my IT career and they have worked really well and I came across this nice little card.
https://www.vantecusa.com/products_detail.php?p_id=286 it was at my local computer retailer memory express https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00120961 where it is retailing for $59.99.
This card requires at least a Gen3 4x PCI-E port, I know my board supported Gen3 PCI-E so I thought I would give it a try.
Initially I had issues getting TrueNAS to boot with the system encountering re-scan errors when trying to initialize the card.
(noperiph:ahcich3:0:-1:ffffffff): rescan already queued
After some troubleshooting; I determined that it had to do with the system cold booting because after a couple of reboots the system would boot and recognized all the drives. I also noted that the card did not initialize until just before they system was about to boot. The system registered all my drives, I have 3 SSD drives on the motherboard SATA ports and the rest of my 3+ TB drives running off the card.
So for the disk setup I have a 120GB SSD boot drive, 40Gig SSD Z-Log Drive, and 120GB SSD Cache Drive. The rest of the drives are NAS drives mostly WD REDS and two 3TB seagate iron wolfs.
I setup a SMB share to test how the system might perform
Though a 1Gig network the samba share registered the following through put
When I setup the iSCSI target on my lab server I will update this but for now I am pretty happy about this and anyone looking for an inexpensive controller for TrueNAS, I would defiantly recommend this controller if your on a budget. The throughput on the NAS is pretty much max out on my 1Gig network, and the NAS did not sweat a bit!
