Sata3 HBA reccommendation

[Nymmie]

Looking for some HBA recommendations for a NAS server i'm setting up.

 

Current Mobo is M5A97 LE R2.0 Link

(Will eventually update this to a more proper board in the future.)

 

Looking for a setup of 3 4port HBA's to eliminate SPoF in my array. Looking for cheap but not absolute crap.

 

Found  https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064&ignorebbr=1 on sale on newegg which would serve me nicely in terms of ports per card and its connectivity to the system.

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

[unkn0wn1]

The issue is that is uses a marvel chipset and they are notorious for just dying for long term use I would find something that doesn't use one. It may be a bit more expensive but it will save you a lot of headache in the future.

[dalekphalm]

The problem is that generally, when looking at HBA's, cheap and "not crap", don't often go together.

 

I use an LSI 9207-8e HBA. This has 2x SAS 4-channel ports (You can use a breakout cable that gives 4 SATA ports per SAS port, thus 8 SATA ports total - more if an HBA Expander is used in conjunction).

 

It uses the SAS2008 chipset, which is one of the most reliable out there. I paid $82 CAD plus shipping for it. I'm using it right now with ESXi and PCIe Passthrough to a FreeNAS VM, and it works great.

 

You'd obviously want an i model (e for external, i for internal). You could look at something like an IBM m1015, which are IBM branded LSI cards. They're damn cheap on eBay.

 

For the price of three of those IOCrest cards, you could buy 2 IBM m1015's, and it would give you 16 total SATA ports, instead of just 12. Granted, you'd also need to buy SAS to SATA breakout cables, but those can be found on eBay for cheap too.

[AshleyAshes]

Meanwhile, in Ashley's server... :V

 

 

 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

On 11/9/2017 at 3:05 PM, dalekphalm said:

The problem is that generally, when looking at HBA's, cheap and "not crap", don't often go together.

 

I use an LSI 9207-8e HBA. This has 2x SAS 4-channel ports (You can use a breakout cable that gives 4 SATA ports per SAS port, thus 8 SATA ports total - more if an HBA Expander is used in conjunction).

 

It uses the SAS2008 chipset, which is one of the most reliable out there. I paid $82 CAD plus shipping for it. I'm using it right now with ESXi and PCIe Passthrough to a FreeNAS VM, and it works great.

 

You'd obviously want an i model (e for external, i for internal). You could look at something like an IBM m1015, which are IBM branded LSI cards. They're damn cheap on eBay.

 

For the price of three of those IOCrest cards, you could buy 2 IBM m1015's, and it would give you 16 total SATA ports, instead of just 12. Granted, you'd also need to buy SAS to SATA breakout cables, but those can be found on eBay for cheap too.

I've been considering getting one or more of those older LSI SAS HBAs, either for my current system or a possible FreeNAS box I've considered building.

What would be the oldest ones that would work with 3TB and larger HDDs? Would SAS2008 work, or even something older?  Also can they pass through the drives directly to the OS without using hardware RAID?  (I've heard FreeNAS doesn't like HW RAID.)

 

Also speaking of older SAS/SATA controllers, if you'd happen to know ... What might be the oldest motherboards that would support 3+TB HDDs with the on-board controllers?  If I was building a NAS box, my budget for the non-storage parts would limit me to like LGA 771, Socket 604 or 478, Socket F (1207), 940, or similar.

LGA 1366 would be a bit of a stretch for me - even with the cheapest board, CPU, PSU & case, I might only be able to put in like 512MB or 1GB RAM, which would prevent running FreeNAS.  (I kinda wanted the checksums / integrity checks/validation / deduplication / etc. though. )

[dalekphalm]

13 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I've been considering getting one or more of those older LSI SAS HBAs, either for my current system or a possible FreeNAS box I've considered building.

What would be the oldest ones that would work with 3TB and larger HDDs? Would SAS2008 work, or even something older?  Also can they pass through the drives directly to the OS without using hardware RAID?  (I've heard FreeNAS doesn't like HW RAID.)

