TrueNAS on a AMD EPYC 7002 system? This ASRock board looks very interesting ROMED6U-2L2T.

[Mannekino]

I'm currently browsing the ASRock site out or curiosity about their server board offerings. I want to build a new TrueNAS server in the spring/summer of this year and I'm considering going for AMD if that is viable. I'm looking at the options from ASRock and came across this board that looks very interesting.

ASRock ROMED6U-2L2T

I see it has three Mini-SAS HD Connectors which seem to get their PCI-E connectivity directly via the CPU. So that means this is straight SATA connectivity so TrueNAS has direct access to the drives right?

The only problem is see with this board that it doesn't seem to be for sale anywhere. Is this a new model?

What kind of CPU would pair nicely with this board for a TrueNAS system without it going to unreasonable price territory. I'm looking at the EPYC 7002 table in WikiPedia and these seems seem interesting options:

• EPYC 7232P
• EPYC 7252
• EPYC 7262

I don't fully understand the differences yet between the various models. Looks like you have CPU with 8 or 16 cores but different layouts and cache levels. I need to look into that.

How well supported is this platform now on TrueNAS? Considered to be mature and stable or not?

 

[Etorix]

This is a new motherboard. Intel plateforms enjoy better support than AMD.

Unless you have untold plans for a high number of PCIe lanes, as provided by Xeon Scalable or EPYC, you're looking way too high-end! (Explanation of EPYC memory layouts here.)
For reasonable price, you should rather look at older plateforms, possibly second-hand, like Supermicro X10SDV boards. If you need many SATA/SAS ports, pick one with an integrated LSI controller, or use an add-on card.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Completely seconding what @Etorix wrote, I guess it depends on your use-case. For a plain NAS this looks like massive overkill to me. For comparison, my system (details in signature) is 7-8 years old technology with 4 cores and it usually idles at about 5-10% utilization. The highest peak I have seen so far was around 40-50%. I use it only as a data store (incl. media files) and for backup of VMs.

So, again, it all depends on what you want to do.

 

[Mannekino]

So, again, it all depends on what you want to do.

I want to spend irresponsibly, have lots of fun while doing it and explore new technologies.

Also 4K transcoding from Plex to a new TV I'm planning on getting. But I should probably look into hardware transcoding also.

 

[Samuel Tai]

The EPYCs won't have hardware transcoding available for Plex. See https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/. Only Intel QuickSync-capable CPUs and nVidia GPUs will do.

The real platform for a beast like this is as a virtualization platform with insane VM loading.

 

[Mannekino]

Well I wasn't planning on buying a very expensive EPYC CPU, the ones I looked at started around 400 EUR which isn't an insane amount of money I think. But hardware transcoding is really appealing to me and something I think would be nice to get to work properly. I'm going to explore the Intel alternatives then and see what would fit my use and could be fun to build.

 

[Arwen]

I was looking at this same board, but it's not available yet.

Note that AMD Epyc 7002 CPUs that end in "P" are single socket varieties, which is what this board has. It would be expected that a single socket CPU would be cheaper. I was looking at the absolute bottom end, about $600 US;

AMD EPYC™ 7232P
# of CPU Cores 8
# of Threads 16
Default TDP / TDP 120W

It would be annoying if that CPU could only use 4 of the 6 supplied DIMM slots bandwidth. (Which should be connected to 1 memory bus per DIMM slot.)

My alternative, is the likely more expensive board & embedded Epyc CPU, ASRock Rack EPYC3451D4I2-2T. It IS available now, but in some respects way over-kill, (16 core/32 thread).

PS: For those wondering why I have AMD CPUs listed and not Intel, I am boycotting Intel CPUs. Intel may be the Worlds Leader in CPUs, but they are also the World Leader in CPU Security Flaws.

 

[Mannekino]

I've been browsing and researching for the past 2 hours or so and I've ended up with these two Intel boards that seem like a very good upgrade from what I have. Trying to figure out now what kind of CPU would best fit for hardware transcoding with Plex

X11SSL-CF | Motherboards | Products | Supermicro

X11SSH-CTF | Motherboards | Products | Supermicro

I'm still on the fence if I want to upgrade to 10GbE. I have a X9 motherboard now that was released in 2011.

 

[ChrisRJ]

[..] I have a X9 motherboard now that was released in 2011.

This is what I upgraded to 4 months ago . It's not that I couldn't afford something more expensive, but I simply like the idea of not throwing away something that still has live in it (for a given purpose). Similar to typing this on a Thinkpad T520 that I had bought a year ago for 140 Euros (ok, I added an SSD and 16 GB of RAM that I had lying around). Not that I want to tell others they should do it like this. Everybody needs to follow their calling ...

 

[Mannekino]

This is what I upgraded to 4 months ago . It's not that I couldn't afford something more expensive, but I simply like the idea of not throwing away something that still has live in it (for a given purpose). Similar to typing this on a Thinkpad T520 that I had bought a year ago for 140 Euros (ok, I added an SSD and 16 GB of RAM that I had lying around). Not that I want to tell others they should do it like this. Everybody needs to follow their calling ...

You upgraded to the X9 or X11?

 

[ChrisRJ]

I chose an X9SRi-F for my new NAS. And I liked it so much that I bought two more (actually as part of complete 1U servers from Supermicro) for my two new virtualization nodes.

 

[Droz]

I have this exact board and system running!

had some issues but finally have it running and stable at the moment.

I chose this board and 8 core Epyc because threadrippers were stupid expensive and I wanted an upgrade path further down the road to go all flash and have tons of PCIe lanes

 

[Etorix]

@Droz Do not hesitate to report about your issues, how you solved them, and on your experiment with all-flash!