Replacing an ASRock C2750D4I board

[nigelm]

So my 22 month old FreeNAS decided to die overnight - mainboard dead other than IPMI. I have spoken to the original suppliers of the mainboard and they are willing to refund (subject to return and test) - they say the board is EOL and they no longer maintain stock.

The system is a reasonably typical small/home system - ASRock C2750D4I (probably overpowered for my use, but the C2550D4I was basically same price when I was buying), in a Node 304 case, with Seasonic PSU, 6 WD REDs 3TB and 16GB ECC RAM (2 off 8GB). Boots off a pair of USB sticks.

A like for like replacement of the mainboard is substantially more expensive than I paid, and its looking like a 2 year life on these boards is non-untypical from other comments around the forums, which makes this unattractive.

So any recommendations for a replacement board, keeping as much of the rest as possible. Or cost effective upgrade (RAM cost more rather more than the case for example, so a case change might be worth it to keep the RAM).

I do not need to expand the storage in foreseeable future. I do run a number of active jails on the system, including a crashplan, gogs and paperless servers. [Of those crashplan runs all the time, the others probably spend their life paged out]. I would like the ability to go as high as 32GB RAM but no foreseen need to go higher. However I do not do any transcoding so huge CPU requirements are not necessary...

I'm going to work my way through the hardware recommendations but would appreciate informed comments...

Nigel.

 

[anodos]

So my 22 month old FreeNAS decided to die overnight - mainboard dead other than IPMI. I have spoken to the original suppliers of the mainboard and they are willing to refund (subject to return and test) - they say the board is EOL and they no longer maintain stock.

The system is a reasonably typical small/home system - ASRock C2750D4I (probably overpowered for my use, but the C2550D4I was basically same price when I was buying), in a Node 304 case, with Seasonic PSU, 6 WD REDs 3TB and 16GB ECC RAM (2 off 8GB). Boots off a pair of USB sticks.

A like for like replacement of the mainboard is substantially more expensive than I paid, and its looking like a 2 year life on these boards is non-untypical from other comments around the forums, which makes this unattractive.

So any recommendations for a replacement board, keeping as much of the rest as possible. Or cost effective upgrade (RAM cost more rather more than the case for example, so a case change might be worth it to keep the RAM).

I do not need to expand the storage in foreseeable future. I do run a number of active jails on the system, including a crashplan, gogs and paperless servers. [Of those crashplan runs all the time, the others probably spend their life paged out]. I would like the ability to go as high as 32GB RAM but no foreseen need to go higher. However I do not do any transcoding so huge CPU requirements are not necessary...

I'm going to work my way through the hardware recommendations but would appreciate informed comments...

Nigel.

Well, you're not exactly swimming in options for mini-itx boards that support ECC memory. You could get something like the Asrock E3C226D2I and a Pentium CPU, but then you're limited to 16GB RAM. You could always replace the Node 304 with a Node 804 (or similar case). Then the options for socketed boards supporting ECC memory increases significantly because the case supports micro-atx.

Alternatively, you can switch motherboard vendors to Supermicro (which might not be a cost-effective option).

 

[nojohnny101]

they say the board is EOL and they no longer maintain stock.

ASRock said they are no longer selling that board? I haven't heard that before and the fact that they issued a fix which supposedly fixes the problem made me think they had intentions to continue to sell.

 

[wblock]

"original suppliers" probably means a reseller.