ioquatix
Dabbler
- Joined
- May 9, 2017
- Messages
- 48
Hi,
I'm currently rocking a N40L but it's dying a slow and painful death. It was a good first home server. It's got 4x 3TB WD green drives which have served me well over 6 years (ZFS and monthly scrubbing seems to indicate no errors).
It's time to upgrade because the server will crash about once a month due to ECC errors, and honestly, it's a bit below spec. I'm using it for backup (about 4TB, want to add another 2TB), media, general storage, and so on. I've got a couple of ZFS partitions I rotate to offline disks, via external USB enclosures which are a bit slow.
I'm looking at building something fairly decent, but also pay attention to cost. If it lasts me 6+ years like the last system did, it will be cost effective in any case.
I'm going to bring my old WD drives forward, so that's 4x 3TB, and buy another 4-6 4TB WD reds. I've got a single Samsung SSD 840 PRO for the boot drive and ZFS read cache, ideally can use them. I'm thinking I'll have 8-11 bays filled, with 1-2 bays for rotating backups (or perhaps continue to use the external Wiebe Tech USB enclosures - performance not really an issue).
So, after much mucking around, I've figured out the following:
- Motherboard: Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F (or other variant with only 2 ethernet ports)
- Enclosure: Supermicro SC826TQ-R500LPB
- CPU: E5-1620 v4 (what is the difference between v4 and v3?)
- Ram: 32Gb ECC whatever is decent price and cost effective (recommendations?)
I have a few questions.
- How do I connect the motherboard to the drive backplane? Using SFF-8087 connectors? The motherboard advertises 8 ports via the integrated SAS controller - so I need 2x SFF-8087 cables to go from the MB to the backplane, and that will drive 8 drives? So, do I need to also connect the SATA connectors to the backplane too? What is the correct way to do this? I'm assuming I'd need 2x SFF-8087 <-> SFF-8087 cables and something else with SATA?
- Also considering the other motherboard which doesn't have SAS (X10SRL-F) - if I went with this option and bought a separate card with, say, 4x SFF-8087 connectors or something like that (advice please?), would that make more sense than using something built into the MB?
- I'd like to continue using the Samsung 840 PRO for an OS drive, it's been super reliable. Additionally, I might consider getting a 2nd one and using them as a write cache. Can I mount the 2.5" drive into the 3.5" enclosure or is that a bad idea? What should I do here? I notice the Supermicro MB has "SuperDOM", what looks like a proprietary flash drive which I could use for the OS. Can I use the SuperDOM ports as regular SATA ports for my 840 PRO? Advice/suggestions welcome.
Thanks everyone I really appreciate any time/support/ideas/help you can give me.
I'm currently rocking a N40L but it's dying a slow and painful death. It was a good first home server. It's got 4x 3TB WD green drives which have served me well over 6 years (ZFS and monthly scrubbing seems to indicate no errors).
It's time to upgrade because the server will crash about once a month due to ECC errors, and honestly, it's a bit below spec. I'm using it for backup (about 4TB, want to add another 2TB), media, general storage, and so on. I've got a couple of ZFS partitions I rotate to offline disks, via external USB enclosures which are a bit slow.
I'm looking at building something fairly decent, but also pay attention to cost. If it lasts me 6+ years like the last system did, it will be cost effective in any case.
I'm going to bring my old WD drives forward, so that's 4x 3TB, and buy another 4-6 4TB WD reds. I've got a single Samsung SSD 840 PRO for the boot drive and ZFS read cache, ideally can use them. I'm thinking I'll have 8-11 bays filled, with 1-2 bays for rotating backups (or perhaps continue to use the external Wiebe Tech USB enclosures - performance not really an issue).
So, after much mucking around, I've figured out the following:
- Motherboard: Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F (or other variant with only 2 ethernet ports)
- Enclosure: Supermicro SC826TQ-R500LPB
- CPU: E5-1620 v4 (what is the difference between v4 and v3?)
- Ram: 32Gb ECC whatever is decent price and cost effective (recommendations?)
I have a few questions.
- How do I connect the motherboard to the drive backplane? Using SFF-8087 connectors? The motherboard advertises 8 ports via the integrated SAS controller - so I need 2x SFF-8087 cables to go from the MB to the backplane, and that will drive 8 drives? So, do I need to also connect the SATA connectors to the backplane too? What is the correct way to do this? I'm assuming I'd need 2x SFF-8087 <-> SFF-8087 cables and something else with SATA?
- Also considering the other motherboard which doesn't have SAS (X10SRL-F) - if I went with this option and bought a separate card with, say, 4x SFF-8087 connectors or something like that (advice please?), would that make more sense than using something built into the MB?
- I'd like to continue using the Samsung 840 PRO for an OS drive, it's been super reliable. Additionally, I might consider getting a 2nd one and using them as a write cache. Can I mount the 2.5" drive into the 3.5" enclosure or is that a bad idea? What should I do here? I notice the Supermicro MB has "SuperDOM", what looks like a proprietary flash drive which I could use for the OS. Can I use the SuperDOM ports as regular SATA ports for my 840 PRO? Advice/suggestions welcome.
Thanks everyone I really appreciate any time/support/ideas/help you can give me.