 

Also speaking of older SAS/SATA controllers, if you'd happen to know ... What might be the oldest motherboards that would support 3+TB HDDs with the on-board controllers?  If I was building a NAS box, my budget for the non-storage parts would limit me to like LGA 771, Socket 604 or 478, Socket F (1207), 940, or similar.

LGA 1366 would be a bit of a stretch for me - even with the cheapest board, CPU, PSU & case, I might only be able to put in like 512MB or 1GB RAM, which would prevent running FreeNAS.  (I kinda wanted the checksums / integrity checks/validation / deduplication / etc. though. )

If you’re gonna use 3TB+ drives, SAS2008 is the chipset you want to start at. Anything older will have questionable support for large drives. 

 

For FreeNAS, you either want an HBA (ideally), or a raid card in “IT” mode (initiator target), which basically turns a raid card into an HBA. Either will work totally fine in FreeNAS. 

 

You don’t want a hardware raid card in normal IR mode, because it won’t properly pass the drives to FreeNAS. 

 

Unfortunately you have to flash the bios to change modes, which is why it’s easier to buy an HBA outright, if you’re afraid of flashing a raid card. 

 

As for onboard sata controllers? I know for sure LGA1366 would work. Can’t really say about anything earlier. 

 

Freenas can run on 1GB of ram, but it would likely affect write speeds. Ideally you’d want 8GB of ram. 

 

You only need more ram than 8GB if you want to run Dedupe. 

 

It will use extra as a cache though so it never hurts to throw as much as you can. 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

01 - HBAs - 3+ TB Support, Flashing

 

On 11/11/2017 at 4:52 PM, dalekphalm said:

If you’re gonna use 3TB+ drives, SAS2008 is the chipset you want to start at. Anything older will have questionable support for large drives. 

 

Ahh. I see the LSI 1068 is mentioned on some sites as not supporting drives larger than 2 TB.  Also on SuperMicro's site, some of the older motherboards that have on-board SAS controllers mention Broadcom 1068, but I'm not finding as much info on those.

 

 

Also I came across a few links, on Serve the Home (#1), FreeNAS, Lime Tech (UnRaid), Serve the Home (#2) and Zorinaq.  Are there any one those sites that jump out at you as highly recommended, OR avoid at all costs?  (I'm hoping to get something in the $30-40 range for an 8-port HBA.  I've seen a few that cheap on eBay, and maybe a few as low as $10-15 but I think they were older ones that didn't support > 2 TB drives.)

 

 

Quote

 

For FreeNAS, you either want an HBA (ideally), or a raid card in “IT” mode (initiator target), which basically turns a raid card into an HBA. Either will work totally fine in FreeNAS. 

 

You don’t want a hardware raid card in normal IR mode, because it won’t properly pass the drives to FreeNAS. 

 

Unfortunately you have to flash the bios to change modes, which is why it’s easier to buy an HBA outright, if you’re afraid of flashing a raid card. 

Yeah, I'd prefer to not have to flash one, I'd rather get it working "out of the box" so to speak (although it'd be second hand of course).

 

 

02 - Older Sockets - SATA Support

 

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As for onboard sata controllers? I know for sure LGA1366 would work. Can’t really say about anything earlier. 

Ahh okay.  There's not many LGA1366 boards I see in the $20-40 range, except for ones that don't fit into standard ATX/EATX motherboards.  (I've seen a few around $100 though, but that's a bit on the high side.)  I see more LGA771 and older, though.  I'd also consider AMD.  Either way I'd probably use one of the lower wattage CPUs, for whatever socket I run.

 

 

03 - FreeNAS, etc - low RAM

 

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Freenas can run on 1GB of ram, but it would likely affect write speeds. Ideally you’d want 8GB of ram. 

How slow would be too slow on write speeds?  I was thinking if I built a NAS box, I wouldn't have it running all the time.  Just when I'm doing a full clone/image backup of everything, once in a while.  (I'd still need to figure out how to do the ongoing incremental/differential backups.)  If I don't have to do real-time copy (like cloning to the NAS simultaneously while writing the data on my main storage), I'd be fine with things being slow, kind-of like how tape (mentioned a bit below) is.  Or, for example, taking a 3 or 4 day weekend of the system running 24/7 to clone 20 or 40 TB or however much data I'd be backing up.

