Proposed Truenas Server Build Motherboard parts Selection

GumShoeNoir

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I have a Truenas 12.0-U2.1 server up and running however it's crashing every time I add a new user, see; Add user results in KDB: enter: panic For grins while installing Debian Buster on it to check for panics the install froze. Truenas installs had frozen a couple times too during a marathon of verifying the circumstance of the panics. I'm not trusting the hardware.

After reading the Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev 2a I came up with the following build. It's probably a bit overkill... I'm not positive about the memory, if someone could check that for me please. Mostly from Amazon.


That's about $700.

I have a HP H220 6Gbps SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9205-8i P15 IT Mode 2*SFF-8087 SATA US in the current build, is that adequate?

Comments, suggestions welcome.
 

Ericloewe

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Registered At Newegg sixty bucks cheaper than Amazon seems suspicious...
Well, it's not going to work. You need unbuffered DRAM. Otherwise the system looks fine.
 

GumShoeNoir

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Well, it's not going to work. You need unbuffered DRAM. Otherwise the system looks fine.

I'm searching.... wishing Amazon or Newegg had a bit better memory search function, with checkboxes for ECC, buffering etc. When I search on ECC I'm presented with ecc and non ecc :-(

If I'm doing this correctly on the Supermicro site this should work; Supermicro 16GB 288-Pin DDR4 2666 (PC4-21300) Server Memory (MEM-DR416L-CV02-EU26) I wonder about their shipping lead times? And price?

@Ericloewe thanks for checking and the correction. If you could please spare the time would you see if you could find some memory on Amazon? MB takes 4 sticks for a maximum of 64. I'd like to start with 2 sticks of 16 for 32 allowing me to expand later...
 
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Ericloewe

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I'm doing this correctly on the Supermicro site this should work; Supermicro 16GB 288-Pin DDR4 2666 (PC4-21300) Server Memory (MEM-DR416L-CV02-EU26) I wonder about their shipping lead times? And price?
Yup, that one will work.

@GumShoeNoir - I found three on amazon.com using "MTA18ADF2G72AZ-2G6E1": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=MTA18ADF2G72AZ-2G6E1&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
More generally, a good search method is to grab an OEM part number (or the Supermicro part number, but that's going to be most useful with Supermicro distributors) from Supermicro's QVL and searching for it. Generic searches almost always get bogged down in noise.
 

ChrisRJ

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Have you considered something used? Older Supermicro boards can be found much cheaper, esp. from the X9 series. Power consumption may be a bit higher and the virtual KVM is Java-based; but for me that was a reasonable trade-off. And RAM can be really cheap, if you go for a board that supports registered DDR3 ECC memory.
 

jpb

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I pickup the following 8 bay Nas on ebay last week. It is definitely overkill for me, however the mobo is a mini-itx and there is no shortage of them. It is available as a do it your self or complete assembled.
 

GumShoeNoir

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Yup, that one will work.

I ordered the memory from the supermicro store. It had the best price; shipping was free and to my surprise and delight I got an email at 12:30am this morning saying it had shipped as I ordered about twenty minutes before their 3:45pm PST cutoff. Will arrive here in Mesa, Az from San Jose Ca via FedEx tomorrow.
 

GumShoeNoir

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Have you considered something used?

In my saga of this Truenas build I first bought a Supermicro 2U X8DTI 2x X5670 2.93ghz 12-Cores / 48gb / Raid / 12x Trays / 2x720w which was even noisier than the warnings, I couldn't get rails to fit my older style rack and I woke up to the fact I couldn't leave it in the garage in this desert. Then it started throwing uncorrectable ECC errors. I sent it back. I Then built the machine detailed in this thread; Add user results in KDB: enter: panic FWIW I bought the MB, CPU and RAM from three different vendors.

After reading your comment, I did some searching on Ebay for Motherboard+CPU+Memory. Prices look good, and there were several vendors who had large review counts still maintaining 100% user rating. I might try one of those in another project.

