A few comments:
M.2 Gen 3 should not require a heatsink, may cost less, and probably meets your need for speed. Gen 4 and Gen 5 should have a heatsink unless you have a lot of airflow across the drives.
What card are you planning to use for the M.2 adapter? If it requires 4x4x4x4 bifurcation, does your motherboard support that?
I assume you’ve check that you don’t have any spare motherboard standoffs installed?
That’s part of the surprise package, since we do not have detailed specifications for this Datto-branded Gigabyte-manufactured board. A Xeon D-1521 can do x4x4x4x4, if properly implemented.
Wouldn’t that fry the motherboard rather than RAM modules?
depends if it contacts DIMM slot pins… and there are a lot of those… and they’re not necessarily covered in conformal coatings.
I always test fit a new motherboard to ensure all standoffs are in the correct locations and there is sufficient support. If I feel there isn’t sufficient support, then I add a rubber spacer, something I got decades ago for motherboard spacers. They are sticky on the flat part and they rise to a rounded point on the top. In the old days grounding mounting pads was a problem and we used fiber or paper washers as well on both sides of the motherboard. No need to do that these days however I do inspect the holes to ensure no traces are too close. If I feel they are, a paper washer gets installed.
Also, I will install the RAM in advance normally to reduce motherboard flexing once mounted, although we would all hope there is enough support underneath.
Yes I have, there is no issue with the motherboard standoffs; it’s an issue with one channel and their slots since the first channel has no issues.
Additionally, me being able to use the 3950x and the Asus motherboard is linked to me upgrading my personal system out of AM4, which is something that will end up being costier than what I need up going.
I got:
Additionally, from the little bit of research I did it doesn’t seem the Datto/OEM Gigabyte MB10-DS4 is capable of PCIe bifurcation, although the information I was able to obtain is pretty limited, and I was not able to find any manual for this specific version: I will update anyone once I have the hardware at hand.
I suppose you have to find the manual for the whole Datto system it was in, like the “manual” for Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 is the one for the G431-MM0 GPU server. But you prabably tried that already.
We should have started by searching the STH forum. Bifurcation is not supported, but someone found the latest Datto BIOS and it seems that cross-flashing MB10-DS4 is possible, with only cosmetic issues over non-existing SFP+.
And change the fan…
Place your bet gentlemen, will I brick the board?
On a side note, the RAM sticks were delivered in a package made of… newspaper. Saint Coulomb, pray for me.
Quick update: motherboard, ram and PSU — and OH BOY, THE PSU IS SMALL!! — have all arrived, the system powers on apparently without issues.
Now I’m swamped by my inability to find the default IPMI password given that I have no graphic card in this system. I have read they use a backup-password that’s apparently not fixed, but will need to investigate more.
I think I will steal the graphic card from my lil brother’s unused system.
What about VGA output from the BMC?
I assumed the port on the motherboard was a serial one and not a VGA one.
Tomorrow I will try to find a VGA monitor.
I have the monitor, now I lack only the VGA cable: back to hunting.
Managed to get video feedback… as well as entering the IPMI: the password was password.
The RAM is showing up, running memtest now. BIOS is already Gigabyte’s F13.
Glad the project is moving forward.
Update: most of the harware has arrived (case and HDDs sdue to arrive at end of august/early september).
My initial testing shows that this pair of NVMe drives (24€) I got for my jail pool performs quite good during writes for the few 10-15 seconds before the performance dropping to a few hunder of MB/s first and then to around 50 MB/s: since they have allegedly no cache, I found this a bit eyebrow rising.
Not that performance matters a lot to me (otherwise I wouldn’t have bought such cheap drives), but I am testing the PCIe card so I want to rule out it being a limitation.
Command used was something similar to fio --name TEST --eta-newline=5s --ioengine=posixaio --rw=write --size=150g --io_size=650g --blocksize=128k --iodepth=16 --numjobs=8 --runtime=120 --group_reporting.
Basically fiddling a bit with the hardware, just remembered that jgreco’s solnet array does not work with nvme drives due to it using camcontrol… might look into adapting using nvmecontrol, but everything will be on hold until late August.
P.S.: the CPU runs hot!
Sure sounds like a cached drive. Unless your CPU was doing the caching and the 50MB/s is the true throughput of the drive. Alternatively, are these drives filling up and the trash getting taken out / stuff getting reallocated is driving down performance?
It sure does. I dug a bit and it has a SLC cache.
As for the HDDs, in the end I choose Toshiba’s MG07ACA14TE 14TB: brought one for 212 €. Will buy more the following months.
Are those SMR nvme drives? 
You might recall my fun time with some cheap nvme drive that recycled the memory and only had 64MB capacity, but saying it was 4TB. Thankfully i got my money back. I’m not saying you are in the same boat. It just reminded me of my week of fun.
I do 
As a side note, I am debating whether to try SCALE now (read EE) or next release. Although for the time being this system will just be a fileserver.
Point is, I don’t believe I have the time to properly learn SCALE right now and keep up with the scheduled changes.
CORE forever!
What changes? k3s is out; good ridance.
Jailmaker should keep working as it is if you want to try sandboxes.
Docker-compose + Dockge in Electric Eel should be pretty much the same experience as docker-compose + Dockge in a Dragonfish sandbox, and this sandbox will keep working as it is in Electric Eel. I expect the experience to remain the same in 25.04, except that by then the SCALE UI may expose more custom settings and obviate the need to install Dockge or Portainer.
The question mark is on the migration to LXC for sandboxes, which is only relevant if you intend to use custom sandboxes as a direct replacement for CORE jails. (Unless iX switches to a non-systemd distribution, 25.04 may actually support two kinds of sandboxes: The current nspawn-based ones and new LXC-based ones.)
