I picked up another SM server 826 chassis w/ an X10DRH-C motherboard (bios 2.0 I think). It has newer processors w/ more cores and more & faster memory (128gb ddr4 vs 32gb ddr3).
I would like to swap the board into my existing 826 chassis, and replace the X9DRi-LN4F+ that is in there. The reason being, that case has 12 drive bays vs 8 in the new chassis, and it has 920w PSUs vs 700ish ones in the new one. The new one does have an optical drive, and may fit some SSDs in the front. Not sure.
I am planning on getting an 826B chassis in the future for the 2x ssd hit swap bays in the rear for boot drive.
Some notes/questions.
My current system is in my signature.
I am currently on Core 13.3. Want to upgrade board and be stable. Maybe upgrade processors. Then look to upgrade to Scale. Have been waiting for better support for VM/containers since I have several jails. Should I upgrade to scale first? Or upgrade hardware first? I suppose another upgrade path could be to stay in current chassis. Setup Scale, then move drives over and import pool?
I have a AOC-SLG3-2M2 PCIe card for 2x NVMe drives in mirror for VM. I had to set “bifurcate” in the bios for this. Will I need to for the new board?
This board has a different SAS controller (3108), and from what I read (but several years old), it sounds like this controller doesn’t have IT mode, but has JBOD mode, but feelings are mixed. Has this changed? Or is this considered not as bad as 5+ years ago?
Do I need to worry about the backplane? The newer server has a SAS3/SATA3 backplane, but only 8 drive bays. This would be sufficient for my current pool setup, but feels like I would be maxed out? Or don’t worry and just use the new chassis?
Old server has an extra LSI card for drives 9-12 (numbered 8-11 starting at 0). Would I need to move that as well to keep those bays working? Would that cause a conflict? Am I better off not using the onboard SAS controller and just getting LSI/Broadcom cards?
I currently boot from a SATADOM. From what I read, the X10 board supports them in specific SATA ports on the board. Any gotchas?
If the new chassis supports ssds in that top row, should I just stay in that chassis to add ssds for boot drives in mirror? Never been a fan of the satadom, but it’s there and working.
You would need to look at the number on the actual backplanes. Typically Supermicro uses The “EL1” and “EL2” designation which mean (LSI) expanders built into the backplane, at They also use SAS, SAS2 and SAS3 speeds on the backplanes with El1 having a single expander chip connecting typically to your hba card and the EL2 having a second expander chip for additional capability and configurations. These active backplanes are hot swap backplanes and SAS/SATA. The EL2 versions I think have a configuration for dual channel SAS drives. Don’t know if EXOS2 will work in dual channel though. There are also “dumb” expanders in the mix to which there are no expander chips and you will need cards to connect each drive separately You have the consult the manual for the particular backplane you have and available configurations.
So see what you actually have and that will determine what you can do. Almost all the backplanes can be swapped out or upgraded easily and the motherboard takes care of stuff, I think (someone will correct if wrong) also between SAS2 and SAS3 versions as the speed is built into the backplane but you may need a mathing LSI card to use the extra speed.
It is not recommended to use the onboard (on the motherboard) controller chip. It can be set to JBOD mode but still uses the raid memory chip which can not be turned off so it’s not recommended to use for other than the boot drive(s) You can also use a SATA DOM for boot drive as the motherboard has a spot for it.
I connected my backplanes to a proper LSI card I installed in a slot and have not had any issues and bothe systems are very stable. Watch the slots as some are shared with other stuff to make sure you have the slot speed x4,x8, the LSI card needs and if dual processor each processor controls half the expansion slots so If you only have one processor in a 2 processor board only half the slots work. The motherboard manuals are detailed and show what is what so that is helpful including where the ram sticks should be installed.
I forgot to mention, it appears to have a “CacheVault” add-on. I am not really certain what this does. Sounds like battery backed up cached write buffer?
So I opened my existing server. It looks like the backplane is connected to 2 x LSI 9210-8i cards. I think I can just move these over and my drives will keep working as-is.
While I don’t have an 826B case, I looked at some on eBay w/ varied results. However, I did see this: SuperMicro CSE-826 QUAD 2.5" SSD BRACKET 4x Drives Internal Mount Holder | eBay
That might be the way to go for the time being to add 2 SSD drives for booting. I will probably start w/ 1 for now to mirror the SATADOM, and then pull it at some point in the future and replace w/ a 2nd SSD.
All that, and I think my AOC-SLG3-2M2 will move over as-is as well.
I also found an old Dell Radeon R5 video card. Would that be worth throwing in for Plex transcoding after upgrading to scale?
I see where the chassis control header is different on the 2 boards. Shouldn’t be an issue.
Power cables look like they will move right over. Fan power connectors, etc.
Ok, so I was really stupid and didn’t backup my TrueNAS configuration before migrating. However, I got away with it and am back up and running.
Couple of notes.
The X9 SATADOM has a power cable that gets plugged into a specific power header for that on the X9 board. The X10 has a different SATADOM that gets power through the SATA port. So my SATADOM is not compatible. Thankfully, I had a disk in the system that was mirrored and could be used to boot from. I just purchased one of these, and ordered 2 SSDs and the necessary power cables from Amazon to have a mirrored internal SSD boot drive setup. Granted, they will not be hot-swappable, but will be better than what I had.
I did have to move a couple of the motherboard posts, but this was very simple/easy.
I did have to pay attention to the front-panel control cable and which way it was plugged in to the X9 board, so I could plug it in correctly on the X10 board. The quick-reference PDF from Supermicro was helpful here.
I did not have the IPMI password, and the BIOS does not provide a way to reset it. I tried using the Supermicro IPMICFG tools, but these did not initially work. I don’t know why, but I set a 20 character alphanumeric password to the ‘ADMIN’ user and it didn’t work. I also tried adding a user and it didn’t work. I then set the password of the new user to something really simple, and it worked. So I created an 18 character alphanumeric (no specials) password, set it on the ADMIN user, and it worked. What a pain. Also, I created a bootable “FreeDOS” USB thumb drive using Rufus and put the IPMICFG tools there and it didn’t work. Said something about couldn’t allocate DOS memory. But I was able to boot TrueNAS, get the network interfaces setup (this is what I wanted IPMI for in the first place), then when I SSH’d in I could put the IPMICFG tools there and run them.
Now I am trying to figure out next steps. I am considering upgrading the processors. I can get slightly faster v4 processors for about $25-50/pair. I want to move to SCALE, but not sure when I have several jails and I need to know the container/VM solution has stabilized. Seems like there has been a lot of churn in that area…
I am also looking at some CSE-826B cases (the one w/ the ability to have the rear 2.5" SSD hot-swap space next to the PSU).
Is it worth upgrading to a SAS3 backplane? I don’t have SAS3 drives, just SATA3 drives. Note that I would likely also need to pick up a couple of LSI/Broadcom cards to drive it with rather than use the on-board SAS (which supports JBOD mode but not IT mode like the LSI cards).
