New mobo, or CPU & mobo

[willnx]

I picked up a used 2U supermicro server for a great price, and thought it would make a great base for a home FreeNAS server. Here's the basic guts:

X8DTN+
2x Xeon 5520
12x 2GB ECC PC3-10600R Ram

I bought a norco 20bay 4U RPC-4020 to stuff the gear from that supermicro server into, but I derped up, and misread the size of the X8DTN+ (Enhanced Extended ATX, 4U box only supports up to Extended ATX).

Now I'm at a bit of a cross road as the mobo doesn't fit into the 4U chassis;

Should I buy just a new mobo for the 2x 1366 Nehalem procs
or
Get a new CPU and Mobo

Thanks for your opinion.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, 2x 15366 Xeons are a bit of an overkill for FreeNAS unless you intend to run jails that have serious CPU needs or you want all those RAM slots.

 

[willnx]

Even for larger arrays?

I'm thinking of making a volume of 3x raidz2 aggrogates from 6-3TB HDDs (54TB of space before those that damn GiB vs GB reduction... grumble...) . Would a 4 core 2.5 GHz intel choke on that? If not, then I'll totally re-purpose this 2U box for something more fun.

 

[cyberjock]

Sorry, that's not very big. My server is almost that big and I have an E3-1230v2. ;)

Size of the pool matters for RAM.. and more CPUs(and more expensive E5s) support more RAM. Once you start talking CPUs that are Xeons in the last 3-5 years their processing power isn't as big of a factor as RAM for larger and larger servers.

Now, with 54TB of disk space, you may want more than 32GB of RAM, but that doesn't mean you need a $1000 processor(or even multiple processors).

For me, even during scrubs of both of my pools my CPU usage doesn't even hit 30%. :P

 

[joelmusicman]

(54TB of space before those that damn GiB vs GB reduction... grumble...)

Just to nitpick, you're not losing any space, it's just a different way of measuring it... 1024 vs 1000 and all that. If you drop from 2.54cm to 1 inch, it's exactly the same.


I'll echo what CJ said... If your budget allows I'd build a different box for NAS and put ESXi on the one you're talking about now. But it's really easy to spend other people's money! :)

 

[willnx]

I know I'm not losing space on disk, and that it's an accounting difference - by reduction I really meant human vs computer measure.


Thanks for the input everyone. I'm going to figure out something fun for the 2 proc box, and get something more sensible for FreeNAS.