Will this work?

[Cronus94]

Hi All

I'm in the process of building my first home server which will mainly be used for plex and storage and I have a couple questions about my chosen parts;

Case: Fractal Design Define R5 Case
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F (or other if you can recommend one)
RAM: Samsung DDR3 ECC 8Gb x2 (possibly might go for 32gb instead)
Power Supply: SeaSonic G-550
Additional Fans: Noctua PWM Fans
Storage: WD RED 4TB drives x3 (maby 4)

Firstly will I need to cross flash the board to IT mode for the on board LSI?
Secondly whats the difference between Supermicro X10SL7-F and Supermicro MDB-X10SL7-F-O?
Will this work as a plex home server?
And do you have any suggestions or things i should consider?

Also haven't decided yet if a SATA DOM, Thumb Drive or SSD is best for the boot drive.

 

[Jailer]

Firstly will I need to cross flash the board to IT mode for the on board LSI?

Yes you will need to flash it to P20 IT.

Secondly whats the difference between Supermicro X10SL7-F and Supermicro MDB-X10SL7-F-O?

-O is retail packaging.

Will this work as a plex home server?

It's nearly identical to what I run and it works splendidly.

And do you have any suggestions or things i should consider?

If you don't plan on running a lot of jails or VM's then 16GB of memory will be plenty. Also if you only plan on running 3 or 4 drives save some money and get a board without the SAS controller. Any reason you're not going with Skylake for your build?

 

[Cronus94]

Thanks for the info.

Also if you only plan on running 3 or 4 drives save some money and get a board without the SAS controller.

Any board you would recommend? I might end up with more drives depending on total cost of build, could end up with 6 or 7 drives (depending on total end cost)

Any reason you're not going with Skylake for your build?

I hadn't even thought of Skylake tbh. Any recommendations?

 

[Cronus94]

Yes you will need to flash it to P20 IT.

Do you have a link for the IT Firmware as I'm struggling to find it?

 

[droeders]

I hadn't even thought of Skylake tbh. Any recommendations?

The Supermicro X11SSM-F motherboard is frequently recommended and used around here.

I own one, but use it for something other than NAS purposes. Love mine and would definitely recommend it for FreeNAS or other usage.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

As far as your boot drive: SATADOM if you can afford it, I typically use the internal USB on the motherboard with one of those really tiny flash drives. SATADOMs are more reliable than USB sticks in my experience (I have ~6 FreeNAS and ~10 other systems, half with RAID1 SATADOM, half with RAID1 USB).

 

[Cicatrize]

The Supermicro X11SSM-F motherboard is frequently recommended and used around here.

I own one, but use it for something other than NAS purposes. Love mine and would definitely recommend it for FreeNAS or other usage.

+1 to this. This is what I use, and I love it. I just wish it had more PCI slots. :)

 

[Evi Vanoost]

I have the same motherboard in a SYS-5019S-L (barebone), works perfectly fine. The system is 1U and fits up to 4 2.5" drives (although you could, with some work, fit in 6), perfect for a small-scale ZFS server. It's also extremely quiet for a 1U server and it has IPMI and all the nice things you expect from a SuperMicro board.