Mini ITX, ECC RAM, 6 SATA, low TDP?

[jaeti01]

Hello,
I am Till & new to the forum and am currently doing some research to build a new NAS.
I am looking for a proper Mini ITX mainboard with low power consumption, ECC RAM support and at least 5(better 6) SATA ports.
I only found these:

Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F

• Pretty old, but still sold
• Only 4 onboard SATA boards? -> Needs extension card
• Pretty expensive

Asrock rack C3558D4I-4L

• Cheaper than the Supermicro
• 5 SATA ports
• Doesn't seem to be sold anymore

Are there any more to recommend?
I tend to go with the Supermicro, but want to make sure I didn't miss any.

Thanks a lot! Till

 

[jaeti01]

Hello,
I am Till & new to the forum and am currently doing some research to build a new NAS.
I am looking for a proper Mini ITX mainboard with low power consumption, ECC RAM support and at least 5(better 6) SATA ports.
I only found these:

Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F

• Pretty old, but still sold
• Only 4 onboard SATA boards? -> Needs extension card
• Pretty expensive

Asrock rack C3558D4I-4L

• Cheaper than the Supermicro
• 5 SATA ports
• Doesn't seem to be sold anymore

Are there any more to recommend?
I tend to go with the Supermicro, but want to make sure I didn't miss any.

Thanks a lot! Till

Correcting myself:
I just learned that the Supermicro board has an additional mini SAS HD header to connect another 4 drives. I overlooked that initially.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I just learned that the Supermicro board has an additional mini SAS HD header to connect another 4 drives. I overlooked that initially.

And the 8 and 12 core variants come with a whopping 12 SATA ports. Plus an M.2 that can hold an NVMe SSD, plus a PCIe slot.

 

[the_jest]

For what it's worth, in an older build I'm running the ASRock Rack C236 WSI, which is mITX, supports ECC, and has 8 SATA ports, and it's been great. I don't know what the current offerings are; I'm planning a new build and I'm likely going for another Rack mobo, albeit this time in a mATX size, but be aware that some of them supply SATA ports via an Oculink port, which will require an Oculink-to-4x-SATA cable.

 

[Etorix]

Are there any more to recommend?

Pretty much all A2SDi models, except the -2C-, or Atom C3000 boards from other manufacturers.
And Xeon D-1500 boards: Even older than Atom C3000, but still sold; mini-ITX models (Supermicro X10SDV range) come with 6 SATA ports and a x16 PCIe slot. If you find a second hand opportunity…

Edit Looks like A2SDi boards are hitting the second-hand market:

Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F Mainboard SOC Intel Atom C3558 | eBay

Server motherboard in good condition. Up to 64GB Unbuffered ECC/Non-ECC DDR4-2133MHz; in 4 DIMM slots. 1 PCIe 3.0 up to x4 (in x4 slot) . Single Socket FCBGA1310 supported.

www.ebay.de

JUMP ON THIS!

Supermicro motherboard A2SDi-H-TP4F Intel Atom C3958, 128GB RAM | eBay

Entdecken Sie Supermicro motherboard A2SDi-H-TP4F Intel Atom C3958, 128GB RAM in der großen Auswahl bei eBay. Kostenlose Lieferung für viele Artikel!

www.ebay.de

(There's even someone on Tweakers.net selling an A2SDi-H-TP4F for 250,-E, though he'd prefer to sell his whole TrueNAS build, including 3*18 TB HDDs, for 1000,-E and you have to pick it up in Woerden.)

 

[jaeti01]

Thanks for all the feedback. I'll go with the Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F.b
I am struggling a bit finding the right memory (32GB modules, ECC). The manual says it should be 2133er but the memory compatibility list also shows faster modules like 2400er and 3200er. Does the board also support those faster modules and just operates them at a lower frequency then?

 

[Etorix]

Did you won the auction?
Anyway, using faster RDIMM is usually no issue—of course, RAM will only be as fast as the CPU allows.

 

[jaeti01]

Haha - unfortunately I did not. I didn't want to bid more than 50% of the new price. There is always some risk involved with used hardware.
On the RDIMM speed - that's what I thought as well, but I was chatting with the support of gekko-computer.de and he recommended against it. Hence my confusion.

 

[jaeti01]

While looking for boot devices, has anyone considered NVMe SSDs with power loss protection?
There are these from ATP: SSD with PLP
Wondering if it's worth it.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Why would you want that? For the boot pool the cheapest real (brand name) SSD that is not a complete rip-off or fake is good enough.

