Ideal Mini ITX FreeNAS Serve?

[Stanri010]

It appears that this is the most ideal mini ITX motherboard on the market.

ASRock E3C224D4I-14S Extended mini ITX

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157486


It's got 4 Ram slots for up to 32GB of ram and 1 8x PCIe for a HBA card. It's even got two internal SAS headers powered by a LSI SAS 2308 that can be flashed to IT mode. It's also got dual intel Nics. I would have liked for the motherboard to have an onboard HDMI port or a DVI port but I can probably buy a VGA > whatever converter and just live with it while I install the software.

Is there any downsides to this mini ITX motherboard or are there better ones for FreeNAS?

 

[gpsguy]

There was some discussion of it in this thread about a month ago. The kicker is that it's an extended mini-ITX form factor.

 

[Stanri010]

I saw that its extended but for the case that I've got, I think it's going to be actually ideal for the extended mITX. The Caselabs Mercury S3 is a mini-ITX form factor that has space for 3 PCI slots. It could fit a micro ATX board if you really wanted to but then that board would interfere with the space in the front for hard drive bays. By only going extra wide and not deep looks to be the ideal board for this case.

That said, the case can only hold 12 hard drives so the 3 SAS ports on the motherboard is actually enough for those needs.

 

[Stanri010]

Oh my, it's even got a vertical internal USB header. I think that does it for me. I'm gonna pull the trigger on this one. Hopefully, flashing the LSI card into IT mode wont prove to be too much of a pain. ;)

 

[djlax152]

Hi guys was curious if anyone has actually tried this motherboard. I'm about to pull the trigger and I'm really considering this board

 

[Stanri010]

This motherboard is great. There's nothing wrong with it as long as the dimensions fit into the case. It fit perfectly into my Mercury S3 case and it took all 32GB of my Kingston 1600 Ram. A couple things to consider if you're going with this motherboard.

There's a couple things to consider.

1. Natively, it has three SAS connectors. The first one closest to the aluminum silver hatsink is just a HBA while the lower one and the 90 degree one is a pair of SAS connectors on built in LSI controller on the motheboard. I flashed the onboard LSI controller into a host bust adapter but I also had a LSI 9211-8i (Flashed into Host Bust Adapter mode) ready to go so I just decided to use it instead of the onboard connections. Regardless, with its 32gb ram cap, you wont really have the ability to install more than 32TB of hard drives into this system because of ram limitations. I went for a case that would just be able to fit 6x4GB with no intentions on expansion. While the motherboard can take up more hard drives, the case and 32GB ram limitation wont allow. I don't know if this motherboard will take 16gb ram chips. The motherboard specs only say 8gb sticks but doesn't say it wont either. I think it's more of a CPU support issue?

2. As a mini itx motherboard, it's the only one on the market that can properly give you 4 sticks of ram while still fit a small form factor. If you want to be able to expand, to more than 32gb of ram, you will need to use a X79 based system and the smallest types of motherboard with ECC support is a micro ATX form factor.



You can find the build here:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1483750/mercury-s3-extended-itx-freenas-server-build

 

[madik]

Its pretty cool mobo. I would definitelly consider it for a build with more than a 6 drives. It should fit into pretty much all mini-ITX cases that supporting 2- slots graphics cards. Only problem is that mini-ITX cases that can hold more than 6 drives are quite rare and often expensive and is difficult to pick the right one.

So my conclusion is that for a build with more than 6 drives its probably better to go with a micro-ATX board because you have much more options with a case pick.

 

[Stanri010]

The 6 drive limit isn't the issue. The way I have the motherboard configured right now, it has 5x SAS ports that can accept up to 20 hard drives. The issue is the 32GB ram limit imposed by the E3 Xeons. My case can hold up to 12 drives but again, because I'm using 4TB drives, I'm already sitting at 6x 4TB = 24TB. If I were to expand to 12 drives, I'd be easily over what my ram can handle. In fact, even at 24TB my 32GB of ram is always maxed out as it should be.

If you're looking at more than 6 drives, depending on the size of them, you will probably need a LGA2011 motherboard that can support 64GB of ram.

 

[Stanri010]

Ironically, a hand full of Atom processor mini ITX motherboards seem to support up to 64 GB of ECC ram

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...86&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20

 

[SmallGuy]

Nice pictures, beautiful built,... And horrible carpet!
Something off topic, but I can't retain me to say that the carpet isn't a good place to build a NAS, or more generally to assemble electrostatic sensitive devices like electronic parts.
More and more users are agree with the importance of ECC RAM, but don't take any care handling properly electronic components, for me this is pure waste.
No offense to have, just for thought. ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

Ironically, a hand full of Atom processor mini ITX motherboards seem to support up to 64 GB of ECC ram

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007629 600008639 600016286&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20

Intel processors only support 16GB UDIMMs starting with the Avoton Atoms. Anything older, including the Haswell Refresh and Devil's Canyon, is limited by a bug (optimization? design choice?) in Intel's memory controller to 8GB UDIMMs.