Hello all,
I’ve been meaning to post for sometime as I’m an enthusiastic follower of Tom’s Youtibe videos.
He mentioned something that I hadn’t thought of until recently - with the move over to TrueNAS, does this mean a wider array of hardware might be compatible? Something to do with the Linux base?
This comes to mind as I may justify a 10Gb internet connection between 2 freenas machines one day (one of them will do snapshots).
Thanks!
Chris
Great question I feel like Freenas had great HCL prior honestly. Only time I got burned was my r730xd but different raid card and was good.
It is pretty good, just a bit limiting here in the UK when it comes to SFP+ NIC’s…seem they’re around £80 / $100 
Getting the preferred cards is really tricky.
It’s more about what FreeBSD supports than it is TrueNAS. Or Debian for TrueNAS scale.
TrueNAS isn’t abandoning BSD, but it is adopting Linux is what I had mentioned in the video. The company’s in-development TrueNAS Scale project is based on Debian but the current (and available) TrueNAS Core is based on a newer version of BSD which should help with hardware comparability as well.
Have you looked for used cards and SFP+ transceivers? Considering where many of these comes from, they should be able to ship to anywhere in the world.
@Greg_E That’s all I’m looking at (used cards), the transceivers are easily available but the cards themselves are only available from other countries. I’m a bit dubious about getting them from other countries…though it looks like I’ll have to at some point, due to the price difference. The ones that I have seen going cheap, do not have photos that include the Jottermark that the freenas forum advises to look out for. It seems that Intel, Chelsio and possibly SolarFlare cards are the most compatible with FreeNAS/BSD.
Thank you for clarifying @LTS_Tom & @xMAXIMUSx , much appreciated. Fingers crossed for the newer version of BSD making hardware compatibility perhaps a little better. Very happy with FreeNAS so far and slightly cheaper or cards that are more easily obtainable in my country would be the icing on the cake.
I have 3 of the x520 cards running in 2 freenas servers right now, so far no issues.
That’s the card I’ve been looking for, as it seems the most trouble free. Guess I’ll have to wait