I do have a bit of buyer's remorse for the money spent on the components I bought. I grew wary of another used attempt, and had already justified the expense with 'room to grow' for the future... :smile:
 

GumShoeNoir

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Ordered the MB, CPU and fan from Amazon yesterday. Arrived about forty minutes ago. I didn't realize the CPU came with a fan. I might return the Noctuna. comments / thoughts?

The memory is scheduled for delivery from Supermicro tomorrow.

Truenas server parts in boxes 600.jpg
Truenas server parts in opened boxes 600.jpg
 

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jpb

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It has a PCIe and 2x LAN.
 

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Ericloewe

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The Noctua cooler is likely to be quieter when the CPU is loaded.
 

GumShoeNoir

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The memory is scheduled for delivery from Supermicro tomorrow.

The memory is delivered, I installed it in the new MB/CPU. TrueNAS booted up on the previous install from the odd behavior MB with the user add panic. The user I had created but never saw because of the panic was there.

Interesting amount of whirring, flashing and reboots before it finally came up on the first application of power. It seemed to hang on the HP H220 6Gbps SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9205-8i P15 IT Mode 2*SFF-8087 SATA US but just as I was about to restart it rebooted, or did it just black the screen, and then the H220 finished its initialization and displayed the eight HDs attached to it, in addition to the two SSDs for boot attached to the MB.

FWIW I created another user with the new system. It didn't panic.
I'm going to reinstall to be sure it's clean. A couple of the charts on the dashboard aren't populating.

During the boot I noticed the BMC came up apparently from my DHCP server although the only LAN I had up was the first which wasn't the IPMI interface. More exploring / RTFMing now.

Truenas server New MB 800.jpg
 

ChrisRJ

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During the boot I noticed the BMC came up apparently from my DHCP server although the only LAN I had up was the first which wasn't the IPMI interface.
On my old X9SRi-F boards the default setting is that NIC1 is shared with the BMC, which causes this behavior. I guess they have kept it.
 

GumShoeNoir

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A couple of the charts on the dashboard aren't populating.

FWIW
The old system I had configured with a specific ip of 192.168.1.230 by reserving the MAC address to that ip in DHCP. The new system came up with a different ip and I noticed the lack of charting. This morning I configured DHCP in my router with the new system MAC to my desired ...230 and restarted. Now the charting is working again.
 

GumShoeNoir

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Interesting amount of whirring, flashing and reboots before it finally came up on the first application of power. It seemed to hang on the HP H220 6Gbps SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9205-8i P15 IT Mode 2*SFF-8087 SATA US but just as I was about to restart it rebooted, or did it just black the screen, and then the H220 finished its initialization and displayed the eight HDs attached to it, in addition to the two SSDs for boot attached to the MB.

When I rebooted to test a fixed ip address I noticed it, again, took a lloonngg time to boot as mentioned above. I found this post; SOLVED LSI 9211-8i boots extremely slow informative.

I found a helpful video on uTube; Comparing HBA IT mode SAS controllers | 2020 Edition by Art of Server who has an ebay store TheArtOfServer.

I'll probably just live with the boot time, as once I'm done with this initial learning phase I won't be booting it much at all. A jumper would be cool to signal not to load bios overlays.
 

GumShoeNoir

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When I rebooted to test a fixed ip address I noticed it, again, took a lloonngg time to boot as mentioned above. I found this post; SOLVED LSI 9211-8i boots extremely slow informative.

I found a helpful video on uTube; Comparing HBA IT mode SAS controllers | 2020 Edition by Art of Server who has an ebay store TheArtOfServer.

I'll probably just live with the boot time, as once I'm done with this initial learning phase I won't be booting it much at all. A jumper would be cool to signal not to load bios overlays.

Wrap-up
With the help of ArtOfServer I found some much newer firmware for the SAS controller, flashed and my server now boots at reasonable speeds.

- Jeff
 
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