I’m looking to move my server to a different setup (currently have a hp dl 380 G8) It currently has (2) E5-2420 v2’s and 80gb of ram. what motherboard do you guys suggest i could move to (if i can use same processors + ram) preferably one with dual socket)? or should build a newer system? I’m working with a budget of $500 while using part of that budget to get a BPN-SAS2-846EL1 backplane.
That’s a pair of 6 core/12 thread sandy bridge clocked at 1.9GHz. A pair of them has roughly as much horsepower as a Ryzen 5 3600.
A cheap x399 board + 1920 threadripper cost about 400, would have roughly double the cpu power, a bunch of modern features typically not there on sandy bridge era motherboards, but 64G of ECC will set you back around 300 
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I don’t see a significant upgrade fitting your budget unless you sell some parts.
Shrinking to a consumer ryzen 5 3600 + 32G RAM fits, but that’s more like a refresh than an upgrade, and only half the ram and might not fit your storage.
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You haven’t said why? I’d it not performing as you want, is there a feature you need,or is it too power hungry? Without context it is hard to say what you should consider.
For this price you are either looking at prosumer parts or 3 generation old enterprise. So as @risk says not really an upgrade. Again if you can specify your workload (Nas / VMs / containers / tor node) it may help refine.
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You aren’t going to get onto a better enterprise platform than the v2 Xeon for $500. If it’s an issue of just needing more drive space, depending on what you pay for power, add an R720xd or some sort of disk shelf, and just keep your current setup? Alternately, you could look for one of those 16-bay R720s, although they can be rather rare.
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My apologies for not initially clarifying @risk , @Airstripone , @COGlory , I was going not only expand my hard drive capacity but also build the server into my custom built desk that’s currently housing my rig and has a lot of empty space and quiet it down by using bigger fans such as the 140mm’s that’s currently built into my desk. I’m currently running sonarr, pihole, plex, nextcloud, sab dockers. I don’t really run vm’s that often.
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Makes sense. If you are building something into a desk go for new parts and consider consumer solutions. You will get better support for CPU coolers and RGB etc to make it look good. If you just want bulk storage, get a separate NAS and put it in a closet then have a smaller system in your desk without the hard drives. It will be quieter and look better.
This is the last year there will be spinning rust in my desktop. Next upgrade will be just nvme and I may even go ITX, moving all bulk storage off to the NAS.
I’d go with consumer parts for that, tbh.
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New consumer setup is much much easier to thermally manage in a desk. @Airstripone mentioned CPU coolers, but also every single motherboard has a gazillion individually controlled pwm fan headers these days, for that nice and quiet 300rpm airflow.
How much total storage @tarc ?
@risk I’m currently sitting on 30tb across 10 sas drives (3tb per drive) with 1 parity and a 500gb cache sata ssd currently, with about 12tb (2tb per drive) in reserve that was originally in the server before they got switched out with the 3 tb. I plan on watching the sales on 10/12tb external hard drives so i can start shucking drives. main reason i have the 3tb sas was because there was a sale on ebay some months ago where the 3tb drives were $10 a pop and I ended buying what was left.
1 parity disk on 30TiB is high risk. Your rebuild time will be at least a day, with high likelihood of data loss on old drives.
Pricing is all over the place due to “the thing” but you may have better luck with 8TiB drives. A set of 6 drives with two disk parity gives you 32TiB and good resilience.
How are your ears not bleeding?
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If I HAD to move from that, for a 500 dollar budget RAM will be the killer in any (newer) platform move, as you’ll have to go from DDR3 to DDR4.
If you can get away with say 32 GB of RAM you could potentially go to a B350 board with something like a Ryzen 2600, but you’ll be out of money for a SAS card I suspect.
If you’re sticking with DDR3 memory, I think a platform shift from where you are is pretty pointless (unless it is a different board purely for form factor reasons during a move to your desk?) and your $500 is likely far better spent on something else than a platform shift.
e.g., maybe as per above, add some further redundancy to your array. RAID5 on 1 TB disks was suggested as “not a good idea” 10 years ago due to failure during rebuild risk. If you’re doing parity RAID with any sort of 1TB+ drives I’d be looking at RAID6 and ideally maybe RAID60 (or ZFS RAIDZ2/RAIDZ3) to reduce your failure during rebuild risk.
That’s where I’d be putting the $500 personally.
Or maybe some higher clocked CPUs for your existing board if it supports them? Can maybe find some cheap E5-2650v2s perhaps for better clock speed (and more cache, more cores) in the same socket?
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This is where I’d go. Separate your drive storage from the processing. Invest in a couple of PCI-E HBAs to free up your storage array from your platform. If you need a smaller board, dual processor workstation boards in LGA 1366 are dirt cheap.
I wouldn’t invest in anything 2011/Ivy Bridge because they’re already nearly obsolete and to upgrade from those would mean a new motherboard anyways because of Intel’s X79/X99 shenanigans.
