Does Socket Chipset matter e.g. AMD F2 or Intel LGA 2011?

[zenorb]

Hi

Heading should read AMD FM2

I found low cost AMD FM2 boards with 8 x SATA and can add PCIe cards for the additional SATA ports to populate a 13 x 3TB HDD case but am unsure if FreeNAS will work on this.

Please advise.

Additionally there is a 14 SATA port LGA 2011 Gigabyte motherboard (6 SATA plus 8 SAS / SATA ports onboard) which would be ideal.

Would FreeNAS work on this?

 

[BakCompat]

Here is the FreeBSD 8.3 Hardware Compatibility list. FreeNAS 8.3 is based on FreeBSD 8.3.
http://www5.us.freebsd.org/releases/8.3R/hardware.html

The cpu type/socket type of brand is not particularly important. They will all "work" with certain services being slightly faster on higher single core speeds vs. more cores at lower speeds.. but that's a different story.

What you really want is your controller card to be THOROUGHLY supported by FreeBSD, If it is not in here, then stay away from it. Search the forums for particular favorites, but consider purchasing a lower priced desktop motherboard with a pcie controller card that will connect 8/12/16/24 drives to a single card. If that one card is well supported, then you won't be having this sort of question. Some people prefer mixing controllers. Some don't. YMMV. As long as all the controllers you use are THOROUGHLY supported, you should be fine. For example, I just ordered an IBM M1015 card from ebay and will be crossflashing the firmware to an LSI firmware for the latest firmware bugfixes/features. That model supports 8 drives, and is quite cost effective at under $100.

For the quantity of drives you are looking at, you should probably be looking at something in a rackmount type case. You can get them with rather copious drive bays...