I am pondering the idea of building the smallest, most portable, yet fully capable, TN system. I was curious if any of you are running a system that might match or be close to something like this. I love my big tower, but honestly, the factors that pushed me to the large tower were:
ECC support on a TN compatible MB
HBA support on a TN compatible MB
4 HDD bays
Cooling of HDD
Good Power Supply
I haven’t done any research yet, so this is my first cast of the line, but… is there away to get the bulleted features into a smaller system?
A friend of mine has one of these microservers (several years now) and they’re quite smitten with it. They’re a power user of discerning tastes, other than their preference of btrfs to zfs, I trust their just opinions on most things. The microserver also appears to have some half height PCIe slots, so you could kit it out with high speed SFP networking or maybe even a low power GPU.
There’s also of course the iXsystems Mini line which hits most of your points as well. Similar price point to the HPE, and guaranteed to be fully supported.
The HPE has a lot more CPU grunt, and a PCIe slot, but you don’t have 1st party support for TN.
Bigger though. By quite a bit. But one more 3.5" bay, and 2x 2.5" bays, are a definite benefit.
More, yes. A lot more? It’s still pretty limited, and of course you’ll pay for that in watts. OTOH, the Denverton Atoms are almost 8 years old, while a current Microserver uses current-generation parts.
The Mini X+ has this; apparently (and surprisingly) the Mini X doesn’t.
5x actually, assuming Passmark’s validity. Definitely more than I’d thought. The 3758 might be a better comparison at 4614, but that Xeon still handily wins, though at more than double the TDP–though at 55W vs. 25W, there’s also a question of how much that matters. I’m running a two-socket Xeon Scalable system, so TDP clearly isn’t that important to me…
This little box, meets all your criteria. I thought the MB might not support ECC, but it does! They make mitx server boards which support it, but the problem I found is getting a cpu cooler to fit into this chassis. The company that makes it also makes a 8 bay as well. These are NORCO knock offs, the HDD trays interswap which is the reason I use it since my main chassis are NORCO.
This box contains an Supermicro A2SDi-H-TF, 64G of RAM, 4*8T of hard disks, dual 10G RJ45 Ethernet plus a single SFP+ Ethernet, a M.2 NVME boot ssd for the system, and dedicated IPMI remote management. This should tick all your boxes. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/a2sdi-h-tf
The mainboard has got 12 SATA ports, so no need for an HBA, although you could use the PCIe slot for one.
Where is this port at? I looked at the specs, and it did not list a sfp+ port. If in fact it does, I think you might have sold me on grabbing one of these.
I guess I have enough paranoia that 4 disks, regardless of ZFS or mirroring, just triggers my anxiety - but we all panic at different thresholds. A long lead-in to the case I’ve been using for more than a decade now - a Node 304. It does need an ITX motherboard but it will take 6 3.5" disks so I can do RAIDZ2, giving me a bit more comfort when I do lose a disk, which has only happened a couple of times.
Lots of interesting solutions here. I have a Node 304 that houses my backup NAS. Since my crucial storage pool is about 15TB, I was thinking of something very small with a triple mirror of 3x20TB 3.5" drives. Good redundancy, quick resilver, and If I needed more space, just duplicate and/or use larger drives. Finding a suitable case for that footprint and the hardware to push TrueNAS is what I’m hoping to find. I’ve checked into many of the smaller L cases like that Jonesbo N1, but I haven’t found the ONE yet.
I’m using an HPE Microserver Gen10+ with the stock Pentium Gold and 24 gigs of ECC RAM (which I’ll upgrade to 64 at some point). No issues but bugs with the TrueNAS distro itself. For example can’t use docker from the GUI anymore, but I can at least use portainer for that. I used it with 3x 6T drives, but decided to upgrade to 4x22TB WD Ultrastar drives and call it a day.
This server is pretty small for its capabilities and has 4x 1Gig Ethernet interfaces plus 1x PCIe if you need more speed.
The minuses are that
You cannot use the Pentium’s built-in hardware encoder to transcode video (which you can mitigate by throwing an Nvidia p400 in the PCIe slot and use that).
Only 4 SATA slots. The workaround for the OS is to use an USB drive (SSD not Flash) to run the OS from. You get the message, but it works perfectly.
The Gen 11 has finally added a m.2 slot for this purpose (better late than never, HPE). But at least the Gen 10+ (and the Gen 8, and presumably other earlier versions) has a USB port on the motherboard for this purpose, so the boot device can be inside the system rather than sticking out the back.
