X10SDV-4C-TLN2F Build

[phatfish]

Hi all,

I'm in the UK and it looks like i can finally get my hands on the X10SDV-4C-TLN2F Xeon D 1520. This seems like a perfect board to me as the first Xeon D boards Supermicro had with the 1540 8 core CPU seemed way over spec for a NAS.

Basically I need a Xeon D board for the RAM, i want to run iSCSI targets for VMs and realize I need as much RAM as possible (32GB will be the start).

The build should be pretty straightforward but I'm worried about a couple of things.

Can anyone advise on the driver support for the X10SDV-4C-TLN2F? I've noticed some comments about issues with drivers for the 10gb NICs this board has. I will be running through a 1gb switch for the foreseeable future but obviously I want the NICs to be functional.

Secondly I'm a bit lost on which PSU to choose. I'll be using a Node 304 case with 6 drives eventually and am interested in how to reduce cable clutter and make sure i have enough power connectors for the drives. Is a modular Seasonic a good idea?

This will be the build:

X10SDV-4C-TLN2F -- £410
http://www.lambda-tek.com/Supermicro-MBD-X10SDV-4C-TLN2F-O~sh/B2170840

Node 304 -- £62
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/frac...k-mini-itx-case-with-usb-30-w-o-psu-(std-atx)

Samsung 32GB ECC DDR4 -- £287
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/32gb...3)-288-pin-ecc-registered-lrdimm-cl-15-4-rank

Seasonic PSU, as yet undecided

HDD i will pick up later as a have 3 old 1.5tb drives to play with for the moment.

USB stick for FreeNAS to boot from.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ericloewe]

Seasonic PSU, as yet undecided

Assuming 6 drives, a Seasonic G-450 will be fine.

Samsung 32GB ECC DDR4 -- £287
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/32gb...3)-288-pin-ecc-registered-lrdimm-cl-15-4-rank

Xeon-D does not support LRDIMMs, only regular RDIMMs. Get something from Supermicro's QVL.

 

[phatfish]

Assuming 6 drives, a Seasonic G-450 will be fine.


Xeon-D does not support LRDIMMs, only regular RDIMMs. Get something from Supermicro's QVL.

Yeah i actually couldn't find a QVL for the board linked on the Supermicro site, usually there is a link from the product page correct? Also i know its basically anecdotal, but this review seems to have used LRDIMMs fine... http://www.servethehome.com/exclusive-intel-xeon-d-1520-benchmark-results/

I'll check out the PSU, thanks.

Any idea on driver support? I'm worried there will be some hardware issues that put a spanner in the works until an update is released. Am i right in thinking that the current FreeNAS release only supports the hardware on this list for FreeBSD 9.3? http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/hardware.html

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah i actually couldn't find a QVL for the board linked on the Supermicro site, usually there is a link from the product page correct?

Yeah, it does seem to be missing, which is weird.

From what I've heard, the 10GbE adapters aren't supported yet. Otherwise, everything should work well. The appropriate 10GbE driver should not be far behind.

 

[miraculix]

Yeah i actually couldn't find a QVL for the board linked on the Supermicro site, usually there is a link from the product page correct? Also i know its basically anecdotal, but this review seems to have used LRDIMMs fine... http://www.servethehome.com/exclusive-intel-xeon-d-1520-benchmark-results/

It's the same as the 1540 variants like this

From what I've heard, the 10GbE adapters aren't supported yet. Otherwise, everything should work well. The appropriate 10GbE driver should not be far behind.

Any details like timeline or major release? I'm only googling around for news or unfounded rumors like maybe once daily... it's not like I'm obsessing over it or anything :D

 

[phatfish]

From what I've heard, the 10GbE adapters aren't supported yet. Otherwise, everything should work well. The appropriate 10GbE driver should not be far behind.

The Supermicro product page for the X10SDV-4C-TLN2F is pretty useless, no QVL and this review shows it has ONLY the x2 10gig NICs, there is a blank space on the PCB where the 1gig NICs go http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x10sdv-4c-tln2f-review-xeon-d-1520/

The product page says there are x2 of both! Not sure which to believe, but ill go with the photographic evidence for the moment :)

From a bit of searching the 10gig NIC appears to be a "X552/X557-AT 10GBASE-T" this model here i think http://ark.intel.com/products/88342/Intel-Ethernet-Connection-X557-AT2

Like miraculix I'm unsure of how new drivers get into FreeNAS. Do they appear in the "nightly" builds shortly after they are made available for FreeBSD, and then get rolled up into the next stable release. Or can you side-load kernel modules pretty easily?

 

[Ericloewe]

Or can you side-load kernel modules pretty easily?

Nope.