 

 

04 - To DeDupe Or Not

 

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You only need more ram than 8GB if you want to run Dedupe. 

Ah.  I'm actually not 100% sure if dedupe is what I want, for what I want to do.

 

Let's say, when I plug multiple drives into a Windows box, I have multiple copies of the data in different places.  Like, C:\Music\Elton, and H:\Media\Music\Elton, also D:\Media\Videos\Concerts and Z:\Concerts (yes I have had all available drive letters assigned, except A and B), and F:\Pictures\TwitchCon and T:\TwitchConPics.  The files in C...Elton might be mostly 128kbps mp3 (with a few as low as 24kbps), and in H....Elton might be uncompressed WAVE.  D...Concerts might be 480p MJpeg 30fps videos whereas Z...Concerts might be 4K H.264 30fps.  F...TwitchCon might be like 1920x1080 JPGs at 85% quality, while T...TwitchConPics might be full resolution PNG files.  For the most part, they'd have the same actual content in the multiple places, although there might be a few songs / videos / photos where there's only one copy, or there's three or four on other places.

I'd want to be able to find where the different ones are, and consolidate them to only existing in D:\Media\(whatever), plus the backup location.

 

I get the feeling that dedupe would just find the files, store them in one location, but still leave pointers from the original locations (kind-of similar to Windows shortcuts in a way).  I remember some time ago looking at Duplicate File Finders, but it was a while back, I think on like Windows 98 or 2000 or XP or something like that.  I think it did a lot of what I wanted, but I haven't found stuff recently that would do it.  (I think it still required a lot of manual work to decide what I wanted to keep & toss, which I could understand, just want to streamline the process.)

 

Even if I didn't use dedupe, I still think I'd definitely want the checksumming, error correction, etc.

 

 

05 - Low Ram, Low Budget (sum of other parts ≤ 1 4-6TB HDD), UnRAID/others?

 

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It will use extra as a cache though so it never hurts to throw as much as you can. 

 

Ahh.  Hopefully I could get something working on fairly low system resources.  I was hoping to build the entire NAS system, not including the storage for the backup data, for about what a single 4 or 6 TB HDD costs (or an 8TB drive when it's on sale).  That would include the case, PSU, motherboard, CPU, RAM, any HBAs, boot drive, GPU (unless there's on-board HDMI or DisplayPort - I might sometimes hook up a monitor and that's all I have, I've heard you can't easily go VGA out to HDMI/DP in, or it might be cheaper to get like a GT 710), OS license (if I went with UnRAID), etc.

 

Speaking of which, I was also considering UnRAID as well.  I like how it doesn't require tons of RAM nor ECC if I understand right, and I think unlike FreeNAS, you can add and remove drives one at a time.  I've also heard of, I think, Rockstor, OpenMediaVault, ZFSonLinux, and maybe one or two others, but don't know enough about them yet.

 

 

06 - have i3-6100, build around LGA1151?

 

One thing that *might* influence what I'd get - I have an i3-6100 sitting around unused in the box right now.  It was in my laptop (Clevo P750DM-G) before I upgraded to a 6700K last Black Friday.  A few LGA1151 boards I've considered include the ASRock B250M Pro4, Gigabyte GA-B250M-D3H, or if I went ECC, the ASRock E3V5 WS, the somehwat-over-budget ASRock C236 WSI or SuperMicro MBD-X11SSM-F-O, or if I stole an 8GB G.Skill Ares DDR3-1600 stick from my Z97/LGA1150 desktop (leaving it with 24GB), the not-currently-available-but-was-$77-until-this-week ASUS B150M-K D3.  (Too bad there isn't an LGA1151 board that accepts SO-DIMM DDR4 - I'd pull the 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4-2133 stick out of my laptop, leaving the two 16GB sticks in there, and giving me room to add another two 16GB sticks to the laptop when prices come down.)

