What? Samsung is one of the few manufacturers of DRAM that matter (along with NAND flash and processors), along with Micron and Hynix. They're tier 1.
This, Samsung and Crucial/Micron are the best of the best for DRAM.
Seasonic is good. A G-450 will work well for 6 drives (and a bit more). A G-550 is slightly more future-proof. Beyond that, I'd step up to an X-Series/Platinum.
To clarify, Seasonic isn't just good, their designs and product quality is by far exceptional. Among tier 1 PSUs, they stand above all others.
The X-series/Platinum I can vouch for.
Boot disk
For previous customers I have done extensive research on NAND flash reliability and especially power-fail robustness, all the way down to flash translations layers remapping bad erase blocks and levelling wear evenly across the NAND flash device, and doing that concurrently. They just cannot seem to get cross-page corruptions in MLC NANDs right, or at least not concurrently across a power failure. The conclusion was that there are no devices doing that 100% reliable, which was to be expected, but also that there are very, very few devices doing a pretty decent job. The investigation covered both SD-Cards and USB flash drives. I haven’t done any research on SSDs, but I have had a couple during the past few years and all failed undetected until it was too late. These drives include an OWC Mercury Extreme PCIe card, an OZC RevoDrive X2 PCIe card and multiple OCZ Vertex drives.
The Mainboard I have chosen does have an M.2 slot and again I’m tempted to put an SSD in. Selecting a PCIe V3.0 module is especially attractive, because that will make all 6 SATA connections on the board available for drives. Unfortunately the only PCIe M.2 module I could find is a €300 Samsung 950 Pro of 512GiB. That seems like a bit overkill. For that kind of money I’d rather have a smaller SLC based drive.
Rebooting will be a VERY, VERY rare occurence or should be. Stick to 2 cheap USB sticks. Sandisk Ultra Fit 16/32GBs go for $16-24.
SSDs are more for Jails, SLOG and l2ARC. To use it for a boot device is well beyond overkill and a waste of PCIe lanes, SATA Ports, m.2 ports and/or PCIe ports.
You guys have been recommending specific fans all over this forum, but I cannot remember exactly which one, so it's hard search for forum for that. Can anybody tell me what 120mm fans are recommended?
Is it perhaps the Noctua NF-F12 industrialPPC-2000 IP67 PWM 120mm? My board can handle 4-pin fans, so I'd like to use that feature. And I'm in doubt between the 2000 and the 3000 RPM version. My case will take 2 of these, so no shortage in airflow, but if the low-end is similar on both fans, I prefer the extra headroom of the 3000 RPM version.
If you need the cooling power of Noctua Industrial fans (awesome as they are, i'm a huge fan of Noctua!) you're doing something VERY wrong.
You shouldn't need that kind of performance or warranty guarantees.
I would consider that to be a pretty sane reason if we were talking about the big, chunky "thumb" drives of yore, but have you looked at the recommended drives such as SanDisk Fit/Ultra Fit? The non-USB plug portion is tiny - they don't stick out.
If you can manage to knock a Sandisk Ultra Fit out of a USB slot, you have MUCH bigger problems to worry about OP.
I now have one Noctua NF-F12 industrialPPC-2000 installed for testing. Perhaps I should get a Noctua NF-F12 industrialPPC-3000, which probably runs at a faster minimum speed.
A fan controller can easily fix that for $10.
This mainboard is starting to piss me off. I know SuperMicro has a good reputation, but this is not Enterprise Grade worthy:
1. All IPMI sensors show "N/A" and "Not present". Resetting and power-cycling was not the solution. If it were, I would have returned the board for being unreliable. Reflashing may help, but I'm not going there: If that's the solution, there's a manufacturing problem.
2. SuperMicro IPMI tools require me to give them my name, email address an probably a pint of blood. Not of this day and age.
3. Downloading IPMI tools is at 50kB/s at most. Are you kidding me? Modem download speeds?!
4. When they're finally downloaded, they turn out not to work on 64-bit Windows. I don't even know people who are still running 32-bit on workstations, let alone servers, but if that's a real limit, tell me before downloading!
So now I'm downloading the Linux version and the command line tools; They're trickling in while we rant...
LIke EricLoewe said, these are some REALLY strange problems...
1) Reinstall the firmware me thinks, and/or call up SuperMicro.
2) I never had that issue getting them from the FTP...
3) I downloaded them in probably 5 seconds from their FTP. Dunno how that happened to you.
4) Well it's best to use it as a bootable, burn it to a CD or spare USB stick for usage.
What? That's the craziest thing I've ever heard about IPMI - and IPMI is a collection of things that make you go "Holy crap, this is hacky, potentially insecure, way too obscure to be properly understood and just overall crazy."
Could you post what Supermicro said, exactly? Not doubting you, but I'd like to see what they said, exactly, to try to figure out where to go from there.
He who isn't impressed by IPMI after usage of it, is unimpressed by life.
Your quote was my initial response to IPMI. After using it I wouldn't give it up for the world. It's just so incredibly useful.
