First FreeNAS Build / Avoton vs Xeon-D / pricing & "future-proofing"

[trickster]

Hello,
I'm procrastinating over the motherboard of my home build which really keeps me from getting off the ground. My requirements are:

- mini-ITX
- low-power usage
- processor w/ ECC support
- at least 6 onboard SATA ports (the case will be a FD Node 304), but buying a controller card is not the end of the world
- aside from plex and maybe some testing with jails and bhyve, I don't expect to be hammering the processor a lot with many applications in this build

I am torn between Avoton and Xeon-D due to the pricing of some Xeon-D SoC systems. When I look at the Supermicro variants of the X10SDV family that only have Gigabit Ethernet ports as 10G ports are unecessary, I see that they're twice as much as the Supermicro or ASRock Avoton boards. While I would like to stay current with a Xeon-D system, I would consider an Avoton chip if it still holds up in 2017 and for many more years. Can anyone speak to the effectiveness of Avoton today?

I'm shopping in Germany and The Netherlands, and see this, for example:
https://www.amazon.de/ASRock-C2750D...95635460&sr=8-1&keywords=asrock+rack+c2750d4i - 442 Euro
http://www.serverdirect.nl/onlineserverkopen/supermicro-mainboard-mbdx10sdv8cln2fo-p-7257.html - 809 Euro
https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mini-DDR4-Motherboard-X10SDV-F/dp/B00X69UX54 - $829
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182964 - $844

Can anyone recommend a motherboard/processor combo that would be more effective and cheaper than the ~$800 boards I've found? I'm open to using a new case and form factor. It is also not clear to me what the difference is, aside from the cooling, on the Supermicro X10SDV-F and X10SDV-8C+-LN2F

Thanks!

 

[religiouslyconfused]

They have a 4 core Xeon D cpu as well as Pentium D.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

C2758 can run 3 PLEX transcodes at 1080p as well as run a Torrent box with 600 torrents. I am sure you can do some transcodes at 1080p and run some VM's as well.

 

[ChriZ]

Well, if you say you are open to using a new case and form factor, then the decision is easy...
With €800 you should be able to get a Supermicro x11 motherboard, a Xeon e3-12xx v5 CPU, 16GB of Ram and a nice PSU... Perhaps even a decent case.
Just took a quick look on amazon.de and saw that e.g. a x11ssm-f combined with an e3-1220v5 are a bit over €450 and IMHO much better than the Avoton motherboard

 

[iammykyl]

As you may buy in Germany, a configuration for consideration. Please note, only 16Gb of RAM included.
> https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/jdwWLD
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2534&cmp[]=2693

 

[adamtaro]

When comparing with Avoton, I'd be looking straight at Supermicro's Xeon D-1521 board: http://www.serverdirect.nl/onlineserverkopen/supermicro-mainboard-x10sdv4ctln2f-p-8077.html

It's weird that it's 10GbE only, but it seems to get a lot of love.