 

 

07 - liking Fractal Design cases; or alt. options for dual/quad-socket mobos

 

Fractal Design cases are on my short list, like the Node 804 (if I go µATX) or Define R3/4/5 if I go ATX.  I'm not sure I'd want EATX, though, as the Define XL R2 is a bit big for me.  I don't want a server/rackmount case, which might prevent me using a quad-socket motherboard (even though those are the only ones that I've seen that accept 128GB of DDR2 RAM.  I've se6en 64GB - 8x8 - DDR2 ECC / FB-DIMM for like $65-70 on eBay.)

 

08 - reminiscing tape backup 23 yrs ago cost fraction per capacity vs HDDs.  Anything similar today?

 

I was actually hoping to find a solution for which the backup hardware and media would work out to be a small fraction of the cost per capacity compared to regular HDDs, kind of like what my parents had in the early/mid 90s with tape backup.  (I was talking with I think Tech Deals on twitter though and he said they were very unreliable.)  Screenshot of invoices below - for example, a 540MB HDD for $325 in June '94, a box of 2x 420MB tapes for $40 ($20 per tape) in Feb '95, a 420MB tape drive for $169 in March '95, and a 1.6GB HDD for $297.67 in Dec '95.

 

I'd think an equivalent today would be like getting a 10TB HDD around $320, some 8TB media for like $20 each, and a way to interface with said media for $170.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Oh! Just thought of a couple things @dalekphalm ...

 

What if I was to get a board that did not natively support 3+ TB drives on the integrated controllers, but I added LSI 2008 or newer PCIe SAS HBAs?  Would something like that work?

Whether I did that would depend on the parts pricing.  If the HBA + old board (that only supported 2TB) was cheaper than the newer board (that supported 2TB+) on its own, I'd consider the old board + HBA.  The type of RAM used would also be a factor as well.  I've seen 64GB (8x8) of DDR2 / FB-DIMM as low as $55-60 or so on eBay.  For DDR3 ECC, 64GB starts at about $180 (except for one listing at $125).

 

I'd guess I wouldn't want to get a board that's so old it doesn't even HAVE PCI-E slots, right?  Also, depending on how I'd do the NAS, I'd want support for enough RAM.  (I'm hoping to be able to do something other than FreeNAS/ZFS so I don't need the x GB per TB formula used, while still having integrity checking / checksums / maybe deduplication.)

 

Also what about riser cards (at least on Supermicro boards) vs having the PCIe slots built in?  Personally, I think I'd prefer built-in.

 

Also I think I'd like to use something similar to a desktop case, rather than a rackmount case.  I hear server fans can get pretty loud, and I'm looking for as close to 0 dB silence as possible, or at least having each mechanical HDD be louder than all the fans combined.  Depending on what type of board I would get, I was considering like a Fractal Design Define series case, like an R3/R4/R5.  (Although, those would only fit ATX & smaller, which would rule out dual and quad socket boards.)

 

As I think I mentioned above, I also have an i3-6100 sitting unused.  (It was in my laptop before I upgraded to the 6700K in November 2016.)  Maybe I should get one of the LGA1151 boards I mentioned above instead of an older server board, since I already have the CPU?  (I'd be leaning strongly toward the Gigabyte GA-B250M-S3H or similar.)  If I went for LGA1151, I'd probably only put in 4 GB RAM, not sure if I"d be able to stretch the budget for 8 GB.  (I think the ASRock C236 WSI would be out of reach totally, but the E3V5 WS might be a possibility, if I got a board that supported ECC; the Gigabyte board doesn't.)

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Oh! Just thought of a couple things @dalekphalm ...

 

What if I was to get a board that did not natively support 3+ TB drives on the integrated controllers, but I added LSI 2008 or newer PCIe SAS HBAs?  Would something like that work?

