Hardware questions - types of ECC RAMs

[peanutsbeagle]

Hi,
Firstly, many thanks to the pros who will be reading these silly questions from a noob and helping me to resolve my questions. Really, I'm in no way computer literate, but I want to learn something out of building a home NAS machine as a pastime.

I've sort of tried out FreeNAS 9.2 and tried to get familiar with it with some recycled hardware which I know is utterly insane to use them. So, I've been trying to sort out some NAS hardware. I've been looking at the supermicro motherboards and ECC rams and is stuck with some questions. Couldn't comprehend much from the vast internet information.

Hardware I am looking at:
Supermicro MBD-X9SCL-F
(http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon/c202_c204/x9scl-f.cfm)
or
Supermicro MBD-X10SLQ-B
(http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/core/q87/x10slq.cfm)

Samsung M391B1G73BH0-CK0 8GB RAM

I noticed supermicro boards are highly recommended by people using NAS and I picked this borderline low-entry board because really I don't want to go way deep into my pockets for a NAS to store my DVDs and CDs which I have an original copy. It's not going to be a machine on 24/7, at most maybe 2 devices may be accessing it for data at the same time for different files. On the whole, I just wished to have a personal NAS so I can remotely access and choose my videos when I'm bored. The spec says the board supports ECC RAM. However, I found out with ECC, there are Registered ECC, unbuffered ECC, ...
so ... I heard from websites that Registered ECC are the way to go. But then I noticed the Backblaze storage guys used this board too
(http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/)
and it is still a supermicro motherboard.

1) What is the difference between Registered ECC and unbuffered ECC?
2) would you recommend this board for an entry FREENAS build?
3) this motherboard, MBD-X9SCL-F or MBD-X10SLQ-B , it seems to only support unbuffered ECC. Am I right?

Again many thanks to everyone who tolerates me in asking these noob questions.

 

[enemy85]

1) http://www.servethehome.com/unbuffered-registered-ecc-memory-difference-ecc-udimms-rdimms/
2) yes
3) UDIMMs stands for Unbuffered

 

[jgreco]

This was meant for you:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/so-you-want-some-hardware-suggestions.12276

Really, read it all, follow any links for anything that isn't completely familiar to you as well. It is intended as a resource for you to refer to while learning about the things that make FreeNAS work well.

The X9SCL is a well-liked, stable board. It is perhaps an "entry level" board in that it is the smallest thing that most of us would recommend, but it is also the largest thing I'd expect a home user to need unless perhaps they had more than 100TB or something ridiculously large. It lacks USB3 and it lacks that one PCIe slot, only two strikes against it I can think of.

The X10SLQ is a bad choice because it is some odd Supermicro venture into desktop land. They are a server manufacturer and probably just don't belong trying to do that. There are some other good X10 boards that should be viable options, and substantial discussion of any problems suffered by early adopters.

 

[Yatti420]

The X9 is nice.. Only issue I've noticed so far is that watchdog isnt working yet with it.. It uses unbuffered (non-registered) ECC..

 

[peanutsbeagle]

Many thanks and my humble thanks to Jgreco. Tremendous help with the Kingston Ram choice page too. :):)
1) Regarding the X10s. Did one of the objection to it happens to be due to the use of Intel Socket 1150 which the Haswell CPUs seems to have some problems when they first came out or was it some other reasons? [survive] seems to have mentioned FN9.1 and above supports them and it can be a newer choice. What would your objections be?

2) I still can't grasp about the ECC unbuffered / registered issue. http://www.servethehome.com/unbuffered-registered-ecc-memory-difference-ecc-udimms-rdimms/ was exactly the article i read before I opened up this trend ;) and it mentions that registered ECC is on trend. Yet, the supermicro board is not ECC registered (right?). So I wonder how come it is suitable? If suitable, so is ECC unbuffered ram like the Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/16G (http://www.kingston.com/us/memory/s...ier_Memory_for_Supermicro_X9SCL-F_Motherboard) already sufficient? (I read 1333 and 1600 doesn't make much difference for the boderline home nas user). The kit of 2 of 8GB ram seems to work well since my max is 32GB only anyway.
I understand the necessary need for ECC. In any ways, ultimate gaming boards just comes to as costly anyways so why not get a "server" rated board? Therefore, I didn't want to screw on this one after going all the way with ECC board and ECC CPU and wants to confirm why unbuffered ECC seems fine. Thanks ahead for the explanations.

