Advice on a NEW build with OLD hardware

[buldamoosh]

What I have -
ASRock 970 Extreme3 Motherboard
AMD FX-8370E Eight-Core Processor
32 GB RAM
LSI MegaRAID 9261-i SAS Controller
Broadcom dual 10G NIC - BCM57810S
6 x Seagate IronWolf 8TB Drives
2 x Samsung 870 EVO 500GB SATA Drives

I will primarily be using this for VMWare iSCSI target hosting 4 small ASRock 4x4 5800U (for now) with 2.5G NICs. I currently have a QNAP872XU also which I use for this purpose today. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best "bang for the buck" improvements I could make to the system? More RAM, a different SAS controller? Thanks in advance for any helpful responses.

 

[jgreco]

32 GB RAM

Not a good choice, see

The path to success for block storage

It seems like I haven't written a sticky for awhile, but just in the last week I've had to cover this topic several times. ZFS does two different things very well. One is storage of large sequentially-written files, such as archives, logs, or data files, where the file does not have the middle...

www.truenas.com

LSI MegaRAID 9261-i SAS Controller

Not acceptable at all, see

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

Broadcom dual 10G NIC - BCM57810S

Not a good choice, pick one suggested in

10 Gig Networking Primer

This is a discussion of high speed networking for newcomers, with specific emphasis on practical small- to medium-scale deployments for home labs or small office users. It originated with a forum thread located here that has many pages of...

www.truenas.com

Make sure you use CORE, not SCALE.

 

[buldamoosh]

I'll grab more RAM - most I can go on this Motherboard is 64GB, I have QLogic Corporation NetXtreme II BCM57712 10 Gigabit Ethernet installed in one of my UCS Chassis that I am going to decommission when I get the solution working. Will this work for the controller - https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Logic-SA...mzn1.fos.fa474cd8-6dfc-4bad-a280-890f5a4e2f90 ?

 

[buldamoosh]

Not a good choice, see

The path to success for block storage

It seems like I haven't written a sticky for awhile, but just in the last week I've had to cover this topic several times. ZFS does two different things very well. One is storage of large sequentially-written files, such as archives, logs, or data files, where the file does not have the middle...

www.truenas.com

Not acceptable at all, see

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

Not a good choice, pick one suggested in

10 Gig Networking Primer

This is a discussion of high speed networking for newcomers, with specific emphasis on practical small- to medium-scale deployments for home labs or small office users. It originated with a forum thread located here that has many pages of...

www.truenas.com

Make sure you use CORE, not SCALE.

I'll grab more RAM - most I can go on this Motherboard is 64GB, I have QLogic Corporation NetXtreme II BCM57712 10 Gigabit Ethernet installed in one of my UCS Chassis that I am going to decommission when I get the solution working. Will this work for the controller - https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Logic-SA...mzn1.fos.fa474cd8-6dfc-4bad-a280-890f5a4e2f90 ?