Which motherboard??


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Can anyone recommend a good motherboard to build a current generation Unraid box?

 

I have built the same spec as the limetech appliance which worked well, however that motherboard can't be got  in Australia now.

 

Looking at socket 1151 or an affordable socket 2011 setup

If socket 1151 I would be looking at using a similar spec processor to the socket 1150 limetech appliance.

If socket 2011 I might be looking at using a 6 core version with a similar clock speed.

 

Prefer a minimum of 10 sata ports.

A typical configuration would accommodate 4 x SSD drives and 6 array drives (including up to 2 parity drives)

I intend to build a few of these in different configurations.

They will be hosting 1 or 2 vm operating systems and a couple of dockers.

One of the operating systems will turn the server into a workstation so pass through is important.

 

I've looked at what is available in Australia and whilst there are some possible contenders, I'd like to know whether anyone has had success without headaches for a particular motherboard.

 

 

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For 10 SATA ports, it's hard to pass the X99 platform.  Buy a used Xeon and some elcheapo graphics card (no GPU in X99)and you're set.

 

I used an Asus X99-A with a Xeon E5-2620V3, and it ran unRAID great.  I was using a £5-off-ebay Matrox G690 video card for local management if required, plus the X99-A got a bit huffy booting without any GPU present.

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A great number of motherboards work perfectly with unRAID due to the large number of drivers that are included with the Linux kernel.  It's probably easier for you to see what's available locally that meets your specifications and then search here (search from the main forum page, before you click into any forums) for any issues with that particular motherboard.

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Thanks for the reply's.

Another criteria I forgot to mention is that I want to pass through a usb controller to one of the vm's so that I can plug in devices such as Usb hard drives, flash drives and mice without going through a restart.

 

Can any one enlighten me on their success stories.  Mainly interested in server grade boards.

 

Ive had success on a socket 1150 gigabyte board desktop non ecc.  Can't recall the particular model atm.

I've also had issues with an intel server board which appeared to have only a single USB controller, so could not share it because the unraid flash drive was on it as well.

 

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Another criteria I forgot to mention is that I want to pass through a usb controller to one of the vm's so that I can plug in devices such as Usb hard drives, flash drives and mice without going through a restart.

 

Can any one enlighten me on their success stories.  Mainly interested in server grade boards.

 

To my understanding (i have not tried it myself yet), there is option to do entire USB controller passthrough to the VM.

With this option, anything  (e.g. mouse, keyboard, usb harddrive, joystick) plugged into the usb ports associated with that passed through controller get's available to the VM. Same for removal. This makes it seamless / transparent, so no need to restart the unraid box to do new passthrough, etc.

 

Probably labeled usb hubs on your desk (that are always plugged to same usb ports on your motherboard) would make it easier to manage/access.

-d

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  • 6 months later...

A bit further down the track with all this stuff.  If anyone was wondering.  I have built quite a few machines using the Gigabyte X170-WS-ecc motherboard.  It has 8 sata ports on it.  Would have preferred 10 but 8 seems to be enough for the purpose.  I have favoured a xeon e3-1245 processor and 16gb to 32gb of ecc ram, depending on what the machine is doing.

I like this board because there is plenty of room for expansion. 

 

As examples, I have machines running monitoring software to measure traffic into shopping centres.  The same machine controls the centres air conditioning system in a separate vm.  2 graphic cards and 2 sets of kb/mice. The same machine in the near future will serve video advertising to monitors throughout the center.

 

Another machine runs windows small business server in a vm on the cache ssd's.  Running on the ssds enables sbs to be very responsive. The same machine runs a windows 10 vm which carries out functions such as network backups etc. One issue setting this one up is that SBS is the domain controller. Because unraid needs to run first, it gets a static ip address for access until sbs kicks in and takes over the rest of the network.  I chose to use the unraid array for shared file access.  You can lock them down fairly securely to prevent unauthorised access.  You can also isolate the backup drives so that only the backup software has access.  I'm hoping this will stop ransomware from getting to them.

Where a USB port is required in the VM, eg to hot plug in a usb backup disk, I found a good solution is to add a usb card and then map it to the vm.  Easier solution than trying to separate the ones built into the Motherboard.  Then the same machine runs a nextcloud docker.  This gives the user locally stored cloud facilities.

I was having lockup problems with this machine.  Turned out to be a faulty memory stick.  Ultra reliable now.

 

Other machines are running windows as a vm so that they function as a workstation while running nextcloud to the network in the background and providing protected storage. A usb card and graphics card used as a pass through for the windows VM.

 

I'm only using cheap graphics cards for video pass through as they are not meant to be games machines.  I get best results from a ASUS Radeon r5-230 card.  If I run 2 cards, the second is usually an asus GeForce gt-730, although I get a couple of issues with the GeForce card relating to sound sync and intermittently display output can go a bit funny when coming out of screen saver mode.  No issues with the radeon.  The GeForce card issue is not a deal breaker though.

 

As far as only having 8 sata ports, not really an issue in these machines. 2 x 500gb ssds for the cache, possibly a 1tb enterprise drive for any data that is going to get hammered, and I favour 3tb wd reds for the array.  So typically you have 500gb for  the cache and up to 13tb protected storage on the array.  Usually enough in most instances.

 

Other machines are being used mainly for storage.  No horsepower required here.

 

 

Edited by Jessie
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