LFA - ~24TB NAS build

Don’t start with the CPU. The motherboard qvl will tell you what chips are compatible, then get a chip to suit.

A year ago I would have said “buy used”. I’ve always gone back a couple of generations and all my servers have run cheap ddr3 ecc dimms. However the ryzen stack is now just too compelling. Ddr4 prices have dropped and are fairly reasonable now for modest speeds (2666). Ddr4 gives you options.

If you are starting from scratch a first or second gen ryzen CPU and motherboard is a compelling deal, and will give you enough lanes for 10GbE and a HBA.

If you are looking at used, I’d stick with 2011v3 era as a minimum, unless you get a great deal on older boards.

More I am searching eBay, more I am leaning towards Ryzen (probably Asrock X570 Phantom Gaming 4, it is for around $150, so I might be able to squeeze an additional 10GbE NIC and HBA card for a total of $300, B450 boards have some unimpressive pci-e lanes layout, but I need to look at it more).

I took your recommendation to look at 2011v3 era, which should be C602 chipset, so trying these two searches
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=supermicro+2011+v3&_sacat=0&_sop=15&rt=nc&LH_PrefLoc=3
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_nkw=C602+motherboard&LH_PrefLoc=3&_sop=15
I got absolutely nothing, anything for an acceptable price is dual socket (I don’t have a space for such a monster). And if there is some, it is for around $300 which is just like a sale price from a retailer.

Then again, it is absolutely no problem to find a cheap Xeon from US/EU listing for even $20-$30, but boards are a completely different story.

“v1” vs v2 was a big jump in (lowering) power consumption, as far as I’ve been told, so I wouldn’t go below the v2’s, but curious as to why v3 as a minimum?

Just be aware that not all desktop boards that take ECC memory also support the actual ECC functionality, so be sure to double check that if you want ECC functionality.

When Wendell does Mobo reviews he usually tells you if it does ECC so that’s a good place to start looking

1 Like

if you get the IBM M1015 raid card I can give you everything you need to flash it to an HBA.

You can get them for $25 on ebay all day long and then another $25-ish for decent mini sas to sata cables.

probably the cheapest way to get +8 sata on your setup

1 Like

If your price ceiling is $300 all in then you will struggle for V3 era enterprise boards. One option may be to repurpose a prebuilt, like a Lenovo thinkstation, hp Proliant or Dell. Can be a pain to get them to fit a normal chassis but if you go for rackmount boards they tend to be more standard.

For $300 you could get a moderately good x99 desktop board and still use your Xeon. ECC support is more spotty.

Like I said in my first post, the ryzen boards are just so compelling and give you warranty and modern features. I don’t know why used prices are holding up so well in the face of Ryzen.

Simply availability. V2 was a fairly short window whereas V3 chips are now quite common (at slightly higher price). Note I use a 2011-v1 server and am hanging on until the board dies so will likely skip V3 altogether and go straight to Zen.

1 Like

@droptheghost How does your setup compare to just a simple pair of 16T drives in RAID1?
Optionally with some flash zil/cache?

@marelooke @GigaBusterEXE You are both right, I think I will need to double-check with Asus and Asrock. I am a bit worried about Asrock, though. According to ASRock Rack has created the first AM4 socket server boards, X470D4U, X470D4U2-2T it seems there are issues with Asrock (although I don’t know a background of Asrock Rack, if they are a completely separate branch or same people working on two separate product lines).

@Adubs Thank you for the tip, I didn’t know about this one, I will add it to the list of ones to look for.

As far as the breakout cable goes, I will be honest, I just saw our local offerings here and it is the same I see on eBay, same generic stuff, I got two of these cables for under $18
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184108447500 .

I hope they will not fail on me (I am holding up on giving a feedback until I can verify they work).

@Airstripone Yes, $300 for the board + 10Gbe + HBA + CPU (I see plenty of them laying around eBay, 6/12 Xeons v2/v3 are cheaper than a single HBA card) from entirely used sources is, in my opinion, more than enough for such old HW. For the same price or less it looks it would cost me to get Ryzen components.

But then I have to keep in mind that if I ditch Intel, FreeNAS may protest a bit when the red one is served to it. I am already doing a little research on other options such as OmniOS or SmartOS.

@risk I’d say this - speed, redundancy and maybe 1/8th of the time required to resilver 3TB of 4TB drive vs. 12TB of a 16TB drive. And, of course, 50% capacity cut is just too much to bear. Last but not least, as far as I know, all 16TB drives are SMR…archival/cold storage? Great, go with them. A live storage? Nonononono.

The cheaper cables probably work OK but I like to spend a little bit here for the cablematters cables

Your statement isn’t quite true, AMD has some of the same security flaws and also has different security flaws, at least that is my understanding.

If you finish the whole thread, you’ll probably notice that since the Dec release BIOS and bmc firmwares that thread has almost died, maybe meaning hardly any one coming in to complain about them.

@nx2l There seem to be some very recent unpleasant reports regarding ECC.

It was my understanding that AMD “had” some few security flaws and was able to actually fix them.

This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.