I'm planning a new home server, running SCALE, and am finding myself very confused about the motherboard possibilities.
This box will be replacing an existing TrueNAS Core server, and will be used mainly for typical media storage for a small household, with Plex, a number of jails (to be converted to SCALE apps), and a few VMs. I currently have six spinners (for data) and two SSDs (for jails/VMs), which use all the SATA channels on my existing mobo (the boot drives are USB sticks, but I'll be moving away from this). I'm hoping to put this in a Micro-ATX case, and I'd like the mobo to support 10g networking (which I do not have set up in my home, yet). It won't in general require much CPU power, but for Plex transcoding needs (after discussing it on the Plex forums), I'd like to get something with a fairly recent iGPU, which would obviate the need for a separate GPU. Somewhat arbitrarily, I have chosen the Intel i5-13400 CPU (Raptor Lake), which is overkill, but it's got the Intel UHD Graphics 730 iGPU (which seems to be widely liked) and low base power.
I've never been able to understand SuperMicro motherboards; I can't figure out what they make in an mATX that would support this chip. Everything they list shows compatibility for several-generation-old versions, not Raptor Lake, and for various Xeon chips, which I haven't been looking at. I do see that ASRock Rack has the W680D4U-2L2T/G5, which meets all of the requirements for this (and more; there are 2 10g _and_ 2 1g network ports). What should I be looking at?
Also (and this may be a separate question that I should split out): I'm concerned about the number-of-drives issue. I'd originally hoped to use 2 NVMe drives in a mirror for the VM/app pool, but to do this on the mobo would require _three_ M2 slots (one for the boot drive), which doesn't appear to be possible. If it's not on the mobo, then what? I literally don't know how I'd mount such drives in the case. And I assume I'd use an NVMe-to-SATA adaptor of some kind, but then this setup would again use all eight SATA channels on the (ASRock, at least) mobo, leaving me no room for growth or for other possible setups.
Thanks for all suggestions/insight.
This box will be replacing an existing TrueNAS Core server, and will be used mainly for typical media storage for a small household, with Plex, a number of jails (to be converted to SCALE apps), and a few VMs. I currently have six spinners (for data) and two SSDs (for jails/VMs), which use all the SATA channels on my existing mobo (the boot drives are USB sticks, but I'll be moving away from this). I'm hoping to put this in a Micro-ATX case, and I'd like the mobo to support 10g networking (which I do not have set up in my home, yet). It won't in general require much CPU power, but for Plex transcoding needs (after discussing it on the Plex forums), I'd like to get something with a fairly recent iGPU, which would obviate the need for a separate GPU. Somewhat arbitrarily, I have chosen the Intel i5-13400 CPU (Raptor Lake), which is overkill, but it's got the Intel UHD Graphics 730 iGPU (which seems to be widely liked) and low base power.
I've never been able to understand SuperMicro motherboards; I can't figure out what they make in an mATX that would support this chip. Everything they list shows compatibility for several-generation-old versions, not Raptor Lake, and for various Xeon chips, which I haven't been looking at. I do see that ASRock Rack has the W680D4U-2L2T/G5, which meets all of the requirements for this (and more; there are 2 10g _and_ 2 1g network ports). What should I be looking at?
Also (and this may be a separate question that I should split out): I'm concerned about the number-of-drives issue. I'd originally hoped to use 2 NVMe drives in a mirror for the VM/app pool, but to do this on the mobo would require _three_ M2 slots (one for the boot drive), which doesn't appear to be possible. If it's not on the mobo, then what? I literally don't know how I'd mount such drives in the case. And I assume I'd use an NVMe-to-SATA adaptor of some kind, but then this setup would again use all eight SATA channels on the (ASRock, at least) mobo, leaving me no room for growth or for other possible setups.
Thanks for all suggestions/insight.