When does hardware become obsolete?

[G8One2]

Hello everyone,

First post here, long time reader and lurker. I generally never need to post anything because i always find my answer through searches, but not this time. I was actually able to get a FreeNas server up and running years ago, just by reading all the great information on this site. With that said, my current hardware is as follows:

Supermicro 846E1-R900B w/ upgraded SAS2 backpane and LSI Controller
X8DTE-F Board w/ dual Xeon X5690 CPU's ( 6 core 3.47Ghz )
192Gb ECC RAM (Samsung M393B2G70BH0-YH9 )
18 HDD mostly WD RED and a few WD RE4 configured in RaidZ2
Running FreeNas 11.2 u7
Usage PLEX and NextCloud

I was wondering when or if this hardware would become obsolete or no longer supported by FreeNas, and if i should be looking to upgrade hardware in the near future. Im worried that Im going to upgrade FreeNas one day and hardware will not be compatible. I was also curious, if anyone could tell me, approximately when 11.3 will be released.

 

[Chris Moore]

I don't expect your existing hardware to be unsupported within the next three years, however there are new features that your hardware may not be able to take advantage of. I don't have specific examples because I did not take the time to look your chip up on the Intel site, but one that might be a problem is virtualization if your CPU doesn't have the right hardware in it.
I was using a pair of Dell system with that CPU about three or four years ago and I decided to upgrade to get something that produced less heat. For the performance, what you have is burning a lot of electricity and generating a lot of heat. You could get something newer that would use half the electricity for the same performance. The electric cost was not the big issue for me, it was the heat because my servers are in my office and I was getting cooked.
I don't want you to feel like you need to be in a heated rush, but you might want to keep an eye out for a bargain. The chassis you have sounds fine, but you might want to look at a newer system board like the one I describe here:

Specific build changes to upgrade as high as 512GB of RAM

This is intended as a modification to the list of hardware I put together here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/specific-build-components-list-up-to-32gb-ram.109/ Be aware, this is a totally different system board with a totally...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[G8One2]

According to Intel with the X5690

• Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) ‡
• Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) ‡

Not sure what any of that means though because i dont use any virtualization. My computer skills arent good enough to dip into that. The system does use quite a bit of power, right around 300watts according to my UPS. I suspect most of that is due to 18 spinning hard disks. I am starting to look at other hardware, I serve both Plex and NextCloud to remote users, and at any one time i can have up to 10 people, streaming plex at once. Aside from using higher density, fewer disks, I'm not sure how much power i would really be saving going with newer hardware. I guess what Im saying is, if i were to replace hardware, Id want it to lower power consumption but still be able to server Plex and NextCloud the way i do now. Im currently more concerned with the hardware just no longer being supported as FreeNas evolves, and want to start looking for newer hardware that still fits my needs, to stay ahead of FreeNas versions as they evolve.

 

[Chris Moore]

at any one time i can have up to 10 people, streaming plex at once.

That could be quite a lot of activity.

Im currently more concerned with the hardware just no longer being supported as FreeNas evolves, and want to start looking for newer hardware that still fits my needs, to stay ahead of FreeNas versions as they evolve.

The hardware you have is very, 'standards based'... I really don't see how they could drop support for it without breaking things on newer hardware also. I would not worry about it unless they decide to drop support for "Legacy BIOS" boot support. If I remember correctly, the X8 generation system board either did not have UEFI or the support for it was poor. I have a X9 generation board myself and the UEFI support is not great. I have already purchased a pair of X10 generation boards (used) but have not had time to get them installed in my servers.
The usual development path is to add support for new things and that support (from a software standpoint) usually builds on top of existing support for older hardware. It is very rare that support for old hardware is dropped, but it does happen from time to time. I think that I recently read that the support for floppy disks was dropped from Linux. Not that they are ripping the code out of the OS, but no new development work would be done on it and the reason was simply that they didn't have any hardware to test against. So, if you are trying to get a floppy disk to work, support for it might not be possible. That kind of thing. In most cases, as long as the hardware is available and the developer is still involved in the project, the support for older hardware is maintained. That brings us back to your system. Although it is old, the technology that it is based on is still being used in newer systems. Intel CPU, SAS disk controller, etc. There isn't anything that is peculiar in that, where they could drop it without affecting many hundreds or thousands (maybe millions) of other systems.
The one thing I can think of is UEFI, which might be a problem for systems that don't support it because UEFI is the way of the future. If your board doesn't support UEFI boot, that could, eventually make it unusable BUT, I think it will be several years yet.

 

[G8One2]

Chris,

Thank you for the prompt rely. I can especially appreciate how you articulate your answers. I suspect my hardware will be fine for the next few years, i will however, start looking at newer boards and possibly a smaller case to condense things a bit. Thank you again, for taking the time to respond.