Whether I did that would depend on the parts pricing.  If the HBA + old board (that only supported 2TB) was cheaper than the newer board (that supported 2TB+) on its own, I'd consider the old board + HBA.  The type of RAM used would also be a factor as well.  I've seen 64GB (8x8) of DDR2 / FB-DIMM as low as $55-60 or so on eBay.  For DDR3 ECC, 64GB starts at about $180 (except for one listing at $125).

 

I'd guess I wouldn't want to get a board that's so old it doesn't even HAVE PCI-E slots, right?  Also, depending on how I'd do the NAS, I'd want support for enough RAM.  (I'm hoping to be able to do something other than FreeNAS/ZFS so I don't need the x GB per TB formula used, while still having integrity checking / checksums / maybe deduplication.)

 

Also what about riser cards (at least on Supermicro boards) vs having the PCIe slots built in?  Personally, I think I'd prefer built-in.

 

Also I think I'd like to use something similar to a desktop case, rather than a rackmount case.  I hear server fans can get pretty loud, and I'm looking for as close to 0 dB silence as possible, or at least having each mechanical HDD be louder than all the fans combined.  Depending on what type of board I would get, I was considering like a Fractal Design Define series case, like an R3/R4/R5.  (Although, those would only fit ATX & smaller, which would rule out dual and quad socket boards.)

 

As I think I mentioned above, I also have an i3-6100 sitting unused.  (It was in my laptop before I upgraded to the 6700K in November 2016.)  Maybe I should get one of the LGA1151 boards I mentioned above instead of an older server board, since I already have the CPU?  (I'd be leaning strongly toward the Gigabyte GA-B250M-S3H or similar.)

1. I do believe that using a SAS2008 RAID/HBA Card (or similar w/ 3TB+ support) would still function correctly on an older motherboard - so long as the OS itself also supports such large drive/partition sizes.

 

2. DDR2 is pretty slow - granted, still better than HDD caching, but still - if you can get something with DDR3 support, I'd go for it. Not sure on the Server Hardware side of things, but quite a few LGA775 Motherboards support DDR3.

 

3. Yes, I would avoid ANYTHING that doesn't have PCEe. PCI and PCI-X are both way too slow for a modern RAID/HBA card. You'd have a massive IO bottleneck.

 

4. Dedupe is Memory/CPU intensive, no matter what OS you choose to use. If you use a different OS that uses Dedupe, you're still going to need a lot of RAM for good performance. It might not be exactly the 1TB = 1GB of RAM formula, but it will still be significant.

 

Honestly, if you're gonna do Dedupe, you should either:

A. Do it properly, and just get a crap load of RAM, or

B. Forget about it completely, and just spend the money saved on RAM on bigger/more HDD's, so that you don't need to use Dedupe in the first place.

 

ZFS has Checksum/integrity protection/bitrot protection built-in via scrubbing. I have a 12TB ZFS RAIDZ1 pool w/ only 8GB of RAM, and it does scrubbing with no problems.

 

5. Riser cards are generally not a problem. Many Server motherboards/chassis use them.

 

6. If you want a silent build, that pretty much excludes using a pre-built server (whether new or used), since modifying them enough for silent operation is going to be difficult or impossible.

In that case, you'll want to get a good airflow case, and some excellent low dB fans, with an efficient, low power CPU.

 

7. An i3-6100 is not a bad CPU for a low powered home NAS/Server. You won't be doing any Virtualization with that thing, but it'll do just fine for NAS oriented tasks. It's low enough power, and it also supports ECC RAM - if you choose to use that feature. Picking up a motherboard for that CPU might be a good basis for a NAS build. You'd get DDR4 support (or DDR3, with the right board), and you can pick one with enough onboard SATA ports for a sweet little FreeNAS build. Then, no need to worry about HBA cards at all, unless you run out of ports - but even a smaller board will have at least 6 SATA ports - sometimes as many as 10+.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

b01 - 3+TB via HBA on older boards

 

On 11/16/2017 at 4:30 PM, dalekphalm said:

1. I do believe that using a SAS2008 RAID/HBA Card (or similar w/ 3TB+ support) would still function correctly on an older motherboard - so long as the OS itself also supports such large drive/partition sizes.