 

[Etorix]

My NASes boot from Optane M10 16 GB, so I have de facto PLP on boot drives, but that's purely accidental. These drives were selected on account of being available second hand for 9.99 E (and now less than that on eBay).

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

It certainly doesn't hurt and if you can get a used small Optane that makes a rather attractive boot device. But buying new enterprise gear like the devices linked for the boot pool is a waste of money.

 

[jaeti01]

Hmm - yes you are right, this probably doesn't make much sense. I better invest into a UPS

 

[jaeti01]

In terms of disks, my plan would be to have one SSD (eventually mirrored) and run a Seafile server on it.
Then have a mirror of two spinning disks as backup and archive drive (assuming that two large mirrored drives are a better choice than the same capacity with smaller drives in a Z1 array).
Any better suggestions?
Thank you!

 

[ChrisRJ]

In terms of disks, my plan would be to have one SSD (eventually mirrored) and run a Seafile server on it.

Just be aware that it needs to be a separate SSD from your boot device

 

[jaeti01]

Just be aware that it needs to be a separate SSD from your boot device

Yes, I am aware of that. Thanks for bringing that up.
I could actually use a USB device for booting like a "SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.2", which is designed for more writes than a typical USB drive.

 

[nabsltd]

I better invest into a UPS

PLP on an SSD serves a different purpose than a UPS.

If the power supply in the computer fails, or you trip over the power cord, no external UPS will make sure your data gets written to disk.

Secondly, an SSD with PLP can report back to the OS that the data has been written to disk even though it is still held in the RAM of the SSD. This means that small writes can return much more quickly, because the data will eventually be written, even if the SSD loses power.

 

[pallee]

Yes, I am aware of that. Thanks for bringing that up.
I could actually use a USB device for booting like a "SanDisk Extreme PRO USB 3.2", which is designed for more writes than a typical USB drive.

I have been running my X10SDV-8C-TLN4F for about 7+ years booting of a set of mirrored USB drives. I would advise against it. I have had 2 Sandisk USB drives fail on me and every time it is a hassle to get it back up and running. It sure is a cheap and simple way to get by with less SATA/m.2 ports, but USB-sticks are not built with endurance and data integrity in mind. Please don't make the same mistakes I made, use an SSD. Whatever you do IF you are to use USB-drives anyway use them as a mirror, and expect to loose 1 drive every couple of years! Today, the difference in price between a second hand brand name SSD and a pair of "good enough" USB-sticks is most certainly in favor of the SSD.

I have gotten tired of replacing broken USB-devices and am in the process migrating the boot environment to an SSD.

 

[jaeti01]

I have been running my X10SDV-8C-TLN4F for about 7+ years booting of a set of mirrored USB drives. I would advise against it. I have had 2 Sandisk USB drives fail on me and every time it is a hassle to get it back up and running. It sure is a cheap and simple way to get by with less SATA/m.2 ports, but USB-sticks are not built with endurance and data integrity in mind. Please don't make the same mistakes I made, use an SSD. Whatever you do IF you are to use USB-drives anyway use them as a mirror, and expect to loose 1 drive every couple of years! Today, the difference in price between a second hand brand name SSD and a pair of "good enough" USB-sticks is most certainly in favor of the SSD.

I have gotten tired of replacing broken USB-devices and am in the process migrating the boot environment to an SSD.

Thank you! That is invaluable feedback. I'll take it into consideration.
There are USB drives which are based on SSD technology like the above mentioned one however. I would expect them to have the same or similar endurance.

 

[jaeti01]

Meanwhile I have most of the hardware (except the case) running for testing at the moment. Nothing final yet.
I have added a very fast Samsung NVMe disk to the board with the assumption that it would be much faster than the SATA drives. The intention was to run a high I/O intensive virtual machine on it.
So out of curiosity, I have deployed scale on a USB connected SSD (I know - just a test install for now), and then ran:

dd if=/dev/random of=testfile bs=64M count=16

on
a) the NVMe disk
b) a mirror pool of two 16TB Seagate disks
c) the USB connected older SSD
All three mostly show the same write performance (152MB/s) which is on the lower end of SATA performance?!
Was my expectation wrong that the NVMe connected drive should perform much faster?
Thank you!