Doing a motherboard transplant to upgrade my NAS

TrueNAS General
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I’m currently running TrueNAS 25.04, and have been since mid-2016 with the following hardware configuration:

  • Intel Xeon E3-1275 V5 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor
  • Supermicro X11SAE-M Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
  • 2×Crucial CT2K16G4DFD8213 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-2133 CL15 Memory, 64GB total
  • Enermax TRIATHLOR 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply
  • Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case
  • I also added a 2.5 gigabit network card about a year ago for faster transfers along with a 2.5 gigabit 24-port switch.

Since the motherboard/processor is at least ten years old, I’m thinking of doing a motherboard swap with a newer motherboard and a faster processor for some of the more process-intensive apps that I’m occasionally running as a TrueNAS app, including Plex transcoding. Right now, I’m staring at a SuperMicro MBD-X13SAE-F-O motherboard which has everything I need including ECC memory and a 2.5 gigabit port, plus IPMI port. Anything good or bad about this motherboard? With DDR5, new memory. :frowning:

It should be easy to swap motherboards, right? Just remove the old one, install the new one with just memroy and power, upgrade the BIOS, run a memory test, then put the boot drive (NVMe) and the hard drives back in.

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Yes. You will be fine. You might need to reconfigure the network though. I personally did not have to when I swapped motherboards.

And a CPU stress test :slightly_smiling_face:

Supermicro should be good but I am sure more experienced people will know better as I do not have experience with that model.

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That motherboard will not fit into your Node 804 case.

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Are you speaking about software transcoding? I mean, xeons usually don’t have iGPU; thus, you need a separate GPU for hardware transcoding.

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The right question is: Why change? What gain are you expecting from the swap?
Your Skylake hardware being ten years old is not, by itself, a reason to change and “for some of the more process-intensive apps that I’m occasionally running” is rather vague.

Xeon E had iGPUs until, and including, the E-2300 series. OP’s current Xeon E3-1275 does feature an iGPU…
But this X13SAE motherboard is a (full ATX!) workstation and takes regular Core CPUs, which have (or can have) an iGPU. And yes Virginia, LGA1700 Core CPUs support ECC (i5 or higher).
Please look up before posting wrong comments.

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Nice to know. Seems like I’ve been wrong. My apologies.

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[quote=“etorix, post:5, topic:43295”]The right question is: Why change? What gain are you expecting from the swap?

Your Skylake hardware being ten years old is not, by itself, a reason to change and “for some of the more process-intensive apps that I’m occasionally running” is rather vague.[/quote]

At it’s very core, the current Xeon setup is working great for the core purpose of being a NAS server. Since the migration from TrueNAS CORE to TrueNAS Scale, I have gone beyond running just Plex and qTorrent and have added a number of apps including:

  • DDNS Updater
  • NginX Reverse Proxy
  • Audiobookshelf
  • Kavita
  • AdGuard Home
  • LinkDing
  • OpenSpeedTest
  • Uptime Kuma
  • SFTP Go and File Browser
  • Tailscale and ZeroTier

For most of the stuff, the current setup is fine. It’s just some corner cases, such as faster startup of Audiobookshelf in the morning due to the number of books and faster conversions that make the motherboard upgrade a “gee, it’s a nice thing to have”, It would also be nice to have more onboard memory for virtualization.

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My 2 cents :smile:
I have similar hw to yours (or better, even a bit less powerfull), and i have more service running.
If you wanna improve transcoding performance, maybe just grab a better GPU, instead of swap motherboard-ram-cpu, for transcode anyway with an igpu (yes, newer, but at much more cost)

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I’m still toying with the idea of the upgrade. There is also the option of re-using an old nVidia 1080 video card as a transcoder in my NAS as well.

shrug… I’m going back and forth with the upgrade question. Unless my TrueNAS server goes down and it becomes a “need” issue, right now, it’s below the “want” level, and at the “gee, wouldn’t it be nice” level.

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Does Audiobook preemptively transcode all its catalog anew at each start??? (If so, I’d say: Ditch that app!)

If that’s the goal, look into (DDR4) RDIMM platforms. You already have 64 GB; DDR4 Xeon E would top at 128 GB, and >128 GB in DDR5 ECC UDIMM is going to be heavy on the wallet.

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No it doesn’t. But I have a large number of audiobooks in it’s database.

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I have that motherboard, used an i5 14500 for ECC and power consumption reasons. I upgraded from an x10sl7. Did I need to upgrade? No, but it was a whole lot of fun and I had the money at the time. Originally I stuck with the x10 simply because I virtualized TrueNAS and the X10 had an onboard hba to pass through to esxi. When Jailmaker came around there was no need for esxi to run docker and I have TrueNAS running on bare metal. The 2.5 gbe is a highlight when backing up data over smb. Also it runs about 10 watts less than the old system at idle. I recommend, had no issues except passing through the igpu to a VM