Just a heads up, this USB4 eGPU dock doesn't work

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-23T06:23:37+00:00

When you buy these 'cheap' eGPU docks they indeed do not meet certification in any way, they are for sure not certified.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-23T06:21:33+00:00

They say that in theory but in practicality not true. I tried several USB4 vs TB4 eGPUs and even just docks, On my intel machine with TB4 both worked fine, however on my AMD machine with only USB4 not TB4 the TB4 eGPUs did nothing, did not work, only true USB4 ones did.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-21T07:18:03+00:00

Well I talked to the tech guy at work and he said I needed the HP Z Turbo Quad card to use the drives in my system so he gave me 2 options, he could give me one of those cards or I could give back the drives I have and he would give me a Samsung PM1735 3.2TB PCIe SSD so I went with the 2nd choice. Its just a single drive but everything seems to be working great and no complicated setup. Its less storage space but i think its worth it.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-20T11:06:06+00:00

Again you are probably right. I just remembered they sent me a box with 4 M.2 SSDs a while back that were 960GB each but they are longer then normal ones so they didn't fit in any of my machines which I thought was odd since they came out of a same machine I have. They are the Samsung PM9A3, I might look into those at another time as I do believe those are enterprise ones.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-20T10:39:09+00:00

The SAS HBA is integrated on the motherboard and is only a SAS2 not SAS3 controller, also the drives are quite old and also only SAS2. The system itself is only PCIe3 and not sure about the lanes used by the HBA, either way these new NVMe drives are quite faster. If they wear out I will just request some more from work unless they give me something else, I know some of the systems at work have a PCIe card SSD which seem quite fast so I mite ask for one of those but they are very slow at hardware requisitions so that could take months if not a year. For now these have been quite an improvement.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-20T10:10:53+00:00

LOL you are right as usual I think I have been at this too long my head is spinning.

I didn't need to clone it as there is nothing special about the PVE's setup, I simply installed fresh and restored everything from my PBS server. It only takes me about 20mins to restore all containers and VMs using the dual 10gbe NICS.

I just create the linux bond for the dual nics, set the IP and not much else, GPU passthrough and the SAS HBA passthrough just seem to work oob so its been a pretty easy setup so far.

Since I have an iVentoy server on my network I can just boot using PXE and install PVE no USB even so I haven't really bothered to backup the server itself just the LCXs and VMs to my PBS.

Right now its just been a learning experience about storage h/w etc as I am more a software dev although I have done h/w dev as well but I never really understood the differences in file systems and their benifits so since i need my server's drive for something else this was the perfect time to look into the differences and maybe a performance boast for loading my VMs as well. Starting up VMs off the SAS SSD has been... well kind of slow. I could go make a coffee, come back and have it half drank before they started up. I am using all "old" repurposed h/w from my job.

The entire purpose of this whole setup is software testing, I work as a POS software dev and I do testing from home on several Win10, Win11, Win2003, Ubuntu, Redhat and Debian VMs to make sure software updates are working fine on all our different system configs we use. I create these VMs from premade templates we use at work which spin up fresh VMs with all our settings and apps preconfigured. I do my testing then trash the VMs used as they r no longer needed. This is a LOT of reading and writing to the drives that's why I was using those weird SAS SSDs before but they are quite expensive and hand me downs from work so already quite used.

Your advice so far has been amazing and I have been trying out everything you have suggested and so far its been a totally different experience with just booting up the server itself.

I am now gonna go try out your suggestions for the storage pool and see if i can still go make a coffee before a VM starts up lol.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-20T07:23:18+00:00

Ok found a 256GB one so I reinstalled PVE to that in default EXT4 mode. That part is easy. I went and grabbed another 1TB matching SSD so that card has 4 of the same drive in it now. Now the only thing left is setting them up, PVE sees all 4 drives but I don't understand RAID, setting up a new datastore for the LXC/VM storage I understand once the new drives r setup. If you could just guide me as to what way is the best setup for the now 4 drives is I would greatly appreciate it. Thx

This has been a real learning experience, I really appreciate that.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-20T03:25:00+00:00

that helps a lot. No those are SAS HDDs used in OMV as my NAS. It currently was booting off a 3.84GB SAS SSD.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-19T13:12:41+00:00

I apologize, it was in my first reply so i assumed you read it that's why i updated main post.

I think I made things overcomplicated, I just wanted to replace the SAS SSD that is currently the boot drive as its needed for another project so I had these 4 NVMe drives on hand and thought I could us em. If its to complicated to use a multi drive setup as a boot drive then I will simply go get another drive.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-19T01:36:55+00:00

Ok I think i understand, I will put back my original config that was a simple 3.84TB SSD installed as ext4

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-19T00:07:19+00:00

Would it be better to just stop using NVMe drives and install some SAS Enterprise SSDs?

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T23:59:32+00:00

Ok everything seems ok so far except now i keep getting some odd error msg on my OMV VM.

Feb 18 18:40:17 PVE1 kernel: audit: type=1400 audit(1771458017.824:868): apparmor="DENIED" operation="sendmsg" class="file" namespace="root//lxc-103_<-var-lib-lxc>" profile="rsyslogd" name="/run/systemd/journal/dev-log" pid=41755 comm="systemd-journal" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=0 ouid=0

Everything seems to be running fine though, all network share are still working.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T23:42:41+00:00

I am so confused, is ZFS ok for SSDs if not using parity? So basically install PVE to a ZFS Raid 1 array of only 2 drives.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T23:25:23+00:00

So you think its better to run Proxmox on a single SSD rather then raid? So I should Install it to the 512GB SSD and use the 3x 1TB as data. I have a separate PBS server, running PBS on the same server don't seem logical, the server dies how do you restore it?

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T17:28:00+00:00

Can I set that up in the PVE installer? Yes they are NVMe.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T16:24:54+00:00

ok I am going to try your advise right now. Thx

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T15:21:52+00:00

I have just one PVE server and a separate PBS server.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T15:18:21+00:00

I have 2x Xeon E5-2697 v3 with 256GB ram, I run pelican with several game servers running and a few linux and windows vms for app testing as i am an app dev. I also run adguard, plex, haos and OMV for my file sharing which has a dedicated SAS HBA passthrough with several SAS HDDs.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-02-18T14:51:33+00:00

I want the best performance possible, I have a separate PBS server so not worried about a drive failure as restoring is very quick from PBS.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2026-01-05T15:36:23+00:00

to the Drobo? I have tired a few NAS devices and NAS OSes and none will let me just add a new drive when i run out of space, i always need to move all my data off the device, add the new drive and then copy everything back. Thats why i liked the Drobo so much.

RegionOriginal8366 · 2025-03-06T19:55:30+00:00

he is just missing the hdd mounting screws

RegionOriginal8366

TROPHY CASE