@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.