X10SDV-TLN4F

[MrHands]

I plan on upgrading my server, I have been using the asrock c2750d4i and it keeps failing, I've rma'd it bunch, and I know it's a common theme with this board. The voltage sensors go bad and the motherboard just doesn't post.

So I've decided to upgrade this and will use the rma'd c2750d4i for pfsense.

After doing some research the X10SDV-TLN4F (1540 four core version) ( https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x10sdv-tln4f-review-platform/) seems to meet my needs, just wanted to check there's no festering issues like the asrock c2550d4i and c2750d4i had, and that's it's all good to go with Freenas? I don't want to fall in the same pit twice.

 

[Ericloewe]

We haven't heard of anything, but Xeon-D as a whole is much less popular than just ASRock's C2x50 boards, so boilerplate "smaller sample size" disclaimers apply.

Of course, Supermicro is mostly trouble-free. The worst part are the BIOSes, but everyone has crap system firmware, these days.

 

[jdong]

Happy owner of an X10SDV-TLN4F (the 1541 version). You can find my write up here, but I've only had the system for a few weeks so not enough time to say anything about reliability.

I would recommend applying the BIOS updates when you get it to fix some known microcode issues with Xeon-D. And don't screw around too much with BIOS settings particularly in the power management department. It's really easy to pick wrong settings and cut your performance substantially.


But like you, I came from an Avoton platform and this thing is a beast in comparison!

 

[MrHands]

We haven't heard of anything, but Xeon-D as a whole is much less popular than just ASRock's C2x50 boards, so boilerplate "smaller sample size" disclaimers apply.

Of course, Supermicro is mostly trouble-free. The worst part are the BIOSes, but everyone has crap system firmware, these days.

Thanks for the reply. Is there any reason why asrocks Avoton boards are more popular than xeon-D?

I'm probably assuming price, as the super micro xeon-d boards are a little more expensive, but I'd really prefer to buy supermicro and hopefully not have to deal with a dead motherboard every 6 months.

 

[Ericloewe]

Is there any reason why asrocks Avoton boards are more popular than xeon-D?

They're much older, for one. Pricing used to be much better, too. And they're used in the FreeNAS Mini, which gives them projection and a large install base.

 

[jdong]

Thanks for the reply. Is there any reason why asrocks Avoton boards are more popular than xeon-D?

I'm probably assuming price, as the super micro xeon-d boards are a little more expensive, but I'd really prefer to buy supermicro and hopefully not have to deal with a dead motherboard every 6 months.

Basically what Eric said.


How I got here: when I built my first NAS, Xeon-D's didn't really exist. There were vague press releases on them, but I've been lurking here for years and saw too many horror stories from those to early-adopt a hardware platform. Also, at the time my mentality was still "it's just a NAS, what CPU-intensive work could it do?" without realizing that it would one day turn into a Plex server, and also without realizing that a single thread of the Avoton struggles to even do rsync-over-ssh at gigabit speeds without fine tuning. I was extra stupid and thought most of my workloads were single-threaded so I went with a 4-core Avoton instead of the 8-core due to the price difference. Ok I didn't admit all my stupidity: I also thought that the Marvell SATA ports would be useful and that board would save me from buying a HBA to go beyond 6 drives. That was a huge world of hurt until they released that firmware update, and after nearly losing my pool to that SATA controller, I have serious trust issues with ever using those ports again.

You are definitely right in that today, the price gap between the X10SDV-TLN4F and the 8-core Avoton is so slim that if you can afford it, it's almost universally a better idea to spring for the Xeon-D platform. But the 4-core Avoton still hits a price:performance:power point that is unique for NAS purposes.


For me, one extra appeal of the Xeon-D was that with VT-D and plenty of CPU/RAM resources, it made an all-in-one ESXi build possible: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...cro-x10sdv-xeon-d-1541-esxi-all-in-one.47261/ . I knew that aspect of the build was risky and wasn't depending on it. I thought worst case, I would end up with a monster NAS + Plex box that would be able to handle transcoding any content I threw at it, plus be ready for FreeNAS 10's virtualization capabilities.

 

[Sir Jepper]

I recently build 2 systems based on the X10SDV series.
One system with the X10SDV-TLN4F with 64GB RAM as a ESXi host.

Freenas installed on the other system with a X10SDV-4C-TLN4F as iSCSI storage for ESXi.
Specs:
X10SDV-4C-TLN4F (Xeon D-1518)
64GB Samsung ECC DDR4 RAM
4x HGST Deskstar NAS, 3TB (6TB mirrored stripe)
Intel 750 SSD Half Height PCIe 3.0 x4 400GB as SLOG
Supermicro SSD-DM032-PHI 32GB Sata DOM as boot

The Xeon D-1518 is more than adequate for my freenas setup and cheaper. Added benefit of using 2 of these series boards is the 10GB LAN connection I can make between them. No issues with these setups.