Xeon-D Mini-ITX board suggestions?

[danb35]

So I've got a burr under my saddle to 3D-print a server chassis. Of course, a chassis by itself is just a bulky paperweight, so I'd need components to build a system. It takes a Mini-ITX board, and I've been intrigued by the Xeon-D systems for the last few years, but haven't learned a great deal about them. Here's what I'd like to have on a board:

• 8 SATA ports would be nice--the chassis has space for 7 3.5" disks, and another bracket for a couple of SSDs
• IPMI
• 10G Ethernet, but only if it's SFP+; otherwise I'll plug in a card
• ???

What boards should I be looking at? Don't want to spend more than necessary, but I'm not necessarily looking for the cheapest thing out there either.

 

[danb35]

Any thoughts?

 

[jenksdrummer]

I'm not sure if that combination exists; specifically, 8 (or more) SATA + 10G ethernet + Mini-ITX + IPMI; SuperMicro would probably be the start/end of that search, IMO.

That said, I just built a Supermicro x10 series bare-bones box that has 10G-T onboard + IPMI, and I believe it's a Mini-ITX. I believe there is a version of the board I have in mine where it comes as SFP+. To that, it's a Xeon-D 1541 on an X10 series board; it's not a newer series. But the issue you'll have here is that it has 6 SATA ports (+1 M.2 NVMe).

You'd need to either get an HBA or cut back on your SATA requirement (so there goes, likely, the only PCIe Slot).

I ended up putting 4x 10TB WD Gold disks, a pair of Intel DC-series SSDs, and a Samsung 950 Pro NVMe stick in it along with 128GB of ECC RAM by NEMIX (never heard of them, but took a chance and the chips are Micron, in my case, and it tests good)

Overall performance is good/fine until I decided to cranked up compression to max and turned on dedupe just to see how bad performance would tank (it tanked to nearly unusable/non-responsive...but it never popped...)

 

[Constantin]

If you’re printing your own case, stop limiting yourself, add a few inches and go flex ATX. The D-1508 through D-1537-cpu using series of x10 boards from Supermicro offer excellent performance with very low power consumption. 16 SATA per LSI 2116, 2 satadoms, SFP+, etc.

My only complaint with my board is the lack of a good HBA cooler and that the CPU heat sink is passive by default. With some tinkering, I have made both happy. The 2c version of the motherboard clocks in around $450 last time I checked.

 

[Ericloewe]

The 8 ports are probably the trickiest part. Xeon-D has six SATA ports, so anything more is LSI SAS territory.

C3758 might be a more interesting platform. Plus you get to suffer from the same problems as to benefit from the experience acquired by everyone who buys the new Mini XL+ or whatever it's called