Fractal Define R5 Motherboard Options

[csmall]

I've begun my first freenas build and decided to buy the Fractal R5 case.

It supports ATX, Mini ATX and Micro ATX.

I want to purchase a supermicro motherboard with enough onboard SATA ports to support all the drives that this case can hold. I believe 8 (possibly a couple more with adapters etc) but at least 8.

Is it reasonable to use a full ATX motherboard in this case or will I have issues fitting everything?

Full ATX boards seem to be slightly cheaper and offer 10 sata ports.

At the end of the day I'm just trying to find supermicro board that has at least 8 sata ports at a decent price. The box will be used for data, media/plex and vm's.

 

[Chris Moore]

Are you asking for some sort of suggestion because it sounds like you already made your mind up.

 

[csmall]

Are you asking for some sort of suggestion because it sounds like you already made your mind up.

I made my mind up on the brand of board and that I need 8-10 sata ports but I am asking about if a full ATX board would have issues in this case with the other components and fully populated with disks etc..

Of course any personal opinions regarding supermicro boards that meet the sata requirements would be welcome :). I looked at asrock boards but none seem to support over 64GB of ram and from what I understand freenas likes 1GB per TB of disk so if I populated this thing at full capacity the asrock boards wouldn't support enough ram. Unless I'm way off here.

 

[Ericloewe]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/so-you’ve-decided-to-buy-a-supermicro-x11-board.13/

I'll point out that the motherboards you're probably looking at are workstation boards, which makes them less-than-ideal for a server.

 

[csmall]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/so-you’ve-decided-to-buy-a-supermicro-x11-board.13/

I'll point out that the motherboards you're probably looking at are workstation boards, which makes them less-than-ideal for a server.

This PDF is a huge help.

 

[Chris Moore]

So, you say 8 drives, maybe 10, but you don't say anything about drive size or total capacity required. Can you give some idea what you intend to do with the system besides just storage? Do you want to run Plex or any virtual machines?
The more information you give about what it is you are thinking, the better advice can be provided.
For example, if you are only hitting the system with one or two clients, you don't have to maintain that 1GB to 1TB relationship on RAM. You need to have a certain minimum amount, but above a certain amount of memory, it isn't really cost effective in a low volume, home use, scenario.
I would also suggest that you go with an add-in SAS HBA instead of concerning yourself with what is built into the board. I just don't like integrated hardware because it is often less flexible in implementation than being able to buy what you want / need.
Also, if you have not bought your hard drives yet (speaking of which, what capacity are you thinking of getting) but I would suggest the Seagate 4 TB drives. They are the best value right now, cost per TB.

 

[Chris Moore]

I've begun my first freenas build and decided to buy the Fractal R5 case.

It supports ATX, Mini ATX and Micro ATX.

If you were not dead-set on that Fractal case, I would suggest something like this: Supermicro 24 bay with SAS2 expander.
This would allow you to connect up to 24 drives in hot swap bays and have redundant power supplied included. Just take out that system board (or use it) and connect the expander backplane to a supported HBA and you are almost set.

 

[csmall]

So, you say 8 drives, maybe 10, but you don't say anything about drive size or total capacity required. Can you give some idea what you intend to do with the system besides just storage? Do you want to run Plex or any virtual machines?
The more information you give about what it is you are thinking, the better advice can be provided.
For example, if you are only hitting the system with one or two clients, you don't have to maintain that 1GB to 1TB relationship on RAM. You need to have a certain minimum amount, but above a certain amount of memory, it isn't really cost effective in a low volume, home use, scenario.
I would also suggest that you go with an add-in SAS HBA instead of concerning yourself with what is built into the board. I just don't like integrated hardware because it is often less flexible in implementation than being able to buy what you want / need.
Also, if you have not bought your hard drives yet (speaking of which, what capacity are you thinking of getting) but I would suggest the Seagate 4 TB drives. They are the best value right now, cost per TB.

It will be used for Data storage, plex/media, and virtual machine storage but I would like to actually run a couple light vm's on the box for something like nextcloud / plex.

I agree with the seagate suggestion. The WD reds are pretty pricey. I don't know what capacity drives I will purchase yet. I will not be fully populating it at first due to cost but will likely buy 4 disks (4TB minimum) to start as that would use half the bays.

I'd like to have the board support enough ram if the case was populated with 8 or 10TB disks down the road but I didn't know about the load playing into the 1GB per TB rule. It will host a decent sized home lab of virtual machines (but not a ton of disk activity) in addition to media streaming to a max of 4 clients at a time. Data access (documents and photos) will be random and minimal number of clients at any given time. I would like to use nextcloud with mobile devices.

I chose the fractal because I am trying to get away from large rack mounted equipment at home. I currently have freenas running on a large older rack mount supermicro server and I would much prefer a smaller profile that is quieter and less power hungry.

I guess I don't want to cheap out on the board regardless of immediate requirements because I will likely take advantage of more down the road. Buy once, cry once.

 

[Stux]

X11 LGA1151 boards are limited to 4 cores and 64MB. They come in 6 or 8 SATA ports, or with a built-in SAS controller an additional 8 SATA/SAS ports

X10 LGA2011-3 boards are effectively unlimited.

X10-SRL-F is probably the best choice for future expandsbility. It supports up to 5 PCIe 8x slots. 256GB using 32GB RDIMMs and you can use up to a 22 core processor. But I would recommend the E5-1650v4, high speed hexacore.

