Hello from a sunny South Africa

[Tinus Viljoen]

Hi,

Thank you for adding me to the forum!

I'm running a small Property Rental business from home and mainly use OSX with the children (Pregrads) using Windows. I have a website I do testing for here at home. The family's main photo library currently resides on my machine but with the recent OSX change to Photos we have difficulty in sharing them across the different OSes.

Enter FreeNAS and I have experimented on an old pc (Intel Pentium G630 @ 2.70GHz with 8Gb RAM). It is a very stable platform but lacks oomph for streaming to my Roku and file transfers are very slow.

Long story short, I'm planning to build a new FreeNAS server which should act as our main Photo/Media library as well as Plex server.

Problem here in South Africa is getting affordable SuperMicro and AsRock Server Motherboards.

The cheapest SuperMicro Motherboard I can get is the X11SSL-F for +-$280 but can get a comparable Intel "Silver Pass" S1200SP - DBS1200SPS for $200.

Is there a good reason not to use the Intel MB?

As this is the most important decision of the build I've anguished over it for days now and would really appreciate your opinion/suggestions.

Thank you for having me.

Regards,

 

[Spearfoot]

Welcome to the forums! I've looked at the Intel board's specs, and it seems to me to be quite well suited for use as a FreeNAS server.

But unless you're financially constrained (and I understand that situation!) I would select the Supermicro. It's comparable in most ways to the Intel board, but it supports IPMI, while the Intel doesn't.

IPMI, which you may not know about, lets you control the server remotely, just as though you are sitting in front of it. This allows you to reboot it, watch the screen as it powers up, change BIOS settings, install software, etc., from across the room or across the planet. Many of us find IPMI indispensable.

Good luck!