AM5 Gaming Motherboard for Ryzen 9 Proxmox Server, SATA expantion on 16x PCIe 5.0 Max RAM

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Well, here we go: Im setting up Hardware for server for mostly Windows VMs office purposes.

  • New komponents,
  • Motherboards ASUS or MSI
  • Ryzen 9 7000 series
  • ZFS Raid2z
  • 192GB
  • Proxmox on Mirror NVMi
  • Option for ZFS cashe
  • Dediceted NIC for Proxmox mamagment
  • 3,5 SATA drives (spinnig rust)
  • No GPU hardare acceleration needed.
    I have been looking around but there is not enough SATA ports, I want at least 7. I would love to setup 2 vdevs so the more the beter.
    Well there are expantions cards (I have 16x PCIe gen 5 waiting) but will it work with Raidz???
    Any hardware suggestions???

Thank you.

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  • Consider Asrock Rack mainboards, they have an AM5 solution (here ← link) so you can still use a Ryzen CPU. Has a BCM/IPMI port for remote management.
  • Forget 192GB for now. DDR5 is too new to support more then 2 sticks of RAM, AMD is particularly petty on which modules and slots to use.
  • You can get refurbished 16TB HDD’s right now from ebay (US) for reasonable prices. If money no object, consider an all-SSD solution.
  • Make your VDEV’s as small as possible to reduce the expansion-investment: 8-drive VDEV’s require another 8 drives to expand, while 3 or 4 drive VDEV’s only need that amount of drives, which is much more affordable.
  • Make sure you buy CMR drives, not SMR types! SMR is only usable for “write once, forget it’s there” kind of data. Anything else → CMR.
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Thank You for quick replay, but what about sata ports, the board u mentioned supports only 4 sata and barely 2 m.2s. Any idea how to expand those numbers for raid2z usege + plus mirror for proxmox. Are expantion cards are suited to run raidz?

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MSI x670e Carbon. 6 Sata, 4 M.2, PCIE x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4.
If you need more sata, try to find m.2 to sata converter. Then, you can free up pcie slots for other purpose.

PS: AMD screws up something each time they changes AGESA. Some 192GB kits, even on the QVL list of the motherboard vendors, they may not work out of the box on the latest AGESA. Be prepared to do some manual configuration to make it work.

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Thank you, any sugestion for converters that are good for Raidz I heard not all of them support Raidz. And whitch m.2 should I use (CPU or chipset) for this converter. I really dont know how many sata ports can"fit" into eg pcie gen 4 etc

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There are couple of m.2 to sata converters listed in Amazon. Some of them can fit 6 sata ports.
I tend to put them on chipset m.2. Spare cpu m.2 for zfs cache and log devices. As raidz, any thing can support raidz without problem. I even built zfs on usb external drives before.

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Superb 6 is just another vdev in my point of view (raidz2) gonna do that. Thank you.

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if u go to higher xmp yes, but i think in the amd product page it is listed how many dimms at which speed are supported.
2x1R

DDR5-5200

2x2R

DDR5-5200

4x1R

DDR5-3600

4x2R

DDR5-3600

what ive read by my quicksearch results in 2x 48gb dimms maximum for the msi x670e ace of msi. i guess there is no real solution for his ram problem anyway.

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as long as the hba/raid controller pass the drives threw to os, zfs should work, im using a delock m2->sata card

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Thanks that was very helpful. But I recon that there is a problem with ram. Where is relible source to check what is the max for that MSI carbon m-board?

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Or just maybe go with ddr4 I don’t need fast i need plenty?

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QVL list on the mainboard list, support tab. also its listed which bios was tested. and u can cross check, i know gskill provides their own support list and maybe more up2date with mainboards.

for fast memory, does your usage profit of it? and maybe consumer plattforms arent suited for maxing out every possible slot/io/scenario. it reminds me when i was doing my jellyfinserver/nas. read somewhere “1gb ram for 1tb hdd” in zfs. meh, basicly i can turn of the memory arc and dont feel any perfomance difference in my daily usage.

as i see u want to use it for vm’s, then memory is really good for this. are u running multiple clients in the same time/got multiple users? if u are a single user, meh.
and u want ssd caching for readcache, one ssd should be enough. 2 ssds for meta data special device as mirror (if u loose the meta data, u are f uped)

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Its for VMs with win10/11 in the office max 6 machines. The Idea is to run proxmox on mirror on two m.2s, 6 x SATA HDD for Raidz2, one readcache, I don’t know anything about metadata. So maybe do another m.2 mirror for meta instead of readcache? Is it nesessery (never heard of it).

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not really nesessary, but it may improve some things. ive tested it for like 15 minutes and removed it, because i didnt mirrored it cause of lack of ssd’s for me. sftp/scp explorer in bitvise felt faster as before on my storage-pool. u can search for meta data special device z in this board and find alot more infos.

those vm will profit of memory arc for multiple vm’s, i think. and i remember one thing about ddr5 and am5, ecc on consumer plattform maybe not working correctly. for intel its kind the same. maybe in this usecase threadripper/epyc/sapphire rapids is more suited in this scenario cause business. there u dont have headaches about ecc and got plenty of pcie for addin cards. also most of the enterprise features are more widly available. also bifurcation should be more offered on those plattforms and u can use pcie m2 cards for expension of nvme drives.

but dont take my advise as good, im not a professional nor i can show any works. just some thoughts of a hobbyist.

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Thanks man. That was very helpful.

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