Hardware and setup recommendation

[Keith Pratola]

I recently acquired a Supermicro SC847E16-R1400LPB chassis that has the X8DTU-F motherboard and Intel Xeon E5620. I don't really care for the motherboard/cpu and would like to replace it. I was looking through some of the hardware recommendations and saw the X9SRH-7F motherboard. I was wondering if that is the best option especially for stability, or if there was another recommended model? Maybe something in the X10 lineup...

I already have an LSI 9207-4i4e (SAS2308) flashed in IT mode. I was using firmware version 16. I didn't really see anything negative about this card and firmware version. I would like to continue using it unless there is some reason I shouldn't?

Also curious about opinions on the hard drives I already have. I have a lot of these drives that came with the server, so it is not like I am just going to replace them. My opinion is I don't like using Seagate, but I am stuck with them for now. I have 18x 2 TB Seagate ST32000644NS. I was going to set them up as a single volume with two raid groups, 8 disks each in RAIDZ2 and leave 2 spares. I also have 10x 3 TB Seagate ST33000650SS which I guess I would do two raid groups with 4 disks each in RAIDZ and leave two spares, or potentially order a couple more of these drives.

For the NIC I was going to use an Intel X520-DA2 setup in LAG.

My main purpose of this storage is for backups. It would be connected to VMware ESXi servers using iSCSI. Carve out LUNs for use by Veeam and other software.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I was using firmware version 16. I didn't really see anything negative about this card and firmware version.

It's important to match the firmware version with the driver version The current stable release uses version 20 as far as I know.

My opinion is I don't like using Seagate, but I am stuck with them for now.

Burn them in the same way you would new drives. Discard any that fail burn-in.

 

[DrKK]

Discard any that fail burn-in.

Discard any that pass, too :)

 

[jgreco]

RAIDZ2. iSCSI. Not good bedfellows.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

RAIDZ2. iSCSI. Not good bedfellows.

I wasn't sure whether to flag this, in the light of this:

My main purpose of this storage is for backups

 

[Keith Pratola]

RAIDZ2. iSCSI. Not good bedfellows.

Are you talking from a performance standpoint? There is not a lot of performance required. This is going to be mounted to ESXi. iSCSI supports UNMAP which is important for reclaiming space and why I don't use NFS with FreeNAS.

 

[Keith Pratola]

Discard any that pass, too :)

Yeah, I feel the same way. Been trying to get them to just purchase a TrueNAS.

 

[Keith Pratola]

What about the motherboard?

 

[jgreco]

Are you talking from a performance standpoint? There is not a lot of performance required. This is going to be mounted to ESXi. iSCSI supports UNMAP which is important for reclaiming space and why I don't use NFS with FreeNAS.

You've probably got that all backwards. iSCSI on RAIDZ2 will tend to eat up a lot of space as small blocks of data are written, plus performance will be very poor, and I'd kinda expect NFS to be the winner there, especially for something like backups, which tend to be sequential writes.

But no one here knows that much about iSCSI and there aren't a bunch of forum posts already answering your question.