Motherboard Sanity Check

[rickybsd]

Hello,

I'm planning a budget home NAS, and wonder what thoughts are on the MSI MS S0891 mini ITX board. This seems to tick the following boxes:

- Super cheap
- Intel LGA1150
- Supports ECC LDIMM / LVDIMM up to 16 GB

Unsure On:
- Intel Chipset C222 & Intel Gigabit i210AT - both missing on supported hardware list, but Intel should be ok...?

I would then go with a quad core CPU and 16gb ECC - is there any obvious issues with that setup plan?

This would probably be used with 3*3TB drives, and I would like to run 3 light weight Debian VMs on the server as well, hopefully that's achievable?

Thanks for any advice!

 

[Inxsible]

Both the chipset and the network card should be fine. Many on board NICs are i210AT. Only issue I see is that the max RAM is 16GB, so if you upgrade to bigger drives or if you plan to put a lot of drives that may be a problem.

Having said that, I use a Tyan S5533 which also supports a max of 16GB RAM and I currently have 7TB of total HDD space with a Pentium G3240. Haven't had any issues. If I upgrade, I will use my X9SCL-F board (currently used as a pfSense router) which supports a max of 32GB RAM


Great thing is that it also has IPMI which is amazing for server applications. This is a great find for people who want a mini-ITX form factor because it is difficult to find ITX server boards with IPMI and none of the useless ports for sound, dvi, hdmi etc. You are limited in number of USB ports however, so having mirrored boot pool might consume all your usb ports. I don't see a USB2 header listed (even though I see USB in the top view of the board picture) -- normally all boards have at least 1 USB2 header. But even if it doesn't, since it has IPMI, you don't really need to attach the keyboard, mouse or monitor to it even during installation.

I am a bit confused about this:

SATA
- 3 x SATA2.0(3G) (ATX/ATX IPMI SKU)
- 2 x SATA2.0(3G) (DC SKU)(External power supply required)
- 2 x SATA3.0(6G): SATA1, SATA2

ESATA
- 1 x ESATA2.0 (ATX/ATX IPMI SKU)

It lists 7 SATA ports, but on the board picture, I see only 5. Also make sure you don't use the ESATA to connect one of your storage pool drives. You might be able to use an external SSD on the ESATA port which could act as your boot drive if you don't want to use mirrored USB for boot.

If you don't mind me asking, how much does it cost? I didn't find it in Newegg or Amazon US. Ebay showed 2 different prices : $236.11 and $104.93 (both from the same seller -- go figure !! )

 

[rickybsd]

Thanks, that's really helpful. I'm looking on UK ebay, and they are selling "new" for £78 ($105) - seems very good value to me!

My plan if the 5 SATA ports isn't enough is to get a PCI-E card with a couple of additional ports.

Do you think 16gb will be enough for plex transcoding? Not sure if RAM correlates with ZFS volume size, but as said 3*3TB at least to begin with. Ideally I would like to also give 4gb to running two VMs (not sure if BSD fully commits that memory or not).

 

[Inxsible]

Thanks, that's really helpful. I'm looking on UK ebay, and they are selling "new" for £78 ($105) - seems very good value to me!

My plan if the 5 SATA ports isn't enough is to get a PCI-E card with a couple of additional ports.

Do you think 16gb will be enough for plex transcoding? Not sure if RAM correlates with ZFS volume size, but as said 3*3TB at least to begin with. Ideally I would like to also give 4gb to running two VMs (not sure if BSD fully commits that memory or not).

PCIE card for the extra ports would be the way to go depending on your chassis.

I have 16 GB and I do run Plex. Max 2 streams with my Pentium G3240. Also couple other plugins - Radarr, CouchPotato, Transmission. If you are going to run VMs, you will surely need a beefier CPU. RAM may not be sufficient either, depending on how heavy those VMs will be and what they will be doing. Running 3 VMs will be problematic, in my opinion. See if you can have another machine run your VMs and dedicate this to FreeNAS with Plex.

Even I am not sure about whether BSD fully commits or not, but I'd rather have fully committed RAM for my VMs instead of having dynamically increasing/decreasing because those tend to lead to crashes if you haven't set up everything correctly and also based on the load in each VM at that given instance.

 

[Inxsible]

I have seen reports where people put in more RAM than the max spec listed on the board. I haven't read anything about this board, but you could try putting in more and see if more than 16GB is recognized. If so, you might be able to put more in and still run a VM or two.

I will not guarantee, however, about the stability of doing this as it may recognize the extra RAM now, but on a reboot or something it might not and things might start failing. Again this is conjecture as I have never tried such a thing.