SOLVED Brain Transplant

[GrumpyBear]

Well it's been almost a year with my FreeNAS and I'm still loving it.

A funny thing has happened though. My workstation with its lowley i3-2100 in a X9SCL was getting increasingly envious of the e3-1231v3 in the X10SL7-F. As outlined in my original build thread I had originally contemplated using the X9SCL for the NAS but had decided against it.

A year later I decided that the NAS was just not an efficient use of the processor (which sits mostly idle or below 2 threads) so I swapped the motherboards and CPUs. The bulk of the work was going from a 8x3TB ZFS3 to a six disk ZFS2 as the X9 has only 6 SATA2 ports. So I added 2 more of the Western Digital Reds as they appear to be more consistent and added moved the 4 Seagate disks from my original build to my workstation and reflashed the LSI2308 back to IR mode and created a 5.4TB RAID10 for local data.

I use the workstation mostly for Lightroom and PhotoShop and it is definetly more peppy both building previews and loading 100% views in Develop mode. Though disk access was not a bottleneck in either App I had to do a rather ugly hack to make Lightroom use a network drive and I do some video editing and transcoding that having the fast local storage will help with. I will be setting up a sync job to mirror the data over to the NAS.

I was able to use my mirrored USB sticks to get FreeNAS back up and running in under an hour including rebuilding the LAG and the new Pool. Rather embarrassing considering the 8 hours to get Windows 7 functional. I am sorely missing the IPMI though.

Moving the Data back from the Synology NAS I use for the on-site backup took under a day.

I'm waiting for the new socket 1151 boards from SuperMicro to become available and stable so sometime next year I may reverse the process again. Then the X9SCL will likely be repurposed to replace my LAMP server which is currently running 4 Servers on a dual core atom with 2GB RAM!

 

[anodos]

 

[jgreco]

View attachment 9579

I'd say you have bigger problems than that.

 

[Ericloewe]

I'm waiting for the new socket 1151 boards from SuperMicro to become available and stable so sometime next year I may reverse the process again. Then the X9SCL will likely be repurposed to replace my LAMP server which is currently running 4 Servers on a dual core atom with 2GB RAM!

I'm waiting for a quote from a local Supermicro distributor, but I'm almost certainly going to be assembling a new server with an X11SSM-F or X11SSH-F (if pricing is just right, X11SSH-LN4F, since the PCI-e connectivity used for the third and fourth i210s is unused in the -F model) early next year.

One big catch (for some, at least) is that booting from USB is going to be very painful, at least until FreeNAS 10 (and possibly even then). Booting from a SATA (or SAS or PATA, I guess) device is going to be a hard requirement on X11 boards until FreeNAS provides proper USB 3.0 (XHCI, really) support. And that's assuming GRUB will work well (which is a reasonable assumption).

 

[GrumpyBear]

... One big catch (for some, at least) is that booting from USB is going to be very painful, at least until FreeNAS 10 (and possibly even then). Booting from a SATA (or SAS or PATA, I guess) device is going to be a hard requirement on X11 boards until FreeNAS provides proper USB 3.0 (XHCI, really) support. And that's assuming GRUB will work well (which is a reasonable assumption).

Both the X11SSH-F and X11SLM-F models have 2 USB2 ports via a header and 4 via the back panel. Could one not just use these for booting or am I missing something?

For a workstation replacement I'm looking at the X11SAE-M combined with a E3-1245 v5 (or a 1275) as it has the micro ATX form-factor, a decent number of SATA3 ports for RAID SSD, integrated audio, dual GBE NICs and, triple display support (I'm running dual 1920x1200 monitors at present and need (want) a third). I know the X11SAT and X11SAE are the workstation specific boards but these, like their X10 counterparts, are both in the ATX form factor so they can support full-length PCIe3x16 cards.

Come on Eric I know you WANT the X11SSH-CTF model. Dual 1oGE and a LSI3008 with dual miniSAS connectors along with an M2 port and 2 SuperDOM connectors.

 

[Ericloewe]

Both the X11SSH-F and X11SLM-F models have 2 USB2 ports via a header and 4 via the back panel. Could one not just use these for booting or am I missing something?

That's not the issue. X10s also boot fine from USB 2.0 devices on USB 3.0 ports.

The problem is that the Skylake PCH removes support for all USB drivers except XHCI, which was designed to (eventually) supersede all the incompatible versions written for various specs and provide compatibility with USB 3.0 and furture developments. Intel pulled the plug a bit early.

Come on Eric I know you WANT the X11SSH-CTF model. Dual 1oGE and a LSI3008 with dual miniSAS connectors along with an M2 port and 2 SuperDOM connectors.

It's certainly going to be drool-worthy as soon as LSI gets the driver/firmware fully stabilized and Intel adds support for the new 10GbE controller used on that board. ;)

At the moment, its big features are worth close to zero in FreeNAS, unfortunately.

 

[jgreco]

At the moment, its big features are worth close to zero in FreeNAS, unfortunately.

You still lust for it. Don't pretend otherwise. We see through you.

 

[GrumpyBear]

...The problem is that the Skylake PCH removes support for all USB drivers except XHCI, which was designed to (eventually) supersede all the incompatible versions written for various specs and provide compatibility with USB 3.0 and furture developments. Intel pulled the plug a bit early.

Ahh - thanks, I haven't read the specs on the new Syklake PCHs yet.