Ahh, so even if the board doesn't use UEFI, I could still use the HBA for large drives?  And I was thinking of running a distro of Linux, if I didn't use FreeNAS, or something else.  (I don't plan on running Windows, especially not a 32-bit version.)

I'm guessing I'd at least also want a 64-bit capable CPU.

 

 

b02 - DDR2 vs DDR3 RAM, speed, price

 

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2. DDR2 is pretty slow - granted, still better than HDD caching, but still - if you can get something with DDR3 support, I'd go for it. Not sure on the Server Hardware side of things, but quite a few LGA775 Motherboards support DDR3.

Well, DDR3 RAM appears to be about three times as expensive as DDR2 RAM on eBay right now, at least for ECC / FB-DIMMs.

"still better than HDD caching" popped something in my mind, not sure if I'd do it ... but what about using a smaller (like 64GB, 120GB or at most 250GB) SSD for caching?

 

Interesting, a lot of LGA775 boards I've seen I thought were DDR2.  Also IIRC, LGA771 is dual socket / server, LGA775 is single socket in that generation.  (I hear there's a mod that can be done to make one work in the other's socket, but not really sure I want to do that.)

 

I just remembered I have 4x 1GB sticks of G.Skill DDR2-800 RAM that I saved from my previous desktop (that I used from 2008 to 2012).  (Whoa, it's STILL being sold new by Newegg?? )

 

 

b03 - PCI to SATA; PCI GPU in PCI-X slot?

 

Quote

 

3. Yes, I would avoid ANYTHING that doesn't have PCEe. PCI and PCI-X are both way too slow for a modern RAID/HBA card. You'd have a massive IO bottleneck.

Yeah. I think at most it could only support 1 SATA port per PCI slot, and even that would be for slower / older HDDs.

 

Also ... let's say I got a board that had PCIe, and PCI-X, and only has VGA out.  (My monitor only has HDMI and DisplayPort in, and I might want to hook it up to the NAS sometimes.)  Could I drop, say, a PCI-based GT 610 (I've seen them around I think) into a PCI-X slot, leaving the PCIe slots free for HBAs?  (I've heard, I think, that there's some compatibility between PCI & PCI-X...)

 

 

04 - Dedupe

 

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4. Dedupe is Memory/CPU intensive, no matter what OS you choose to use. If you use a different OS that uses Dedupe, you're still going to need a lot of RAM for good performance. It might not be exactly the 1TB = 1GB of RAM formula, but it will still be significant.

 

Honestly, if you're gonna do Dedupe, you should either:

A. Do it properly, and just get a crap load of RAM, or

B. Forget about it completely, and just spend the money saved on RAM on bigger/more HDD's, so that you don't need to use Dedupe in the first place.

Ahh.  See section #04 in my previous post where I try to say why I was thinking of dedupe.

I do want to get rid of my duplicate stuff, but I'm getting the feeling that dedupe won't it quite how I want. (Like, if I was to restore from a backup to new media with it non-deduped / running a "standard" filesystem like ext4 or NTFS, the original duplicates would be put back; is that something like how it works when copying to a non-dedupe-supporting platform?)

I think I'd be leaning toward B, of the above options in the quote.

 

 

b05 - ZFS or No? Prefer not much RAM.  ECC or No?

 

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ZFS has Checksum/integrity protection/bitrot protection built-in via scrubbing. I have a 12TB ZFS RAIDZ1 pool w/ only 8GB of RAM, and it does scrubbing with no problems.

Ahh.  I wonder if there's a way to do it without ZFS.  Also you mention that you have 8GB RAM with a 12TB pool, meaning you have less than the 1GB per TB formula.  I guess having less RAM would be safe (even if not high performance), even if, say, I ran with only 1 stick of the lowest capacity RAM for that generation (4GB for DDR4, 1 or 2GB for DDR3, I think 512MB for DDR2)?

