I have been wringing my hands about upgrading my TrueNAS hardware from an old repurposed Dell server to something more recent. I finally took the plunge and have on my desk:
- an X11SSH-F motherboard;
- a (used) Xeon E3-1270 (v6); and
- a Node 804 case (actually, that's on the way...)
- It seems that Supermicro recommends two different solutions: the SNK-P0046A4 (2U) or SNK-P0051AP4 (4U). Irritatingly, on their own site, they do not explicitly declare compatibility with the E3-12XX v6 family (only up through v5); could something go wrong with this combination?
- Now, it seems that the SNK-P0051AP4 is a bit noisy, and I have a very high opinion of Noctua fans. So, I poked around on their website a bit. It seems that this motherboard has a heatsink backplate already installed that is not directly compatible with any of the Noctura fans (!?), but that there are some adapter kits that can bridge the gap. To be specific, I see that the NH-U9DX i4, NH-U12DX i4, and NH-D9DX i4 U3 can all be coupled with kits for this. Does anyone have experience with this--is it an acceptable solution?
- Any comments very welcome (even those that suggest completely different approaches). This is a machine that cannot be locked completely away, so noise is an issue; obviously, I would also like to keep the CPUs comfortable.