Simple day dream

Community Blog
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TLDR …brain storming about a central storage server for the home on the cheap…

Since threadripper 1900x is out… If a TR mother board with 7 or 8 - 8x pcie slots would come out… here is my idea.
Its pretty common lately to be able to find 40Gbps Infiniband adapters and cables for cheap. So add in two SAS HBAs with one-two 36 port SAS expanders. Use your imagination and You could have a pretty nice central storage server for home use.

Could also link several storage nodes with the 40Gb connections for an awesome glusterFS setup or ceph… whatever else

Could also just throw as many infiniband adapters into a linux bridge so you can create a switch/media converter also. Heres a video on it…

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You can get a real Infiniband switch for much less than the cost of just the Threadripper CPU, and you will get better performance out of it than you would with software bridging.

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Good luck adding a SAS HBA to that infiniband switch to make it a storage server though.

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I dont know how well it would work but its something that I would be interested in seeing!

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Threadripper will be dirt cheap in 5 years, The catch is in five years, you’ll also be drooling at the next big thing.

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You can put a SAS HBA and Infiniband or Ethernet card in just about anything else. What is the value added by Threadripper for this use case?

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ecc supported motherboards and up to 128GB of ram for using ZFS if you wanted it. and up to 7-8 each 8x pcie slots

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Maybe linux is better at infiniband but as far is i know it’s performing worse or equal to SFP+