Like miraculix I'm unsure of how new drivers get into FreeNAS. Do they appear in the "nightly" builds shortly after they are made available for FreeBSD, and then get rolled up into the next stable release.

Obscure drivers typically wait for the next major release (next one is probably 10.something), carrying the equivalent FreeBSD version's drivers.

Popular drivers are updated independently, typically soon after they're available. They might stick to the nightlies for a while for testing (like mps P20).

Intel 10GbE is definitely the latter category. The devs are probably waiting for the FreeBSD port of the driver.

 

[miraculix]

The Supermicro product page for the X10SDV-4C-TLN2F is pretty useless, no QVL and this review shows it has ONLY the x2 10gig NICs, there is a blank space on the PCB where the 1gig NICs go http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x10sdv-4c-tln2f-review-xeon-d-1520/

The product page says there are x2 of both! Not sure which to believe, but ill go with the photographic evidence for the moment :)

From a bit of searching the 10gig NIC appears to be a "X552/X557-AT 10GBASE-T" this model here i think http://ark.intel.com/products/88342/Intel-Ethernet-Connection-X557-AT2?

I'll provide whatever info I can since I have one ...

• I'm not sure why the page for the TLN2F version is missing so much, but you can 100% use the X10SDV-TLN4F product page for QVL, manual (keeping in mind the notable exceptions), BIOS/IPMI updates and drivers (or current lack thereof). Verified while I had a case open with SM.
• Confirmed just the the 2 onboard 10GE ports (X557-AT2) and no onboard 1GE ports (blank pad as you observed)

Anything else?

 

[Chris Hubick]

Hi! I have the same problem with the 10GbE ports on the X10SDV-8C-TLN4F build I just completed.

Someone posted on the FreeBSD forums that the 10GbE ports started working when upgrading from 10.1 to 10.2: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/xeon-d-1540-on-sm-x10sdv-8c-tln4f.53263/

This is my first time using FreeNAS (traditionally a Linux guy), and I also came to the forum wondering if you could just grab a newer kernel package or something like that, but as per above, that sounds problematic :-(

I'm shooting for the dream setup home NAS, using a Lian-Li PC-Q25B case, Corsair CS650M PSU, 32GB Crucial ECC RDIMM (4x8GB), Kingston Predator M.2/boot, Intel 750 SLOG (woo!), and 6x4TB WD Black RAIDZ2 (from prev Linux SW RAID build, no TLER), which should be great for my software development, editing 4K video from my cams, etc. I hope we don't have to wait too long for 10GbE support though, since I also shelled out big bucks for a Netgear S3300 (28X-PoE) switch to go with this thing, and I'm naturally rather excited to use it

 

[Ericloewe]

This is my first time using FreeNAS (traditionally a Linux guy), and I also came to the forum wondering if you could just grab a newer kernel package or something like that, but as per above, that sounds problematic :-(

No, and the FreeBSD 10.2 driver isn't guaranteed to be compatible with the 9.x branch.

Anyway, I'd submit a feature request for the driver to be cherry-picked, if possible.

 

[phatfish]

I'll provide whatever info I can since I have one ...

• I'm not sure why the page for the TLN2F version is missing so much, but you can 100% use the X10SDV-TLN4F product page for QVL, manual (keeping in mind the notable exceptions), BIOS/IPMI updates and drivers (or current lack thereof). Verified while I had a case open with SM.
• Confirmed just the the 2 onboard 10GE ports (X557-AT2) and no onboard 1GE ports (blank pad as you observed)

Anything else?

Ah thanks for the QVL tip. I see a Samsung 32GB ECC stick on there for the X10SDV-TLN4F, looks like i can pick it up here and it its cheaper that the one i had! http://www.morecomputers.com/product.aspx?pn=M393A4K40BB0-CPB00&man=Samsung

As we just have the 10gig ports ill wait until the drivers get merged into a release or nightly. Prices are dropping on RAM and the board so no point buying anything if you cant use it yet.

Anyway, I'd submit a feature request for the driver to be cherry-picked, if possible.

Sounds like a good idea, ill try and do this when i get a chance, at the weekend probably unless someone else gets there first.

 

[ProblematicLlama]

I'm interested in this board too (although it's hard to come by in the UK - the only place I can find that sells it is Lambda Tek). I may wait for other 1500-series processors to come out as apparently Intel has a few variants planned including a 25w TDP one, although I don't know how quickly they announce/release this stuff.

My usage for the system would just be network storage and running Plex (including transcoding etc). I was looking at the C2750D4I which I'm sure would do the job just fine but it's single thread performance isn't great and some codecs aren't optimised for multi-core CPUs. Apparently they were supposed to announce a successor to the Avoton at some point ("Denverton") but I haven't heard anything about it and I'm somewhat reluctant to buy a 2 year old motherboard with an SoC processor.

