First NAS - Which Supermicro mainboard should I take?

[Ericloewe]

zdevs

vdevs

 

[Yorick]

Right. I'll get there. Eventually :)

 

[Pharmi]

My order has been set :)

Supermicro X11SSM-F: LGA1151, E5-1200v5 I
Samsung DDR4 16GB 2400MHz CL17 ECC Reg
Intel Pentium G4560 3,50GHz Boxed CPU


additional, I will use some old hardware:
120 GB Samsung SSD
PSU BeQuiet StraightPower10 550 W


What do you think about this chassis?
I am looking for something with HotSwaps...

ebay: SUPERMICRO CASE CSE-825 CHASSIS

 

[Yorick]

That’s a great case I think. Will fit ATX, If I’m not mistaken uATX uses the same hole spacing just fewer of them so that’ll go in fine. You’ll use a server PSU, not the one you have, but it looks like your choice comes with one?

You’ll need to dig a little as for cabling to connect the backplane to your sata ports on the board.

And of course passive coolers because 2U ... plenty of fans in that chassis to blow air over your coolers.

I expect it’ll be loud.

You can get hotswap without the noise and 19” formfactor, there’s a recently resurrected thread in this forum about that.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/825/SC825TQ-R720LPB

Edit: here’s that discussion about a small server chassis, not 19”: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/first-build-u-nas-nsc-810a-chassis-case.59612/

 

[LimeCrusher]

When will this line finally die? There is no RAMdisk or similar thing. The OS is loaded like any other. Sure, ARC helps, but the boot device is not virtually read-only.

A slow boot device can easily render the GUI useless as components fail to load. And boot environment manipulations get rather long and painful. And so on...

My point is that there is real value in going with a real SSD instead of USB flash drives. Cheap M.2 PCIe SSDs can fill the niche previously occupied by expensive, unreliable SATA DOMs.

My apologies. I read that somewhere but it is indeed untrue. I wrote this because @Yorick wrote:

The SSD is for caching

which I understood as "a SSD as a boot drive is useful because it is used for write/read caching" while he later clarified that he intended to say "SSDs are for caching as SLOG or L2ARC device", which, at the end of the day has nothing to do with the boot device. Anyway!

My order has been set :)

Supermicro X11SSM-F: LGA1151, E5-1200v5 I
Samsung DDR4 16GB 2400MHz CL17 ECC Reg
Intel Pentium G4560 3,50GHz Boxed CPU

WAIT A MINUTE! You bought some Registered ECC RAM (RDIMM) while the Supermicro X11SSM-F supports Unregistered (or Unbuffered) ECC RAM (namely UDIMM). Is the Registered RAM compatible? I thought it wasn't and one had to go for the more expensive UDIMM.

 

[Yorick]

I wrote hastily hence the confusion. I meant “if the SSD is for caching as a slog or L2ARC, one will care about latency and maybe even throughput; but as a boot device, a x2 is plenty fast and then some”. Apologies for causing confusion.

Good catch on the registered ECC. UDIMM is what SM calls out: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSM.cfm
Motherboard manual also confirms Unbuffered.

Presumably the RDIMM could be returned?

 

[LimeCrusher]

I wrote hastily hence the confusion. I meant “if the SSD is for caching as a slog or L2ARC, one will care about latency and maybe even throughput; but as a boot device, a x2 is plenty fast and then some”. Apologies for causing confusion.

Entirely my fault. I put words in your mouth and repeated a fallacy.

Good catch on the registered ECC. UDIMM is what SM calls out: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSM.cfm
Motherboard manual also confirms Unbuffered.

Presumably the RDIMM could be returned?

You confirm?

@Pharmi you need to cancel that order and get yourself some UDIMM instead.

 

[Yorick]

You confirm?
@Pharmi you need to cancel that order and get yourself some UDIMM instead.

Yeah. https://www.supermicro.com/support/...1&prid=84940&type=DDR4 1.2V&ecc=1&reg=0&fbd=0 lists five modules, all UDIMM. The SuperMicro page for the board itself says it supports UDIMM, the Motherboard manual says "supports UDIMM", and Intel's memory validation page only mentions UDIMM for Kaby Lake Xeon (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/platform-memory/platform-memory.html). For the Pentium, ECC is not on that validation page, but it does support ECC: Completely reasonable to expect that to be UDIMM as well, it won't do more than the Xeon does.

Let's call that conclusive.

 

[Pharmi]

Replaced the order with

Kingston
KSM24ED8/16ME
16GB 2Rx8 2G x 72-Bit PC4-2400
CL17 288-Pin DIMM


Thanks for your feedback :)