BUILD Hardware Recommendations For Low-Power 16 disk Build

[paylesspizzaman]

If anyone has a reason for me NOT to buy an x10sdv-4c-tln2f please speak up. Otherwise, I may order one in the next couple days. Also, on Supermicro's page for the x10sdv-4c-tln2f I can't find any drivers or manuals available for download.

 

[DaveFL]

My only concern would be 10gbe. Not sure if there are drivers for them or if you have hardware. I got the 8 core so it has 1gbe. I'm using esxi and it runs great.

 

[paylesspizzaman]

Does your 8 core only have 1Gbe or does it also have some 10Gbe ports? I was thinking if the drivers for the 10Gbe aren't around yet, I could get a $5 M2 to PCIe x4 adapter board to put a supported 1Gbe card in. That way I still have the PCIe x16 slot for an HBA card. Then one day down the road, when there are drivers, I will have an extra PCIe x4 slot for something else. Sound feasible?

 

[DaveFL]

Does your 8 core only have 1Gbe or does it also have some 10Gbe ports? I was thinking if the drivers for the 10Gbe aren't around yet, I could get a $5 M2 to PCIe x4 adapter board to put a supported 1Gbe card in. That way I still have the PCIe x16 slot for an HBA card. Then one day down the road, when there are drivers, I will have an extra PCIe x4 slot for something else. Sound feasible?

Has both. But I don't have the cheap board, I'm running the 8 core.

 

[paylesspizzaman]

Are you running FreeNAS on it? If so, I would think you would know if there are drivers for it.

 

[DaveFL]

Are you running FreeNAS on it? If so, I would think you would know if there are drivers for it.

ESXi and passing through my LSI card. ESXi does not support the 10GBe ports currently.

 

[Ericloewe]

Xeon-D should be well-supported (I think the 10GbE drivers are working in FreeBSD). Just keep in mind that it only takes half the memory of Xeon-E5 (even less, if you use E5-2xxx processors with LRDIMMs). If 128GB are enough for you, it should work well.

 

[miraculix]

I have a X10SDV-4C-TLN2F and love it despite the current state of onboard 10GE support.

I'm currently running it with 64GB RAM, six 4TB drives (one pool of two raidz1 vdevs) on the SoC's SATA ports, and a dual port 1GE Intel NIC. I haven't done any performance testing since this is not my desired end state, and I guess it's not an optimal vdev/pool setup, but performance seems great to me. Once FreeNAS supports the onboard X557 NIC, I plan to test with an LSI 2308, SLOG and L2ARC.

At some point I'd like to investigate a PLX riser and bifurcation (PCIe split out) to add a 2nd LSI controller. If you can wait another month or two there *may* be a 1540 or 1520 mATX board that can utilize the PCIe lanes more fully without resorting to all that.

Speaking of X557, has anyone heard any news on FreeNAS support? The only hints I could find...

https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/f...ions/e12c5d1ed6e67d05e92e7300d4b38cff76215ae7
https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/f...ions/e12c5d1ed6e67d05e92e7300d4b38cff76215ae7

 

[paylesspizzaman]

So 10Gbe is or is not supported currently on Xeon-D in FreeNAS?

 

[paylesspizzaman]

Does anybody with a Supermicro Xeon-D board know if the 10Gbe controller can be disabled in the BIOS?

 

[miraculix]

So 10Gbe is or is not supported currently on Xeon-D in FreeNAS?

Doesn't appear to be supported in FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201509160044

The X557 ports are the 4th and 3rd last entries in pciconf -lv output http://pastebin.com/QeJcrV1a

 

[miraculix]

Does anybody with a Supermicro Xeon-D board know if the 10Gbe controller can be disabled in the BIOS?

I was wondering about that myself at one point. Option ROM (PXE/iSCSI) can be disabled but not the ports themselves. This is on X10SDV-4C-TLN2F, but should apply to all 4 and 8 core X10SDV variants (same BIOS).

 

[Ericloewe]

Do they cause mayhem when not in use? If not, there's not much of a point in turning them off.

 

[paylesspizzaman]

Do they cause mayhem when not in use? If not, there's not much of a point in turning them off.

I was thinking it would save power if they can't be used with FreeNAS. Maybe not having anything plugged into the ports is just as good?

 

[Darren Myers]

I don't think it would save any kind of noticeable power. Long as it's unplugged I don't think it would cause issued and even if it were to be plugged in it just wouldn't function right or at all


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[miraculix]

I don't think it would save any kind of noticeable power. Long as it's unplugged I don't think it would cause issued and even if it were to be plugged in it just wouldn't function right or at all

For the record I'm not seeing any issues... they're simply enabled yet unrecognized.

In the coming weeks I'm hoping to free up an Intel X520-DA2 or X540-AT2 to use in the PCIe slot. Just something to go with until the onboard X557s are supported sometime in the future. I can try to do some performance testing if anyone is curious.

 

[paylesspizzaman]

miraculix, any luck on that plx riser and bifurcation?