Some input regarding Motherboard replacement

[Kent Larsson]

My motherboard died on me so I am looking for a replacement. I have 10 WD red 8Tb Nas drives as storage and 2 Kingston SSDs as boot media.
I am considering the Supermicro X11SPM-F-O and Intel Xeon Bronze 3204 Processor.
Anyone have any experience with this combination?

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Hi @Kent Larsson. It depends a lot on your use case.

X11SPM-F-

One thing I generally mention is whether you have a need of the M.2 slot. The reason is that it is fairly easy to use a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot as an M.2 slot for the purposes of storage. However, it is harder to use a M.2 slot for a generic PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. This matters if you think through future expansion where the number of PCIe lanes may matter. For that reason if folks are not sure of a solid use case for the M.2 slot I personally think the PCIe 3.0 slots are better and so opt for board without M.2. I would argue SLOG benefits the most, followed by L2ARC, and most other common uses are not worth using in the M.2 slots consuming your PCIe lanes.

Anyway, a quick look tells me it depends on what you use it for. If it is used for basic NAS you should be fine. If you plan to use it for multiple VMs and 1080p or 4k transcoding you may not get the performance you want.