I'm finishing up assembly of a new storage server.
Chassis SC836TQ
Processor: Xeon 1240 V6
32GB (16GBx2) ECC DDR4 RAM - Will upgrade to 64Gb soon, trying to pay for a wedding this month.
Motherboard is a Supermicro X11SSM-F.
Expansion slots are:
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16),
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8,
2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8)
I'd like to reserve one slot for a dual 10Gb ethernet or SFP+ card in the future.
I will be adding more drives in the future, plus I'm also planning on using the onboard SATA for at least one SSD boot drive(I already have the drive laying around), so I'd like the storage drives to be on a separate controller. I'd like a controller card that I can wire into the TQ backplane and don't really want to use an expander unless I need to.
While a card with two physical ports would support up to 8 drives with the splitter cables(I already have cables I sourced cheaply), that means I'd need to source another physical card when I go beyond 8. So the alternative is to source a card that support 4 physical internal ports initially.
So my options are:
One M1015 card(or one of the many alternatives) and use an expander(Intel?) to wire into the TQ backplane
Two M1015 card(or one of the many alternatives), each driving 8 individual drives
One SAS2/SAS3 card with at least 4 physical ports to wire into the TQ backplane
I'm using WD 8TB drives I harvested(mostly reds, I do have two white labels...they seem to mix fine), so I imagine any of the above will not give me a negative impact on overall performance.
M1015's run for about $40-50 each still, so anything with 4 internal ports that's in the $90-130 range? Part of me likes the idea of having just one card, even if I pay a small premium...but mostly I'm not seeing anything under $170 range.
Chassis SC836TQ
Processor: Xeon 1240 V6
32GB (16GBx2) ECC DDR4 RAM - Will upgrade to 64Gb soon, trying to pay for a wedding this month.
Motherboard is a Supermicro X11SSM-F.
Expansion slots are:
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16),
1 PCI-E 3.0 x8,
2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8)
I'd like to reserve one slot for a dual 10Gb ethernet or SFP+ card in the future.
I will be adding more drives in the future, plus I'm also planning on using the onboard SATA for at least one SSD boot drive(I already have the drive laying around), so I'd like the storage drives to be on a separate controller. I'd like a controller card that I can wire into the TQ backplane and don't really want to use an expander unless I need to.
While a card with two physical ports would support up to 8 drives with the splitter cables(I already have cables I sourced cheaply), that means I'd need to source another physical card when I go beyond 8. So the alternative is to source a card that support 4 physical internal ports initially.
So my options are:
One M1015 card(or one of the many alternatives) and use an expander(Intel?) to wire into the TQ backplane
Two M1015 card(or one of the many alternatives), each driving 8 individual drives
One SAS2/SAS3 card with at least 4 physical ports to wire into the TQ backplane
I'm using WD 8TB drives I harvested(mostly reds, I do have two white labels...they seem to mix fine), so I imagine any of the above will not give me a negative impact on overall performance.
M1015's run for about $40-50 each still, so anything with 4 internal ports that's in the $90-130 range? Part of me likes the idea of having just one card, even if I pay a small premium...but mostly I'm not seeing anything under $170 range.