supermicro mbd-x10sra-f / E5-2683 v3 / Dual NVME Cards or SSD ?

[kumarmvnk]

Hi I am planning to build freenas 20 TB (10 x 2TB RaidZ2) with the

supermicro mbd-x10sra-f motherboard
Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 14-core/28 thread 2GHz 120W LGA2011-3
Kingston 4x16GB RDIMM DDR4 2400MHz KVR24R17D8K4/64

Motherboard deatures

PCI-E

4 PCI-E 3.0 x16 2 PCI-E 2.0 x1 (in x4 slot) *4 PCI-E3.0x16 slots are running at 16/16/NA/8 or 16/8/8/8 *PCI-E Slot#1 (x4) and Slot#4 (x16) are disabled when an Intel Core i7-5820K is installed

I am need suggestions as to what option is is good value for money with long run for performance depending the specs on above.

1) NVME on PCIE CARD & as the mobo does not support NVME
2) Dual NVME on PCIE CARD with two NVMEs
3) One SSD
4) Two SSD with raid 0
5) Or just another HDD

 

[Samuel Tai]

Until you describe your anticipated use cases, there's not enough information to choose. Will this be a simple file server? Are you planning to run this stuffed to the gills with VMs and jails? How will you share out to clients: SMB, NFS, iSCSI?

 

[kumarmvnk]

I plan to un Plex server with home videos / photos / SMB File share between countries family members that is all for now.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Unless you absolutely need the speed, the NVMe on PCI-E options are likely overkill, and you'll need to shut down the whole box to swap out bad NVMe drives. In your case, what's limiting the speed is the ISP connections between family members in different countries.

Simple SSDs are your most cost-effective option for now, but I recommend against running them as stripes, as a single drive failure will bring down your entire zpool. Either mirrors or RAIDZx zpools would be better for data safety.

Your chosen CPU doesn't have Plex HW transcode capability.

 

[kumarmvnk]

IC ... Presently i have not built this

SSD is good what i understand. Two SSD vs one in Raidz (I wrote wrongly as Raid 0)

For "Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 14-core/28 thread 2GHz 120W LGA2011-3 " can i not use my old GPU "ATI RADEON HD 4850 GDDR3 1GB VIDEO GRAPHICS CARD" ??

 

[Samuel Tai]

That video card might work. It's listed in the FreeBSD support matrix at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix. I've no idea if it can be used inside a jail for Plex HW acceleration, though.

 

[kumarmvnk]

Super Samuel. Thank you for the very quick response. Also heard from Supermicro support that NVME is not supported.

I am just planning much ahead that next 10 years i don't want to re-install FREENAS..if that is something i can live with..

 

[kumarmvnk]

Hi
I could get the following running good.

supermicro mbd-x10sra-f motherboard
Intel Xeon E5-2683 v3 14-core/28 thread 2GHz 120W LGA2011-3
Kingston 4x16GB RDIMM DDR4 2400MHz(However CPU uses it as 2133mhz)
PCIE x 4 card based NVME WD Black 500Gb

However the GPU - ATI RADEON HD 4850 GDDR3 1GB VIDEO GRAPHICS CARD - did not show up might be Motherboard jumper settings. But as using Freenas & Plex - I did not know how much it effect the videos that i might view!!!

 

[Samuel Tai]

You may also need to set some loader tunables:

drm_load=YES​

radeonkms_load=YES​

​

to get your video card going. Remember to reboot after setting the tunables to get them to take effect.

 

[kumarmvnk]

I am also trying to get two car loaded for 10g
1) Myricom-10G-PCIE2-8C2-T-2T - Dual port card
2) ASUS XG-C100C - single port card

IS there any drivers or aspects i need to do for these to work other than getting the supermicro mbd-x10sra-f motherboard bios PCI / Pnp setting to enable to EFI for the slot being used ?

For the Radeon card, I need to change the jumpers too from VGA enable to GPU enable as per the SM board maual !!

Is drm_load=YES in turnable for 10g card or Radeon ?

 

[Samuel Tai]

drm_load tunable is for the Radeon. The Myricom NIC is supported by the mxge driver. There's no official driver for the Asus NIC, although there is a beta driver in the FreeBSD ports (aquantia-atlantic-kmod-0.0.5). Save yourself some trouble and skip the ASUS.

 

[kumarmvnk]

Can i know where i can find file & loading instructions for the Myricom? Please ? please provide the link for Asus driver in the FreeBSD ports too, incase the Myricomdoes not work then will go with Asus (I suppose similar process)

 

[Samuel Tai]

According to https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mxge&sektion=4, you’ll need to set the following loader tunables:

Code:

if_mxge_load="YES"
mxge_ethp_z8e_load="YES"
mxge_eth_z8e_load="YES"
mxge_rss_ethp_z8e_load="YES"
mxge_rss_eth_z8e_load="YES"

I can’t help you with the Asus driver, sorry.

 

[kumarmvnk]

so with my "Myricom-10G-PCIE2-8C2-T-2T - Dual port card " already in the motherboard where freenas is there is nothing i should do. so my card must be faulty ?

 

[Samuel Tai]

You don’t. Please go to System->Tunables, and set them there.

 

[kumarmvnk]

This works thanks