Yet another board thread

[Donny Davis]

I usually just figure all this stuff out on my own, and I stick with mostly old Enterprise gear. However I am going to try something new for a change and build out a box from scratch that meets my requirements.

I have recently slimmed down my rack and have gotten one of those fancy ones from navepoint with the glass door on the front. In my old builds rack space has never been an issue because I have two full size 42U racks.
This time around I have to actually pay attention to the dimensions of my gear.

So comes to the question
What kind of board should I be looking at that fits a MicroATX form factor, and would last the next 5 years for freenas. I don't do anything but NFS home directories, and ISCSI storage for my RHV hypervisor's.
I have an all 10G network, and plenty of cards laying around to support it. The board needs to have enough pcie slots for my two optane drives, one for the 10G nic, and one for the HBA.

Hopefully I have covered my use case well.

Thanks for any pointers.

 

[CookiesLikeWhoa]

You could look into one of the new Intel D-21xx boards. Supermicro makes the X11SDC-4C-TP8F which is a flex-atx board. It should handle everything you're asking for. It has onboard 10G, both SFP+ and Base-T, a PCI-e M.2 slot and a SATA m.2 slot, two u.2 connectors/4 SATA connectors and a gaggle of 1G network ports. It can support up to 512GBs of RAM, and has two PCI-e slots.

If you feel 4 cores is underwhelming, they have 8, 12, and 16 variants.

 

[Donny Davis]

Thanks for moving my thread to the right place. Didn’t even see the sub forum.

I will check that board out, although it’s a little short on pcie slots. Thanks for the recommendation @CookiesLikeWhoa

 

[Donny Davis]

So here is what I ended up with.

Supermicro MBD-X11SSM-F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1151 Intel C236
Athena AP-RRP4ATX6508 80 PLUS Certified 20+4Pin 2 x 500W Mini Redundant Server Power
Xeon E3-1270v6
64GB ECC Ram
Intel P3605 SLOG
10G Chelsio S320
All stuffed into
iStarUSA Server Chassis Cases D-214-MATX

Lenovo SA120 Drive Shelf