3) Regarding the choice of CPU (say if I go forward with the X9SCL boards) , thanks for your advice on the Intel G2020. I admit it is reasonably priced. However, if I am determined to go even lower price and save a few bucks on electricity with a 35W Celeron (I've been hearing so many people say any ECC CPU would been fine for FreeNas system, although they may not be trust-worthy. [cyberjock] is extremely against low powered CPUs); would you object or have opinions towards the choice of Intel Celeron G1620T for a CPU? Is it far too low in power and defeats HD streaming performance / CIFS performance? It's just a waste of effort since Intel chips when idle goes down to low power too right?

4) It doesn't seems you are in favour of SSD (I might get it wrong) but what if eventually I put up a SSD not for boot but for cache since eventually I may just max out on 32GB of RAM? I guess only than SSD would be useful, right?

5) The lack of PCIe seems to be a problem and an extra IBM M1015 does seem to add to the motherboard cost significantly. The RAID function on the card is also just useless for my zfs system. So, I was wondering about this leap of faith with ASROCK. The Q87WS-DL and C266WS has 6+2 SATA ports and 2+4+2 SATA ports respectively and they seems to run on Intel chipsets rather than the Realtek ones. They have alot more SATA and PCIe expansions. According to them, they are server graded. They are LGA1150 boards though. Would you go screaming at these motherboard choices? I understand people might start screaming at the Taiwanese motherboards.
(http://www.asrock.com/server/overview.asp?Model=Q87WS-DL) Q87WS-DL
(http://www.asrock.com/server/overview.asp?Model=C226 WS) C266WS

6) I heard you mentioned the AVoton processors lately. But isn't it a low powered Atom processor? It gained my interest because I found the ASROCK C2750D4I motherboard (also ECC unbuffered) with 12 Sata (3+2 sata) (enough sata ports for me), 64GB RAM possible (should be descent enough for me too) and embedded Avoton CPU.

Of course, very very very much appreciated for the efforts in maintaining these forums and answering all these massive trends of tedious noobie questions! ;)

 

[cyberjock]

Whoa.. your questions are going far beyond the scope of this thread. Please keep your questions to 1 per thread topic.

 

[enemy85]

2) I still can't grasp about the ECC unbuffered / registered issue. http://www.servethehome.com/unbuffered-registered-ecc-memory-difference-ecc-udimms-rdimms/ was exactly the article i read before I opened up this trend ;) and it mentions that registered ECC is on trend. Yet, the supermicro board is not ECC registered (right?). So I wonder how come it is suitable? If suitable, so is ECC unbuffered ram like the Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/16G (http://www.kingston.com/us/memory/s...ier_Memory_for_Supermicro_X9SCL-F_Motherboard) already sufficient? (I read 1333 and 1600 doesn't make much difference for the boderline home nas user). The kit of 2 of 8GB ram seems to work well since my max is 32GB only anyway.
I understand the necessary need for ECC. In any ways, ultimate gaming boards just comes to as costly anyways so why not get a "server" rated board? Therefore, I didn't want to screw on this one after going all the way with ECC board and ECC CPU and wants to confirm why unbuffered ECC seems fine. Thanks ahead for the explanations.

From the article:
"The basic difference is that memory commands in unbuffered memory configurations go directly from the controller to the memory module, while in registered memory configurations the commands are sent first to the memory banks’ registers prior to being sent to the modules. [...]This feature is very important in server scenarios because, for example, an Intel 3400 series platform, such as the Supermicro X8SI6-F or Intel S3420GPLC supports 16GB unbuffered ECC and 32GB registered ECC memory. Likewise, in dual processor systems, such as the E5600 series based Supermicro X8DTH-6F recently reviewed on ServeTheHome, the delta is much greater with up to 48GB of unregistered ECC or 192GB of registered ECC memory. For virtualization environments where memory, and memory bandwidth is key to achieving high consolidation and density metrics, Registered ECC memory is generally the way to go. If one purchases a server with unregistered ECC DIMMs, then requires additional capacity, then the upgrade operation will require a pull and replace all UDIMM modules making it an expensive proposition."

This means for what I understood, that with Registered ECC the board is able to support more RAM than with Unbuffered, but this is kind of useless in a home enviroment...and much more expensive too!
hope to have cleared things to you.

p.s. the X9S, as said, works with Unbuffered and 1333 is ok