pricing options …
Do I go the safer route of new and only get 128gb of ram?
Newegg has 3 different lots of 2 x CPU but for different systems (eg Compatible with ThinkSystem SR530, SR630, SR650, ST550). I am assuming that I can just use 1 in my single slot motherboard. Is that a bad assumption?
I will dig into AsRock. My first adventure into servers was with the ASRock Rack C2750D4I / C2550D4I and I am a bit wary of them.
Edit: I looked at these and really only found 1 that was an option (I am also filtering by 10Gb ethernet ports), the WC621D8A-2T. It is a nice looking board and I do like the 2 x NVMe slots. It doesn’t appear to have any native SATA ports but it does have 2 x mini-SAS HD.
The kicker is that I can only find ones that sell for north of $750 (even pre-owned ones).
Honestly, reading the specifications would be faster. Or the price/feature anlysis at ServeTheHome.
Skylake vs. Cascade Lake. x2xx is only required if you want to use Optane DCPMM, i.e. Optane memory, not “Optane” in general, as in Optane drives.
The tiering is just Intel doing price segmentation to extract maximum revenue from its top models. For home NAS use, if you’re set on going overkill, you’d rather want high clocks (for SMB) but a limited number of cores, and you’ll find these in the Gold and Platinum tiers—which are now very affordable second hand.
Don’t be set on a predefined model, be opportunistic. You might also look into second-hand EPYC 7000 or Xeon D-2100 (the embedded form of 1st gen. Scalable), as here:
Datto ASRock Rack Server Mainboard S4P2143 (D2143D8UM variant) with Xeon D-2143IT CPU (socketed with heatsink) and Intel X710 2x 10G-BaseT mezzanine board (includes I/O shield with cutouts for mezzanine board) - $175
beats any 4110 and siblings at this price…
With 12 SATA ports you may not even need a HBA, keeping these x16+x8 PCIe slots free (or 4*NVMe in x16 and Arc 310 in open x8).
Let me know when you’ve fact checked the entire posting, and confirmed ChatGPT is not gas lighting you.
Full ACK
While I spent considerably less time here, “thanks” to the forum move, it seem that quite a few people use ChatGPT. While it has its uses, this is certainly not one of them.
What people need to understand is that ChatGPT et al. are statistics-driven copy-pase machines. There is simply too much nonsense out there on this topic: Garbage in, garbage out.
ChatGPT has its uses and I am using my personal research to educate myself on when to use it and when not to use it.
For example … I was try googling something and the item I was looking for included braces or brackets or similar. Google kept on returning the wrong use of the word, would not look at surrounding words and cost me 45 very frustrating minutes.
I asked the same question to ChatGPT and it gave me the exact answer (with links) I was looking for. Not going to see that 45 mins again.
And … yes … validation of ChatGPT stuff is a must.
You could just replace the CPU with a i7 6700T from Ebay.
You will see a noticeable increase in CPU performance with treaded tasks. It will use less power too 35w vs 51w.
Then you could do an upgrade to SCALE from CORE on the same system (Back up first!!).
I have similar use cases, and my CPU - an i5 7500 is rarely pushed to use all of it’s 4 cores.
I was looking in total different direction for a motherboard, but the Supermicro X10SDV-2C-7TP4F you linked is very compelling, given what it includes.
Thanks!
My pleasure! Just keep in mind that running VMs on a machine with just two cores is unlikely to be a happy experience. If I understand your setup correctly, you mean to just maintain storage for VMs, which should work great. I just want to be sure you know how limited that CPU is re: cores.
VM’s are on SSD drives on ESXi host, with backups to FreeNAS 9.10. Near term plan is to continue back up on new TrueNAS.
But I might want flexibility to move and run VM’s from NAS, so will look at similar SuperMicro bundles. I didn’t realize they bundle CPU, 16-port LSI SAS controller, 10Gb SFP, etc,
I’ll have to consider tradeoff’s of increasing cores to provide NFS for VMs. The local SSD drive VM’s just sip on the i7-10700K CPU @ 3.80GHz.
