Recommendations for SATA expansion?

[TheDreadPirate]

AFAICT, the NVMe expander should have a higher theoretical max throughput.  It is PCIe 2x vs 1x.  The example NVMe expander I linked is also using an ASMedia chipset so it should be fine in terms of reliability.  And the same vendor, 10GTek, as the 1x card I got.

I did a NVMe to ZFS transfer (3 hard drive RAIDZ1) and sustained a 1GB/s transfer with bursts to 1.3GB/s.  That's bytes not bits.  So definitely hitting the 8Gbps PCIe 1x limit with three 6TB hard drives.

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Also, what case did you get?  I also had to upgrade my case to fit the additional hard drives.  Went with another Fractal Meshify 2, which I am also using with my gaming desktop.

   

[TheDreadPirate]

It just occurred to me. The hard drives in my ZFS array are connected to my motherboard, not the PCIe 1x expander. So disregard any implied performance assessment of the expander from my last post.

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AFAICT, the NVMe expander should have a higher theoretical max throughput.  It is PCIe 2x vs 1x.  The example NVMe expander I linked is also using an ASMedia chipset so it should be fine in terms of reliability.  And the same vendor, 10GTek, as the 1x card I got.

I did a NVMe to ZFS transfer (3 hard drive RAIDZ1) and sustained a 1GB/s transfer with bursts to 1.3GB/s.  That's bytes not bits.  So definitely hitting the 8Gbps PCIe 1x limit with three 6TB hard drives.

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Also, what case did you get?  I also had to upgrade my case to fit the additional hard drives.  Went with another Fractal Meshify 2, which I am also using with my gaming desktop.

Hahaha, literally the same case! It just got here yesterday. Everything is currently in a Focus G Mini, which was kind of a bastard to fit everything into, so I'm excited for a) a bit more room and b) WAY more bays. I'm gonna have to budget for some more drives in the future...

[TheDreadPirate]

Also, what case did you get?  I also had to upgrade my case to fit the additional hard drives.  Went with another Fractal Meshify 2, which I am also using with my gaming desktop.

Hahaha, literally the same case!

Great minds think alike.  

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Well shit. I just realized (by about an hour of trying to figure it out) that my A380 is in a PCIe x1 slot, likely because there wasn't any other room in the current case. So I've been getting...30% performance? I was going to save re-casing for when I move next, but I'll probably push that up (might try for today) to see if I can fix my...oversights...

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Well shit. I just realized (by about an hour of trying to figure it out) that my A380 is in a PCIe x1 slot, likely because there wasn't any other room in the current case. So I've been getting...30% performance? I was going to save re-casing for when I move next, but I'll probably push that up (might try for today) to see if I can fix my...oversights...

Well...my first thoughts were wrong. I put my NVMe drive in the correct spot and had my A380 in the correct slot (i.e., I'm a dumbass). Now I gotta figure out why lspci was reporting the card as x1 instead of x16....

Also realized I don't have enough SATA cables for my first stage...off to the store...

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Well...a post-mortem of sorts. Messed up by not editing /etc/fstab prior to moving drives. I did eventually manage to get that sorted but for some odd reason, couldn't get my little OptiPlex to mount the NFS shares from my newly-cased monster. Turns out that somehow (despite everything running fine before shutdown) my big guy decided there were missing dependencies for nfs-kernel-server. No complaints or errors, just magically-missing dependencies.

All that to say that most of my main-use drives are now housed in the cavernous bounds of a Meshify 2 and what I thought was a 3x increase in performance has been probably a 10x increase in performance because I'm not shuffling everything through a single USB enclosure. Night and day.

Moral of the story, don't be a dumbass (like me).