After a hard lesson of using a consumer grade motherboard with regular DDR4, which was faulty, I decided to build a TrueNAS Core server according to the community recommended hardware list.
I am able to get a Supermicro X11SSL series motherboard for 100-250€, depending if I buy new or used and use either the Pentium G4400 I already have or a Xeon that comes with the board (if buying used). The problem is sourcing the RAM. Registered DDR4 ECC memory is readily avaliable, but I cannot seem to find Unbuffered memory, except on German amazon from a no-name brand. After already experiencing RAM issues, I would like to avoid that. Do you know of any good EU-based sellers that sell name brand ram?
Alternatively, I could buy a Lenovo Thinkstation P520C with an Intel Xeon W2123 and 32GB of ECC memory pre-installed, would that be a good idea? Do their motherboards have any proprietary components that would not be suitable for TrueNas Core?
Where is it you’re based? I recently had a similar issue after obtaining a deceptively cheap Dell R230 with no RAM that needed ECC Unbuffered. Now I know why the server was so cheap second hand!
Managed to find some on UK eBay under item number 116214430876 and the seller accepted my offer of £80+£12 shipping for 4x16GB sticks. Hope that helps!
It’s higher speed than what the board can use, but Supermicro did test and certify Hynix 16GB 3200 modules, tho those are 2Rx8 and these are 1Rx8, so I hope they will be fully compatible, will report back if I get them.
Normally sourcing such hardware parts as RAM works pretty well and cheap using geizhals.de (a price comparison portal) or it’s british counterpart skinflint if you don’t understand enough German. In case of skinflint just set the offers to the countries within the EU.
The nice thing about geizhals.de is that you can easily select what you’re looking for in a category like RAM and then get a list of available options. Click on one and you get a list of the dealers.
The only real work is then finding the one that ships to your country for cheap if you’re not in Germany.
