HP vs Supermicro

[TheDubiousDubber]

I currently have a home NAS (specs below), but I'm looking to build a second one. I've been looking at building a slightly newer box using a Supermicro X9 or possibly a X10 board and the necessary hardware. However, I have access to a relatively cheap DL380 G6 and am wondering what the tradeoffs are of going one route or the other in regards to the build. I know most people go with the X9/X10 route as it is much simpler for home use, but given how cheap I can get the HP box for I'm curious as to what I might have to gain or lose by doing so. Thanks.

 

[Darren Myers]

Here's the issue, and the battle i am fighting now with an HP....the HP i have has a built in expander, ok great, should be easy;right? Wrong oh very wrong of me....the backplane will not work with ANY SAS controller other then HP's which i am learning the hard way. Now the DL380 G6's use 2.5 inch drives, and the backplane has 2 SAS connections for its 8 hdds, so in theory it should be perfectly fine to use a M1015 or 9211o-i8. Now i cant be sure if youll run into any hardware issues, or funny things that occur. But you in theory should be perfectly fine with a HP so long as that raid card is changed out, maybe another member can weigh in who knows more about HP + FreeNAS

 

[mattbbpl]

To put Darren's message into a point: The problem with a pre-built system not officially stated to be compatible with FreeBSD is that there are a lot of little things that you just won't know until you give it a try (or invest in some heavy research). You can check all the high points - supported processor, ECC RAM, etc. But then you get into the weeds like backplanes, NICs, and even onboard SATA controllers.

You have the specific model, so I would start by looking up supported operating systems for the machine. Then, if FreeBSD isn't officially supported, you can start looking into the very fine details of the system if that suits you.

 

[sfcredfox]

I've been using an HP DL 380 G5 for about two years with no issues. I can't speak to using the built in back plane and controller though. I use 3G and old SAS 140GB 10K drives, so all I can tell you is the through put on those old drives is terrible (like two digitals per second terrible). On the other hand, I have an enclosure that is full of 20 of them, so the system still does 'OK' hosting some VMs.

You will definitely need to change out the HP RAID controller in there for the M1015. The G5 uses 8484 connectors I think, not sure about the G6.

I had no issues with memory other than you can't add much without spending a metric F-ton of money (again G5 uses older memory, not sure about G6).

People around here love intel NICs (gigabit) and cheliso or something like that for 10G. I only use the two built-in NICs for SMF/CIFS and management. I added some Intel Pro 1000 PT's for iSCSI.

Over all, it's been incredible stable on that hardware, but SuperMicro is more well used here, so you'll get more people knowing about it. There's only a few of us that use HP servers that I know of.