GoChris Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 I currently have an old i7-980X and an ASUS Sabertooth X58 board. This combo is very picky with ram, each reboot is 3x power on/off while it configures or something. The CPU is a bit power hungry and overall I need better expansion (more stata 6gb ports) and better power efficiency. I'm having a tough time deciding between an X99 board with a 2011-v3 CPU or a Skylake 1151 build. I was originally dead set on wanting an IPMI capable board but, I don't often *need* to do any bios or otherwise investigation remotely. I run several dockers, sabnzbd, nzb-hydra, emby, znc, rutorrent, deluge, a LibreNMS VM and I'd like to run a couple other VMs as well. I have 16 drives in play now, with another 3 pre-cleared, 2 of which will for sure be added asap. I have two HBA cards but still having 10 onboard sata instead of 6 or 8 would be a plus. I don't really have a budget, but I need to support those dockers, a couple VMs, and a couple emby transcoding streams. Please help me come up with something to buy, I've been agonizing over this too long. Also I need to get something that newegg.ca carries in stock. Cheers Quote Link to comment
mr-hexen Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 There are some boards out there that have >10 SATA ports on them, specifically in the server segment. This one has 14 total, plus two expansion slots. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821 Its haswell based, so a gen or 2 old but still plenty potent. Pair this with a Xeon and 16-32GB of RAM and you wont be wanting for much. Quote Link to comment
jpimlott Posted January 20, 2017 Share Posted January 20, 2017 I just did an upgrade to mine. I choose an z170 mother board and a 6700k proc. 4 Emby streams or playon transcoding. I passed a 710 video card and a usb nec based add on card. 2 sata controllers with 14 drives and counting. The last parity check ran at 90 meg bytes per sec. John Quote Link to comment
GoChris Posted January 23, 2017 Author Share Posted January 23, 2017 There are some boards out there that have >10 SATA ports on them, specifically in the server segment. This one has 14 total, plus two expansion slots. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821 Its haswell based, so a gen or 2 old but still plenty potent. Pair this with a Xeon and 16-32GB of RAM and you wont be wanting for much. This is a nice board, just a bit worried about it being older. Only uses DDR3 for example, was thinking I'd like DDR4 to be more current. Also some of the sata parts are only 3G which...probably not a huge deal. Quote Link to comment
GoChris Posted January 30, 2017 Author Share Posted January 30, 2017 So I'm having a hard time deciding. I doubt I'll be putting any GPU in the system at all since this will just sit in my basement and not run a VM as a PC for anything. Having said that, I will run 2 HBA cards and want to make sure I can eventually support 24 array drives (which I can with the 2 HBA and expanders without saturating the port speeds I think). Onboard sata will likely just be for cache, or maybe 1 reverse breakout sas to a backplane. So, I think my pcie lane requirements are pretty low, just two x8 cards. I'm currently only using one nic, but if I had 2 I could probably bond them (just picked up a cheap 5 port managed switch). I don't really ever see needing 10G. If I need more network ports I could add in a card. This is why what to get is so hard, because there are so many choices since my requirements are easy to full fill. X99 and an hexa core cpu would be good to support many dockers and emby transcoding streams, however I assume they use more power than a 4 core kaby/skylake setup. X99 I think has more pcie lanes, but again, not running multiple GPUs, just the HBA cards so not really a concern? Any suggestions anyone can offer? Quote Link to comment
mr-hexen Posted January 30, 2017 Share Posted January 30, 2017 You really need to consider if you NEED 24 hard drives, or could you get away with fewer larger drives. A lot of people (myself included) started building a system that could support lots of drives, only to realize this was not overly required due to the size of modern drives. Quote Link to comment
GoChris Posted January 30, 2017 Author Share Posted January 30, 2017 You really need to consider if you NEED 24 hard drives, or could you get away with fewer larger drives. A lot of people (myself included) started building a system that could support lots of drives, only to realize this was not overly required due to the size of modern drives. I don't need that many right now, no. I'm very likely going to order a norco 4224 case as my current one is a PITA for changing/adding drives having no hot swap or cages. Currently I have 14 array devices + 2 cache. Either way, it's not super important as the 2 HBAs can support 24 drives. Quote Link to comment
mr-hexen Posted January 30, 2017 Share Posted January 30, 2017 How big are those 14 array devices? (in TB's) Quote Link to comment
GoChris Posted January 30, 2017 Author Share Posted January 30, 2017 How big are those 14 array devices? (in TB's) 8TB parity drives, and the other 12 add up to 42TB. I have a couple more 4TB drives to add, so that would be 16. The number of drives shouldn't affect the motherboard purchase that much, I don't want to get off topic. Quote Link to comment
SSD Posted January 30, 2017 Share Posted January 30, 2017 THIS MOTHERBOARD looks good to me. Up to 64G of ECC memory, 8 SATA ports onboard, dual LAN, DDR4, IPMI. Pretty good price. Quote Link to comment
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