Opinions wanted-Would YOU wait for Denverton?

[Ceetan]

I've been a planning a FreeNAS build for ages now.
(Details here)
I was about to purchase everything when I got wind of the coming of Denverton processors/motherboards. As far as I could tell, the marked target for Denverton is similar to avaton, in that it's a low power processor intended for things such as NAS devices. I 'm pondering wether to wait for Denverton before completeing my build, Because low power is a "nice to have. On th other hand, I can see several cons :

• The hard ware will be very new, and there fore untested.
• FreeBSD stability/driver might very well be questionable, where as Supermicro hardware is often tried and tested
• It would be nice to get going with in fairly soon.

It seems from the above; that I have answered much of my own question, but I am still keen to hear the opinions of those more experienced then me, so any input on the matter would be much appreciated.

 

[Stux]

I'd personally wait.

I am ;)

Well, I'm also looking at Xeon D. Add an HBA to a board with 10gbe, m.2 and lots of ram capacity and plenty of cores and you have a decent system.

I'm waiting because I want to build a mini itx system with 8 drives, PCIe ssd, 64GB of ram and 10gbe.

Can't be done right now I think, except maybe Xeon d.

 

[Ceetan]

I'd personally wait.

I am ;)

Well, I'm also looking at Xeon D. Add an HBA to a board with 10gbe, m.2 and lots of ram capacity and plenty of cores and you have a decent system.

I'm waiting because I want to build a mini itx system with 8 drives, PCIe ssd, 64GB of ram and 10gbe.

Can't be done right now I think, except maybe Xeon d.

Do you have a chasis planned for that?

 

[Mirfster]

Just be careful with cutting edge stuff. Not saying it will not work right with Freenas out of the gate, but there was a bit of pain for those who went with the newer SuperMicro stuff before.

Personally I would let others be the guinea pigs first, but I run all old stuff anyways...

 

[Arwen]

The same chassis used for the FreeNAS Mini XL would seem to support @Stux needs, IF
the server board;

• Had built-in 10Gbps Ethernet, (of the desired type, optical or 10GBase-T)
• Came with 8 SATA or SAS ports

That would leave the PCIe slot free for the SSD.

Annoyingly, I prefer mirrored SATA DOMs for boot drives, and mirrored ZFS SLOGs. I
know I don't need either to be mirrored today. Plus, I use eSATA for my backups. That's
5 more SATA ports needed above and beyond data drive needs :-(.

 

[Stux]

Right,

Ablecom makes it. I believe they're actually owned by SuperMicro.

Another possibility is the UNAS 800

Also LianLi makes a nice 10 bay dtx case

Annoyingly, Xeon D boards only support 6 Sata, but tick all the other boxes.

 

[Stux]

5 more SATA ports needed above and beyond data drive needs :-(.

Good reason to add an HBA to a board with six Sata ports.

HBA for data. On board for misc. could even pass through the HBA to a vm.

That's one alternative I've looked at, if I can get everything except the HBA on board (hence m2 slot). I can use an m2 to u2 adapter and get a high performance ssd with power loss protection.

 

[Ceetan]

Just be careful with cutting edge stuff. Not saying it will not work right with Freenas out of the gate, but there was a bit of pain for those who went with the newer SuperMicro stuff before.

Personally I would let others be the guinea pigs first, but I run all old stuff anyways...

I hear ya. Sadly, the availability of the older stuff (X10 and associated CPU/RAM) comes at a significant premium where I live compared to the newer stuff (30% in some cases) and I can't justifiy that.
I willl have to hope for the best.