I'm building an ESXi server to host three light Windows VM's, but I also want to run FreeNAS and Plex. The Plex server will have 4-6 clients using 1080p and one or two streams possibly doing 4k transcoding. I may also run pfSense in the future, so I wanted a board with 4 NICs. I am posting this thread, because I'm still confused about LSI cards and HBA expanders, even after reading the LSI card confusion thread. My build will contain 10 x 10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro drives. I was planning to use the onboard 3008 LSI controller (flash to IT), but it looks like I will only be able to use 8 drives with this motherboard. I'm guessing I would need a SAS expander to use the other two drives. My question is which one should I buy? The ones I've seen cost as much or more than what it would cost to buy a second LSI HBA x16 controller with more ports and forgetting the onboard 3008 entirely. I'm wondering if an expander (RES3FV288) makes any sense given the prices? Also, the cables I'm going to need appear to be forward breakout cables (mini-SAS to SATA), but let me know if I'm wrong here. Do I need anything else for the expander? I'm reading posts from people on here about how SATA drives don't work as well with SAS expanders. Should I spend a bit more and get HGST 10TB SAS enterprise drives instead? There also seems to be issues with SMR and I should only buy PMR drives instead? Then I'm reading things about SLOG and L2ARC, which seems to require additional SSD's. Specifically devices like the DC S3710. Do I really need this? None of my VM's will contain critical data. If I lost them, it's easy to reinstall.
MOBO: Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz (Based on the Passmark scores, I'm going to need something like this.)
RAM: (4) Crucial 32GB 2133MHz DDR4 ECC RDIMM (128GB total)
HDD: (10) Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB SATA (100TB RAW)
BOOT: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro (Already have this from a different computer)
PSU: SeaSonic PRIME 850W Titanium
FAN: (5x) Noctua 120mm
MOBO: Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz (Based on the Passmark scores, I'm going to need something like this.)
RAM: (4) Crucial 32GB 2133MHz DDR4 ECC RDIMM (128GB total)
HDD: (10) Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB SATA (100TB RAW)
BOOT: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro (Already have this from a different computer)
PSU: SeaSonic PRIME 850W Titanium
FAN: (5x) Noctua 120mm