I’d probably invest in some HBAs, get my drives offloaded to PCI-E, maybe pick up a smaller 1366 motherboard for $50-$75, and then save up for a threadripper + DDR4 down the line, where you can reuse your newly separated storage array.
As far as actual 1366 boards go, there are plenty of dual processor ones out there, I know the HPZxx workstations had dual CPUs, so I’d probably look there for getting a used one.
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Not sure I fully understand your post or how it relates to OPs requirement for a new NAS, but for interest what do you mean by Intel’s shenanigans?
Socket 1366 is very much EOL and one will struggle to find modern CPU coolers that support that socket. If OP is investing in any new hardware I stand by my suggestion of new consumer parts for an in-desk use case where aesthetics, reliability and small form factor. A dual socket 1366 board with mid range 10 year old CPUs will have less horsepower than a modern $100 b450 and Ryzen 1600AF whilst consuming four times the power.
Threadripper is not needed for a file server and provides no benefit over consumer or dedicated server parts, and is not a budget option.
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The v2 xeons being spread over multiple sockets, and some of the sockets supporting DDR3, and some DDR4, despite being the same pinout. Just a complaint about their compatibility and naming scheme, ultimately.
Sure, but OP has 80 gigs of DDR3 memory, and replacing that is going to be expensive. Even just 64 GB of DDR4 ECC is ~$250-$300, not to mention the cost of HBA/RAID controller that would be needed to adapt the SAS drives.
Higher memory capacity, more memory channels. And I wasn’t suggesting that for current budget, merely speculating about future, more economical setups.
The cheapest and easiest way to get the build into their desk is simply buying a workstation 1366 motherboard.
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Yeah, being stuck with a heap of DDR3 is the sticking point here. The OP needs to clarify whether he/she has 80 GB of DDR because
- it is required for some reason OR
- it is just there because this was an ex server that came with a heap of DDR3 included
That’s why I asked about being able to get away with 32 GB (or maybe even 16 if this is to be a mostly dumb NAS) - because any platform shift to something newer is going to involve a DDR3 to DDR4 transition and as mentioned above that just isn’t going to be cheap - getting 64 GB of ECC (even non-ECC) will consume most of the 500 dollar budget in one fell swoop.
Moving to a different platform compatible with DDR3 will be a sideways move at best and just introducing cost and risk (moving from known working 10 year old parts to maybe not working secondhand 10 year old parts) so I wouldn’t do it.
So - if RAM requirements can be reduced a bit… maybe get onto even a low end socket AM4 solution; you’ll get equivalent/better CPU performance even out of something like a Ryzen 1600-1700 is my bet (due to no multi-socket shit to deal with), it just really depends if the RAM requirement is actually 80 GB or if we’re seeing 80 GB purely because that was obtained cheap (I know I have about 96 GB of DDR3 ECC I don’t know what to do with right now because of decommissioned servers, so I’ve been through this sort of consideration process myself :D).
Agreed. If possible, it’s time to get onto a newer platform in my opinion - because as you say these parts are well past EOL and you can get something faster/more reliable/compatible with modern standards/modern parts, etc. for reasonable money.
But I do understand that the OP has a significant investment in the current platform and other than being newer, spending 500 bucks to shift to new parts won’t win much in terms of performance inside of that budget. If the budget was a bit bigger things would be different.
If they would work, the E5-2650v2s might give a bit of a CPU bump most importantly in terms of clock speed - they ramp up to 3.4 Ghz which will help with any video transcoding, etc the box might do. But maybe that’s throwing money away for nothing important to the OP. I haven’t considered power consumption at all however (I never do really, I figure the machine will be mostly idle and monthly contribution to my total energy bill is negligible).
My main advice would be this: don’t invest too much more in parts that are not going to be able to come with you to a new platform. And I certainly wouldn’t shift from one DDR3 platform to another personally.
I wouldn’t move to a b350 board with that many drives and a desire for potentially 20/30 drives total over the next few years.
x399 + 1920 / 1950 + DDR4 sounds like a good next step on the ladder. PCIe bandwidth available and typical x16 x8 x16 x8 motherboard arrangement is great for e.g. a 40G nic, one or two storage adapters, maybe a quadro card for video transcoding.
But you need to either scrape together more budget, or wait for an opportunity to snag ram or cpu cheap.
I have a similar CPU setup. You can’t go wrong with Supermicro… Well, it’s hard to go wrong with Supermicro… 
Sorry if I missed it but OP did not specify 30 drives, (s) he wants 30TiB storage. It would be very strange to put 30 hard disks in a desk.
OP wants to spend $500 on a storage server. I feel we are getting off topic.
I’ll stop flame-warring unless @tarc has any more specific questions as I feel we aren’t helping solve their problem.
You can do DDR4 on an Ivybridge? Cool, that would be news to me.
a brand new ac unit that is more efficient in keeping the house cooler. lol but it’s still loud though. even with the server running at 50%
I had gotten the ram at a extremely cheap price at $1.50 a stick during a random ebay sale so at the time i loaded up. this was about 2 years ago
@COGlory I personally don’t need same amount of ram as my current server is only using 5% of it.
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