 

What about ECC?  I've heard that can wreak havoc with a scrubbed pool if things go wrong.  I definitely want to keep things as safe as possible.  I don't care about performance so much.  (If I could still get a tape drive for $150 and multi-TB tapes for like $30 each, I'd do that, provided they're reliable.)

 

I wouldn't be able to afford lots of RAM of either type, but I probably could swing 1 or 2 small-capacity sticks of ECC.  (Probably limit to 4 GB if I got DDR4, maybe 8 GB with DDR3 and 32 or 64 GB for DDR2.)

 

One thing I don't like about ZFS / FreeNAS is you can't add drives 1 at a time, like I think you can with UnRAID.  (Does UnRAID / OpenMediaVault / others have bitrot / checksum / integrity protection?)

 

 

b06 - Riser Cards

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5. Riser cards are generally not a problem. Many Server motherboards/chassis use them.

Ahh.  I wasn't sure if there was some configuration hassle compared to standard builds, etc; also, I haven't thought a lot about cases that would take riser cards.  I'm pretty sure that I don't want a rackmount style case.  I've heard that some new builds use riser cards to show off their GPUs, but that's not what I'm looking to do.  A GTX 1060 by itself, or an RX 580 before the mining craze would cost more than my planned/expected budget for all the parts combined, not counting storage.

 

 

b07 - avoiding pre-built servers & their motherboards; mobo brands for older sockets

 

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6. If you want a silent build, that pretty much excludes using a pre-built server (whether new or used), since modifying them enough for silent operation is going to be difficult or impossible.

Yeah.  I briefly looked at pre-built servers, but ... nah, don't want to go there.  (And I don't think I'd try to build around a "Dell" / "HP" / etc. mobo off ebay either.  I'm mostly looking at ASRock Rack, ASUS, Gigabyte, Intel, Supermicro & Tyan.  I've probably done more research on Supermicro boards than the others combined - their website is quite extensive.

 

 

b08 - cases

 

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In that case, you'll want to get a good airflow case, and some excellent low dB fans, with an efficient, low power CPU.

Yeah.  As I mentioned earlier, I was considering Fractal Design (the Define series have quite a few drive bays and it's possible to add a few more, and the Node 804 has 10 bays included) for the cases, mostly.  There's a few others I've also looked at but I think I like FD.  (I'd have to choose something else if I went dual-socket EATX, since I don't think the Define XL supports full 13"-width EATX boards, just 10.7".)  As for the CPU, if I went with Xeons, I might be leaning toward one of the "L" SKUs or equivalent.  (Also, power where I currently live isn't cheap - a bill from a few months ago mentions 23¢/kWh up to 428 kWh/month, and 43¢/kWh above that.  That alone might make me spend a little more up front for a more power efficient / lower TDP CPU.)

 

 

b09 - LGA1151 vs others

 

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7. An i3-6100 is not a bad CPU for a low powered home NAS/Server. You won't be doing any Virtualization with that thing, but it'll do just fine for NAS oriented tasks. It's low enough power, and it also supports ECC RAM - if you choose to use that feature. Picking up a motherboard for that CPU might be a good basis for a NAS build. You'd get DDR4 support (or DDR3, with the right board), and you can pick one with enough onboard SATA ports for a sweet little FreeNAS build. Then, no need to worry about HBA cards at all, unless you run out of ports - but even a smaller board will have at least 6 SATA ports - sometimes as many as 10+.

That's definitely an option I'm considering, I'm almost wondering if it might be better than trying to go for LGA1366 / 771 and getting lots of DDR2/DDR3 ECC RAM.  (I can't afford 32 or 64GB RAM anyway, unless I got DDR2 and even then that'd be a stretch.)

 

 

BTW ... can you plug a PCIe 2.0 x8 HBA into a PCIe 3.0 x4-wired x16 slot?  Or would there be a bottleneck somehow?

