3 ms·
There is nothing different versus a regular Ryzen 3x00 CPU. If you want many drives and good performance you need to use add-in SATA or SAS controllers instead
by AdrianB1 6y ago
There is nothing different versus a regular Ryzen 3x00 CPU. If you want many drives and good performance you need to use add-in SATA or SAS controllers instead of the on-board SATA controller that is fairly slow; it is good for one disk at a time, but slow for multiple disk access like a raid-z3 array w. ZFS. In this case the limit is what controller you use (one can find sh LSI SAS controllers at good price and good compatibility; see the Freenas.org forums for more info) and how many.
For the "how many" part the number of available PCIe lanes depends mostly on the chipset, the CPUs have 24 in total - 4 to the chipset, 20 available to use. This is where the difference between B450 and X570, for example, can make a difference. The graphics part of the APU is not relevant for a NAS, but it can be if you also do transcoding or any GPU assisted work.
- zlynx 6y agoThe standard controllers included on my ASUS Pro x370 board show you don't need a add-in controller. It's got 8 ports on the board, and when I do btrfs scrubs the 6 HDDs get 760 MiB/s and the 2 SATA SSDs get 1.05 GiB/s. The scrubs start at the same time each week so it's pretty obvious the SATA controllers on that motherboard can handle at least 2 GiB/s. I've honestly never seen a motherboard with SATA-3 6 Gbps controllers so bad that they couldn't handle a full 500 MB/s on every port. If there is a bottleneck it would be the connection to the board chipset from the CPU. Ryzen and its board support doesn't seem to have any problems here. Especially not if the board and CPU are able to use PCIe 4.0.
- AdrianB1 6y agoMy B450 board with Ryzen 2700 has only 4 usable SATA ports (if a M.2 drive is connected, the SATA ports 5 and 6 are disabled) and the 4 disk scrub in FreeNAS is fairly slow compared to the sum of the speed of each drive. Heavy FreeNAS users confirmed many times on the forum that the performance of a dedicated controller is visibly (not only benchmark measurable) better than the onboard SATA. I did not test, personally, just pointed to the FreeNAS forums.