Older boards utilizing Supermicro X8* or Intel 5500/5600 CPU's and prior are expected to have significant issues, some of which are fairly intermittent, and may not bite you for weeks or months.
Can anyone elaborate on this or point me to more info? What kind of issues? Performance? Trashed data? It sounds like setting up FreeNAS in a VM and verifying it can see and interact with the drives on the passed-through controller isn't sufficient to prove pass-through is working correctly, so are there specific tests that can be run to determine if my particular system is prone to these problems? Or is it always going to boil down to "run it for months and see if it blows up"?
I have a ThinkServer TD230 I'm hoping to use as a home NAS. Until I came across this post I thought it ticked all the boxes - dual Xeons, plenty of threads, 32GB of ECC RAM, LSI 9240-8i, 4 gigabit NICs... But I was hoping to run FreeNAS in a VM under ESXi so I could run related stuff alongside it. Crashplan, Plex, maybe a couple other light things. As soon as I read the above I checked, and yes
of course it has a 5500 board. Specifically S5500BC.
Given that this is just for home use occasional performance problems are not a show-stopper. If the referenced issues make it take an hour to boot up sometimes, or cause it to freeze for a couple hours every few weeks, or force me to take a consistent 10% performance hit, that's the kind of thing I can probably live with.
Everything will also be backed up off-site, so while I certainly wouldn't
want to be in the situation, if my pools were corrupted I could redo everything locally and then redownload it. It would take quite a while and be pretty damned inconvenient, not the kind of thing I would want to do even once a year, but it does make data loss bugs survivable if they're rare enough.
Am I just out of luck? Or are the expected problems something I can potentially live with or even avoid? I can run FreeNAS on the bare metal if I
must, but that means tracking down/putting together another server for ESXi and the other VMs, more rack space, more noise, more heat... Not a problem in a data center but a factor when the rack is right next to my desk.