Another newbie, please double check my build

[macowie]

Hello all! I've been wanting to put together some kind of home server for ages now and I finally started getting serious about it last month. I'm a developer and quite familiar with *nix, and I've been doing my due diligence reading up on the official docs and some of the threads around here, as well as the cyberjock tutorials.

As for my build, I've got a few basic parts I've liberated from other machines that I'd like to re-use. I'm targeting Mini-ITX and the lower end of Skylake Xeons. There's not a lot of options for boards as of yet but I believe these would work.

Stuff I have to reuse
Hard Drives: 2x TOSHIBA 5TB 3.5 Desktop SATA 7200RPM
Power Supply: Corsair RM 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case

Stuff to buy
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V5 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($252.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: 4x Western Digital Red 5TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($194.99 @ Amazon)

These parts aren’t on Parts Picker yet:
Motherboard: Asrock Rack D2I (Newegg)
Memory: Samsung DDR4-2133 16GB/2Gx72 ECC CL15 Samsung Chip Server Memory
Alternative Memory pick Super Talent DDR4-2133 16GB/1Gx72 ECC CL15 Samsung Chip Server Memory (Same chips as the above, but $18 less)
Those were the only 16GB DDR4 ECC UDIMMs I've found.

and

Boot Drives 2x SanDisk UltraFit 16GB
From reading the forums I guess they're moving away from USB sticks for boot but should be fine for now? I guess I can always get an M.2 drive later on, even if it means I'd have to get a SATA controller card to keep using the 6 drive pool.

Alternatively I could still go with this board, $60 cheaper, no IPMI (which I think I could live without), but has 8 SATA ports. And just get a lil SATA DOM guy.
Motherboard: ASRock C236 WSI Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard ($197.99 @ SuperBiiz)

 

[Ericloewe]

I guess I can always get an M.2 drive later on, even if it means I'd have to get a SATA controller card to keep using the 6 drive pool.

Someone at ASRock Rack messed up. The C236 PCH supports 8 SATA ports, so there was no need to share the M.2 port with a SATA port. What a shame...

So you're faced with an unpleasant choice: 8 SATA ports or IPMI. Don't underestimate the value of IPMI, it's really damn useful - but you'll have to choose which feature you can live without.

Note that USB devices will almost certainly work fine for a long time as boot devices. SATA devices are naturally better, but it's something you can definitely live without.

On my original server, I went with USB boot devices because, at the time, FreeNAS used a fixed, tiny amount of space on disk. Later, I didn't upgrade to a SATA device because I'd need to add a SATA controller. Boot device manipulations (updates, snapshot manipulations, ...) can get rather slow, so I am thinking about moving to faster USB 3.0 devices.

On my new server, the additional two SATA ports allowed by the Skylake platform really made it a no-brainer to go with an SSD, so that's what I did. Do note that it was a no-brainer for me only because I was planning on messing around a lot with several FreeNAS versions and because USB wasn't supported yet on Skylake. Today, USB drives are perfectly viable even on Skylake systems.

 

[macowie]

Thanks for alleviating my concerns about USB. If it will continue to work for the foreseeable future that's good enough for me. I just didn't want to build with an assumption that will obsolete it within a year or two.

This is the one machine I don't plan on tinkering with too much after its set up. If the biggest issue is just the speed around that stuff I can deal.


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