 

[Chris Moore]

I'd like to have the board support enough ram if the case was populated with 8 or 10TB disks down the road but I didn't know about the load playing into the 1GB per TB rule. It will host a decent sized home lab of virtual machines (but not a ton of disk activity)

If you are going to use it as an iSCSI target for VMs that are running on another system, you will want to have a little different hardware configuration as L2ARC and SLOG might actually be useful for you.

In addition to that, for VMs, you want high IOPS which is best accomplished with a larger number of vdevs instead of having a single vdev of 4 drives, you might want to start with 2 vdevs of 4 drives each. More vdevs gives more IOPS and more IOPS gives more responsive VMs.

The use you will put the system to has a lot of influence on how you need to build the system. The chassis I linked to has 80+ Gold power supplies and it shouldn't be horribly noisy, but you have to make the decision on how you want to run things. I don't have it completed yet, still buying parts, but I am building a 24 bay system myself to get the higher data rate for running VMs.

 

[csmall]

If you are going to use it as an iSCSI target for VMs that are running on another system, you will want to have a little different hardware configuration as L2ARC and SLOG might actually be useful for you.

In addition to that, for VMs, you want high IOPS which is best accomplished with a larger number of vdevs instead of having a single vdev of 4 drives, you might want to start with 2 vdevs of 4 drives each. More vdevs gives more IOPS and more IOPS gives more responsive VMs.

The use you will put the system to has a lot of influence on how you need to build the system. The chassis I linked to has 80+ Gold power supplies and it shouldn't be horribly noisy, but you have to make the decision on how you want to run things. I don't have it completed yet, still buying parts, but I am building a 24 bay system myself to get the higher data rate for running VMs.

Yes I will likely use iscsi for vm's.

These drives are attractive from a price perspective. Any opinion on these? Regardless or refurb or new.

I could potentially fully populate the box with these financially speaking.

http://m.ebay.com/itm/152248251438?_mwBanner=1

 

[csmall]

X11 LGA1151 boards are limited to 4 cores and 64MB. They come in 6, 8 or 14 Sata(sas) ports

X10 LGA2011-3 boards are effectively unlimited.

X10-SRL-F is probably the best choice for future expandsbility. It supports up to 5 PCIe 8x slots. 256GB using 32GB RDIMMs and you can use up to a 22 core processor. But I would recommend the E5-1650v4, high speed hexacore.

I will check these out, thanks!

 

[danb35]

Any opinion on these?

I didn't have a good experience with my purchase from goharddrive, but those were "white label" drives. Five out of the six failed within about a year.

 

[Chris Moore]

Yes I will likely use iscsi for vm's.

These drives are attractive from a price perspective. Any opinion on these? Regardless or refurb or new.

I could potentially fully populate the box with these financially speaking.

http://m.ebay.com/itm/152248251438?_mwBanner=1

I bought a batch of 2TB HGST drives from eBay a few years ago and about half of them came up with bad sectors within a year of use and all of them ran fairly hot, so you would want to make sure you have good airflow to keep the temperature under control. I thought I had enough airflow, but my temps were still in the 45c range. I switched to the Seagate Desktop drives and the temps dropped by ten degrees on average.
The system had six WD Enterprise drives and six HGST drives. Here is a photo.

 

[csmall]

X11 LGA1151 boards are limited to 4 cores and 64MB. They come in 6, 8 or 14 Sata(sas) ports

X10 LGA2011-3 boards are effectively unlimited.

X10-SRL-F is probably the best choice for future expandsbility. It supports up to 5 PCIe 8x slots. 256GB using 32GB RDIMMs and you can use up to a 22 core processor. But I would recommend the E5-1650v4, high speed hexacore.

I see that the X10-SRL-F on amazon is frequently purchased with a Xeon E5-2620 v4. It is 8 cores and I think over 200 dollars cheaper than the E5-1650v4.

Is there something better about the 1650 to justify that cost bump?

 

[danb35]

It is 8 cores and I think over 200 dollars cheaper than the E5-1650v4.

The price difference is explained by 2.1 GHz vs. 3.6 GHz.

 

[Stux]

And the 1650 will turbo up to 4ghz as well.

 

[Stux]

You might want to take a look at my 24 bay X10 with E5-1650v4 build:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...24-supermicro-x10-sri-f-xeon-e5-1650v4.46262/

 

[Chris Moore]

I see that the X10-SRL-F on amazon is frequently purchased with a Xeon E5-2620 v4. It is 8 cores and I think over 200 dollars cheaper than the E5-1650v4.

Is there something better about the 1650 to justify that cost bump?

Speed, glorious speed. Fast is better than core count. It might be nice to have a big core count if you had a massive number of simultaneous processes, but that just isn't the likely scenario with FreeNAS. Faster cores are better.

 

[csmall]

X11 LGA1151 boards are limited to 4 cores and 64MB. They come in 6 or 8 SATA ports, or with a built-in SAS controller an additional 8 SATA/SAS ports

X10 LGA2011-3 boards are effectively unlimited.

X10-SRL-F is probably the best choice for future expandsbility. It supports up to 5 PCIe 8x slots. 256GB using 32GB RDIMMs and you can use up to a 22 core processor. But I would recommend the E5-1650v4, high speed hexacore.

Do you think the E5-1650 v3 would be a decent alternative to the v4? I think they are easier to find for less money than the v4. I'm trying to save where I can and nothing jumps out at me when comparing the v3 and v4 specs.