Either way I hadn't considered that the 10gig NICs may not be supported at all, so I'm glad a read this page and I look forward to the prices dropping. I do have a couple of questions about it just in case anyone has one of these working (as I'm sure anyone impatient would have put a gigabit PCIe card in, as I see a guy on this thread did).

1) I'm basically looking at doing the same setup with a Node 304 (although I can't afford 32GB RAM yet so 16 will have to do). Did you add any additional cooling to the CPU and if so what did you put on there?
2) My alternative was to go for a C2750D4I; do you think the Xeon D1520 would be better for transcoding or is it overkill? Either way it'll certainly beat my HP N40L!

 

[Ericloewe]

2) My alternative was to go for a C2750D4I; do you think the Xeon D1520 would be better for transcoding or is it overkill? Either way it'll certainly beat my HP N40L!

C2750 can transcode a lot. It won't beat an 84W Haswell Xeon E3, but it's comparable (as in, same order of magnitude).
8-core Xeon-D outperforms Haswell Xeon E3 in very multithreaded workloads (yes, despite the massive TDP difference), so expect transcoding performance somewhere between "Xeon E3 v3" and "leaves Xeon E3 in the dust".

 

[miraculix]

Either way I hadn't considered that the 10gig NICs may not be supported at all, so I'm glad a read this page and I look forward to the prices dropping. I do have a couple of questions about it just in case anyone has one of these working (as I'm sure anyone impatient would have put a gigabit PCIe card in, as I see a guy on this thread did).

1) I'm basically looking at doing the same setup with a Node 304 (although I can't afford 32GB RAM yet so 16 will have to do). Did you add any additional cooling to the CPU and if so what did you put on there?

I'm the guy on the other thread :D I had to pull the 10GE NIC for another need and use a dual 1GE NIC for a bit, but the X540-T2 (-AT2?) is back in. You'll also see mention of cooling I used.

This board was a drop-in replacement of an Asrock E3C226D2I in a system with 6 drives that were on the Asrock's native PCH SATA and are now on the X10SDV SATA, so the lack of X557 Ethernet driver support isn't an immediate showstopper for me. It's just holding me back from future plans... an LSI 2308 controller in the single PCIe slot, more vdevs, SLOG and L2ARC.

Don't forget there's some considerable expansion and performance potential with the X10SDV's NVMe M.2 slot! I heard the current NVMe software support in 9.3 might be shaky, plus I'd prefer to use an actual M.2 2280 form factor drive. Anyway I'm hoping to make use of it with FreeNAS sometime in the next 6 months.

 

[phatfish]

I was poking around for some information on support for the X552\X557 in FreeBSD. This commit shows the ixgbe driver in the 10.2 kernel should have support https://reviews.freebsd.org/rS282289

But no activity on the 9 branch for this driver. As far as I know the only changes outside a full release for FreeBSD are for security patches, so I expect any support would be FreeNAS developers porting the 10.2 code back to 9.3 specifically for FreeNAS.

 

[paylesspizzaman]

Where are people buying the x10sdv-4c-tln2f board from in the USA? On google the only places I have found it for less than $699 is wiredzone.com, neobits.com and antarespro.com, all of which say out of stock, back-ordered or special order. Are people actually paying $700? I considered the "special order" from antarespro, but haven't found too much good about them online.

 

[miraculix]

I bought mine from newegg for $489.99 back in mid August, this link.

The page said "out of stock" immediately after I submitted the order late on a Friday evening... the tension grew steadily over the course of that weekend

It was in/out of stock a couple of times before that but I don't think it's been back in stock since!

 

[paylesspizzaman]

So I bought a x10sdv-4c-tln2f. I'm trying to get it going, but am running into trouble with a network adapter. I realize there is no support for the built in NICs, so I purchased an Intel expi9402pt NIC card and an M.2 to PCIeX4 adapter. The NIC works fine in the mobo pci slot, but will not function in the M.2 slot. In the BIOS under M.2 slot/PCIeX4 it is set to legacy, just like the the mobo PCIe slot. Am I doing something wrong or can the M.2 slot NOT be used in this manner? The green LED on the NIC comes on steady once the system starts up. Thank you for your time.

 

[Chris Hubick]

Since the FreeNAS 10 schedule seems to have slipped, I figured it wouldn't hurt to at least ask for a backport of the ixgbe driver in the meanwhile: https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/13485

 

[paylesspizzaman]

Cool, I hope they do it. It is nice to see that this affects more people than just me. Misery loved company I guess.