I needed to create a Windows File Share for file based storage from Windows computers. I plan on using the Windows File Share for high-speed storage of files for video editing. While this card is great, I would like to point out the following issues and problems I had that are worth mentioning: While you could use this card with Windows software RAID, or Linux mdraid, we’ll be testing the card with FreeNAS, a NAS system built on FreeBSD. For Ubuntu, your /etc/fstab should look like this: LABEL=system-boot /boot/firmware vfat defaults 0 2

After making the above changes, you should see a substantial performance increase and reduction in system resources! Higher throughput with compression and deduplication can be reached with higher frequency CPUs (more Ghz), more cores (for more client connections). Remember that large amounts of RAM are required for deduplication. The card also has beautiful blue LED activity indicators to show I/O on each disk independently. IO-PCE585-5I LED Activity Indicators Since option 1 is probably not going to happen, 2 or 3 remain. The only difference, really, between the two is how many m.2 slots you want to add to your mATX motherboard. I have heard rumors of up to 6 m.2 slots on the motherboard in the next generation high end boards, and even the low-end will have at least 3x m.2 slots.

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When I insert the SD Card containing the Raspberry Pi Linux image, it appeared as /dev/sdb on my system. Please make sure you are using your proper device names to avoid using the wrong one to avoid writing or using the wrong disk. In this post I’ll be reviewing the IOCREST IO-PEX40152, providing information on how to buy, benchmarks, installation, configuration and more! I’ve also posted tons of pics for your viewing pleasure. I installed this card in an HPE DL360p Gen8 server to add NVME capabilities to create an NVMe based Storage Server.

Using compression and deduplication may also reduce the writes to your SSD vdevs, prolonging the lifetime and reducing the cost of maintaining the solution. ZFS ZIL and SLOG Nu I’m not really trying to completely swap to a different platform entirely, and finding a board with a bunch of M.2 slots natively would be fine - but then I’d still have that PCIe x16 slot that won’t be used at all. For some time I’ve been trying to source either an Nvidia GRID K1/K2 or an AMD FirePro S7150 to get started with a simple homelab/demo environment. One of the reasons for the time it took was I didn’t want to spend too much on it, especially with the chances it may not even work. After resolving the issues mentioned below, I’ve been running for weeks with absolutely no problems, and I’m enjoying the increased speed to the NAS. Additional Important Information

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With “nvidia-smi” you can see the 4 GPUs, power usage, temperatures, memory usage, GPU utilization, and processes. This is the main GPU manager for the card. There are some other flags you can use for relevant information. “nvidia-smi vgpu” for vGPU Information “nvidia-smi vgpu -q” to Query more vGPU Information Final Thoughts The card works perfectly with VMware ESXi PCI passthrough when passing it through to a virtualized VM. You’re now complete and have a fully working NFS root for your Raspberry Pi. You’ll no longer worry about storage, have high speed access to it, and you’ll have some new skills! Press the Green “+” and you’ll see it spreads them to the “Servers to be added”, each server entry reflecting an IP on the NAS. (please note I made a typo on one of the IPs). Please Note: Some, most, or all of what I’m doing is not officially supported by Nvidia, HPE, and/or VMware. I am simply doing this to learn and demo, and there was a real possibility that it may not have worked since I’m not following the vendor HCL (Hardware Compatibility lists). If you attempt to do this, or something similar, you do so at your own risk.

I have an Intel 12600K that I want to use for a small NAS, and my plan was to use an Asus Hyper M.2 Gen 4 card to add in 4 NVMe SSD’s to use in a ZFS RAIDz1 pool. Since I’ve set this up, I’ve used it remotely while on airplanes, working while travelling, even for video editing. Slow and Secure storage is the type of storage found in most applications used for SAN or NAS storage. SSD Endurance and Lifetime In this step, we’re going to create a bootable SD card that contains the Linux kernel and other needed files for the Raspberry Pi to boot. The IO-PEX40152 PCIe card allows you to add 4 NVMe SSDs to a computer, workstation, or server that has an available PCIe x16 slot. This card has a built in PEX PCIe switch chip, so your motherboard does not need to support bifurcation. This card can essentially be installed and used in any system with a free x16 slot.

This design was focused on creating non-redundant extremely fast storage. Because I’m limited to a total of 4 NVMe disks in this design, I chose not to use RaidZ and striped the data. If one NVMe drive is lost, all data is lost. As a note, I had to delete the configuration for the existing management settings (don’t worry, it doesn’t take effect until you hit test) and configure the VLAN interface for my LANs VLAN and IP. I tested the settings, confirmed it was good, and it was all setup. There are a number of considerations that must be factored in when virtualization FreeNAS and TrueNAS however those are beyond the scope of this blog post. I will be creating a separate post for this in the future. Use Case (Fast and Risky or Slow and Secure) The risk can be lowered by replicating the pool or dataset to slower storage on a frequent or regular basis. Slow and Secure In the event of a power loss, crash, or freeze, this data will be lost and/or possibly result in corruption.

Using RAIDz-1 or higher will allow for vdev (drive) failures, but with each level increase, performance will be lost due to parity calculations.

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Before putting the stripe or RAIDz pool in to production, perform some large bogus writes and stagger the amount of data written on the SSDs individually. While this will reduce the life counter on the SSDs, it’ll help you offset and stagger the lifetime of each drives so they don’t die at the same time. DISCLAIMER: If you attempt what I did in this post, you are doing it at your own risk. I won’t be held liable for any damages or issues. NVMe Storage Server – Use Cases