I recently finished a build to replace a homebrew ZFS build that has served me well for years, the new box is Xeon based, SuperMicro X12 series board, 8 HDDs, plenty of grunt, about 65TB.
I just ordered a Jonsbo N2 to build a mini-itx form-factor, 5 drive backup server which will just replicate the most important datasets from the main box, so does not need to be particularly powerful.
I was originally going to get a mini-ITX SuperMicro board and build something around a Xeon as that’s what I was familiar with, but it looks like I’ve missed a trick because it seems it’d be a lot cheaper to build around an Atom 3xxx platform on something like an AsrockRack C3758D4I-4L, SuperMicro A2SDi-8C-HLN4F or similar.
The main requirements for the new box are:
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IPMI remote management
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ECC RAM (not a ton, 32GB should be enough, at most I’ll put 64GB in it)
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Reasonable crypto performance (I guess the Atoms have AES-NI?) as most of my datasets are encrypted, so if I have to go live from the backup box at some point it should perform “OK”, doesn’t need to be extraordinarily great just good enough to operate until the main NAS was back online.
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A couple of LAN ports with decent chipsets, 10GB over copper would be handy, but I could probably live without it, there’s not even a 10GBE link to where it’ll be yet, but if the backup box has it I’d probably install one.
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SATA sort of goes without saying, the case only has 5 bays, it’ll do fine if it covers that and a DOM port to boot from would be nice otherwise I’d use NVMe for boot if necessary.
The boards I listed above eg AsrockRack C3758D4I-4L, SuperMicro A2SDi-8C-HLN4F are pretty old, but I know these things have a pretty long lifecycle anyway, so if they’re still the best option I’ll buy them, but I’m feeling as if I’m not really aware what is out there and that there may well be something newer/cheaper etc etc that I don’t know about. Is there anything with the basic server features I detailed above that’s either newer and better than those for similar cost, or something cheaper with ECC, IPMI etc?