I also went with an mATX board since I already have a case that only supports mATX or smaller, and I only needed the top PCIe slot to work in x16 (x4x4x4x4) and a second PCIe slot to work in x4 mode. There are multiple ways to do this, but I’m providing instructions on the easiest way it was for me to do this with the resources I had immediately available. Instructions Please note that consumer SSDs usually do not have PLP (Power Loss Prevention). This means that in the event of a power failure, any data sitting on the write cache on the SSD may be lost. This could put your data at risk. Using enterprise solid state drives remedies this issue as they often come with PLP. Conclusion In addition to the above, the IO-PCE585-5I provides 5 SATA 6Gb/s ports and uses PCIe 3 with 2 PCIe lanes, to provide a theoretical maximum throughput close to 2GB/s, making this card perfect for SSD use as well!

Boot Support– Installing this card in different systems, I noticed that all of them allowed me to boot from the disks connected to the IO-PCE585-5I.You would only want to do this if you had the need for fast storage where data loss would is acceptable (such as video editing, a VDI clone desktop pool, etc).

Technically faster speeds should possible using iSCSI instead of NFS, however special care must be made when using iSCSI. 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.

Mount the new boot partition of the boot SD card to a new directory. In my case I used the directory called “new”. If you simply shutdown the FreeNAS instance that’s hosting the iSCSI datastore, this will result in a improper unclean unmount of the VMFS volume and could lead to data loss, even if no VMs are running.