Supermicro x9dr3-f with freeNas

[MLR68]

Good day all

I inherited a supermicro tower with a x9dr3-f board, 4 x 16gig ddr4 ram,2 x i7 8 core Intel chip-set and 8 x SAS drives. I would like to know if it would be fee-sable to install FreeNas onto it, or am i going down the wrong path on this. I am a newbie in this so all your help will be appreciated.

 

[warllo]

You might want to double check the specs of the board here. https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DR3-F.cfm

This could make a nice FreeNAS board but not in it's current configuration.

1. This board uses ddr3 instead of ddr4, just something to note.
2. FreeNAS and any other file server really should use ECC memory which the Intel i7 does not support. This motherboard does support Xeon e5-2600 series processors which do support ecc and RDIMM memory which you can find cheap on ebay.
3. Lastly I was unable to find any documentation stating the Intel C606 Sas would present the drives in non raid mode, if this is true you would need to purchase an add-on hba card like the LSI 9211-8i which can be flashed to IT mode. I'm not an expert on the Intel Sas controller's but again I was unable to find any documentation, you may want to have another community member double check on the integrated SAS chipset.

To make a long story short, with some configuration changes this board could certainly be used for FreeNAS. If you are interested I could provide you some links for the required parts.

 

[Chris Moore]

It sounds like you are not sure what is in this system.

4 x 16gig ddr4 ram

That system board only works with DDR3 memory, so if you have somehow wedged DDR4 memory in it, I don't think that is going to work at all.

2 x i7 8 core Intel chip

It should not be possible to have two i7 chips working in a dual socket board because the i7 chips are not supposed to support dual socket configurations. That is one of the tricks Intel pulls to force people to spend more money on Xeon processors.

I would like to know if it would be fee-sable

I don't know what, "fee-sable," is supposed to mean, but the word feasible is about something being practical, workable or achievable. So, in that regard, the Supermicro X9DR3-F board is usable, but it is not optimal because the SAS controller is from the C606 chipset, not from a LSI chip so it may not be possible to put it into a proper HBA (initiator target) mode.

It should be possible to disable the integrated SAS controller and use a card because there are plenty of slots in that board. Something like this:

Drive Controller: SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9207-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID - - US $69.55
https://www.ebay.com/itm/162862201664

@MLR68 what country are you in? The letters RSA don't have a meaning that I recognize.

 

[Chris Moore]

To make a long story short, with some configuration changes this board could certainly be used for FreeNAS. If you are interested I could provide you some links for the required parts.

Sorry, I didn't see your post until after I posted mine. The page didn't update. Looks like you said about the same thing I did.

 

[JohnK]

@MLR68 what country are you in? The letters RSA don't have a meaning that I recognize.

RSA - That could be South Africa...which means getting 2nd hand parts might be tough..