 

 

b10 - possible LGA1151 boards

 

Some LGA1151 boards I'm looking at include:

• $60 on Newegg - ASRock B250M Pro4 -
  • Micro ATX,
  • supports 64GB non-ECC RAM, 
  • 6 SATA ports, 
  • 2 PCIe x16 (1 wired x4), 1 PCIe x1, 1 PCI slots
  • HDMI port
• $75 on Newegg - Gigabyte GA-B250-HD3 -
  • ATX,
  • supports 64GB non-ECC RAM,
  • 8 SATA ports,
  • 2 PCIe x16 (1 wired x4), 2 PCIe x1, 2 PCI slots
  • HDMI port
• $75 on Newegg - Gigabyte GA-B250M-D3H -
  • micro ATX,
  • supports 64GB non-ECC RAM,
  • 8 SATA ports,
  • 2 PCIe x16 (1 wired x4), 2 PCI slots
  • HDMI & DisplayPort
• $114 on Amazon - ASRock E3V5 WS -
  • ATX,
  • supports 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM, 
  • 6 SATA ports, 
  • 2 PCIe x16 (1 is wired x4), 3 PCIe x1 slots.
  • No video ports, may need PCIe 1x Zotac GT 710 ~$44 on Amazon - if I want video out & don't want to use an x16 slot for a GPU.  (I did see an MSI GT 710 at Fry's a month ago for like $24, it'd been there for a few weeks.  I also saw a N.I.B. 8400 GS for like $35 or so. )
• $138 on Amazon - MSI C236A WORKSTATION -
  • ATX,
  • supports 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM, 
  • 6 SATA ports,
  • 3 PCIe x16 (only 1 @ x16, unsure if others = x8 or x4), 3 PCIe x1 slots,
  • HDMI port
• $140 on Newegg - ASRock Z270 Gaming K6 -
  • ATX,
  • supports 64GB DDR4 non-ECC RAM,
  • 8 SATA ports
  • 3 PCIe x16 (1 x16, 1 x8, 1 x4, "supports SLI"), 3 PCIe x1 slots
  • HDMI port

 

Over my preferred price range, but may consider if on deep sale:

• $210 (-20% promo) on Newegg - ASRock C236 WSI -
  • Mini ITX,
  • supports 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM,
  • 8 SATA ports,
  • 1 PCIe x16. 
  • Has HDMI & DisplayPort,
    • I'd only consider mini ITX if it had HDMI/DP AND if I was building in a small enough case to require mITX, like a Fractal Design Node 304 ($87 on Amazon, 6 3.5" bays) or Lian-Li PC-Q25B ($110-30% on Newegg, 7 3.5" bays).  There was also the Silverstone DS380B and Lian-Li PC-Q26B, but reviews said the SS had severe heat issues, and both were like $160-190 before being discontinued.
• $195 (-5%) on Newegg - Supermicro X11SSM-F -
  • Micro ATX,
  • supports 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM,
  • 8 SATA ports,
  • 1 PCIe x16, 3 PCIe x8. 
  • Only has VGA port, may need GPU (like GT 710) for video out.
• $204 on Amazon - ASUS P10S-M WS -
  • Micro ATX, 
  • supports 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM,
  • 8 SATA ports,
  • 1 PCIe x16, 1 PCIe x8, 1 PCIe x1,
  • has DisplayPort & HDMI.

 

There's the ~$210 ASRock Z270 Taichi board which has 10 SATA ports built in, but it doesn't support ECC, and I think I'd be better off getting one of the 8-port boards plus an HBA.  Also, if I was going to pull an 8GB stick of DDR3 from my desktop, there was a board around $75-80, but it's discontinued now.  Then today I came across a Supermicro LGA1151 board that supports DDR4 SO-DIMMS (steal the 8GB stick from my laptop, leaving it with 2x16), but that would be non-ECC, in case I'd need it.

 

 

b11 - PSU

 

I'd also need a PSU.  A few on my shortlist include the

• Corsair HX750 Platinum ($130, 16 SATA connectors),
• FSP Hydro G 750W ($100, 12 SATA connectors),
• FSP Hydro G 650W ($85, 10 SATA connectors),
• SeaSonic G-750 ($90, 10 SATA connectors),
• EVGA SuperNova G2 550W ($70, 9 SATA connectors).