PCIe testing on the Raspberry Pi 5 and NAS project, part 10, the monstrosity

ijustpostwhenimhi

1089

Prev: https://imgur.com/gallery/EkGvOsj https://imgur.com/gallery/A9h7sHn
We've gotten to the pièce de résistance.
The Gen 3 PCIe expander card arrived, along with the slot adapters.
I've also switched to an 80+ gold ATX power supply for better efficiency, and because the slot adapters use ATX type connectors anyway.

The same day the expander arrived I also received a 3d printer I'd ordered. I definitely plan to print a case or cases for all these components, but for now... cardboard™️ and heavy foil tape will have to do.

The why:
Final goal is a NAS & Media server combo. 18TB in live storage with room to grow. Besides the media server (Plex), the storage will also be used for security cams. Basically telling Netflix and Ring to go suck it, I'll host my own services ;) . Speaking of, my friends will also have access to the media server. I currently have 12TB of movies, shows and music, adding more weekly.

Community contribution:
If you're thinking "why not x86", well I could, but when I saw the Pi5 had native PCIe connectivity I wanted to do this project for the aforementioned goal, but also as a proof of concept. There's no guarantee that any particular PCIe card will work with the ARM/Pi platform, so user testing is very important to the community.
Check out Jeff Geerling's compatibility database at
https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices
My work on the 9440-8i raid controller has been added to it. (Thanks Jeff!)

Full PCIe expansion/switch part links:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006105942362.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004655762506.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000547667414.html
At time of purchase: expansion card: $69, slot adapters: $12/each, cables: $5/each

Post note, If you saw this post last night that's because I repost once during primetime. I've seen a few repeat users in the comments who follow this project and I'd like to give them an opportunity to catch my updates, and anyone else who'd be interested that isn't awake at 1am EST

Wide shot

The slot adapters are very light and hold on to the edge connectors very tightly, so for now I have them floating in place. They use SATA power and u.2 connections, identical to Mini-SAS HD

In part 8 I tested a 4-way m.2 card that used a PLX PCIe switch chipset and confirmed it to work. This PCIe expansion card uses the same PLX chip, so I was confident it'd work, and it does. Both the 10GbE NIC and the SAS controller show up and function flawlessly at gen 3 speeds

Important dmesg stuff

Idle power with disks spun down. NIC connected with Internet access

Cat tax

technology

linux

raspberry_pi

maker

nas

weedeewee

oh btw, are those the cheaper aliexpress slot adapters we talked about ?

1 year ago |

Yup :) thanks again

Cool ! Have fun ! :-)

Quaxx

Nice! Next step is to tell Google/OneDrive/iCloud is to suck dick ;) By syncing your contacts, calenders, photos and files from smartphone on your own server.

cryborg

What? Do my own backups? Is such a thing possible??

Kuiper

Yeah dude, Nextcloud or owncloud. I run one as a vm on my server. Couple it with a domain name, and proper port forwarding you can host your own shit accessible from anywhere. Shits awesome.

What is this primetime and 1am you speak of ? anyway, nice to catch you again.

Definitely varies by location of course. But I mean imgur primetime, which ime is in the afternoon, but posting in the early afternoon still usually leads to the post being visible into the later afternoon. It's not an exact science but I only repost once regardless of how well it does on the 2nd round. And thanks!

You do realise that there's a thing called timezones right? :-) afternoon for you could be midnight for me.

Yes ;) sorry for leaving that out, but yes timezones are what I'm referring to with "locations", and I know imgur has plenty of non-US users, but US /is/ the majority, so I try to cater accordingly

oh, and please add both previous links :-p I thought I lost my mind when I didn't see my comments. /gallery/A9h7sHn

Done

swephisto

Playing around is fun, but this is borderline ridiculous. You could just buy a cheap mobo+CPU+mem+small nvme and everything will run a lot faster. Like a 4 core AMD Ryzen 3000g (built-in GPU) runs at a max 35 watt, and nvme and mem doesn't really consume a lot. Stick it on a ASRock A320M-HDV with one PCIe x16 or 520-Pro with 2 PCIe

SomethingCatchyLater

Transcoding will not be fun if you’re planning to share with friends

I encode all my media into x265 which allows for direct streaming without transcoding. The only transcoding that occurs is with anime that uses image based subs. The pi5 can reliably transcode 2 sub burn-in streams at a time, all other streams barely touch the CPU at all

That’s pretty impressive for a pi. I expected it to struggle with a transcode, then again, it does have a GPU. I don’t know about your internet but my uploads are so bad that everything is a transcode. Perhaps the next test is a gpu in your pci-e slot to bump up the simultaneous transcode, you know, for fun

Yeah, the pi5 can use GPU for the decoding part, but not encoding, but the 5's CPU is very impressive for its size and rated at 4x the performance of the pi4. My internet upload is 150Mbps. As for gpu add-on cards, compatibility is very poor :( I haven't tried anything myself, but from others testing, nvidia cards all fail. AMD cards fail as well, but testing results look more promising with their open source drivers, but it could still take a lot of work.

ARM is gaining popularity in the personal computing area with Windows going all in on ARM with Windows 11 ARM, and Apple producing a high performance ARM line with the M1. So, there is a chance that AMD and Nvidia will put more focus into arm compatibility. Even if that happens, the Pi is not EFI based and the GPU compatibility issues may be related to that. There has been community work on EFI firmware for the pi5, but it's missing a lot of features in its current state

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