3rd party MB for the Supermicro 836BA chassis

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jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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Hi. I just recently joined and have not found anything close to my question using the search feature of this forum.

I am looking at buying the Supermicro 386BA-R920B chassis to use as a NAS running TrueNAS. Currently I am running turnkey type 6 to 10 NASes. I am considering using the X11SPL-F board, but looking at other MB option. So far the only suitable one that I can find is the ASUS Z11PS-U12. I want remote management so my choices are slim. I was hoping to find a Ryzen based board, but the only one that I could find was a uATX size which will not work in the chassis.

My question is will I have any problem with using a 3rd party ATX or E-ATX MB in the 386BA chassis. I see that Gigabyte has some new boards based on the C621 chipset, but don't see prices on them yet. I am not comfortable with using older gen boards and then trying to buy used CPUs.

Thanks.
 

itronin

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Nov 24, 2018
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Possible challenges that jump to mind (there could be others - will depend on the motherboard you select):

Challenge #1 - Front panel to motherboard control.
the 836 (like many/most/all of the supermicro chassis) use a ribbon cable to provide front panel connections to SM motherboards which typically have a common pin/purpose pattern. This is an easy fix.

To solve you can:
Build your own.
Order one of these in short or long lengths.

Possible Challenge #2 - Suitable power provided by the PSU('s) in the 836.
there was a semi recent report of of someone not being able to power their non supermicro motherboard in a supermicro rackmount chassis (can't find it right now). You'd need to search around the forum for specifics. Example1, Example2 Those are for 846 but same diff for possible challenges.

Possible Challenge #3 - Are you planning to install a discrete GPU that requires PSU power?
If so you may have to craft/create a power adapter cable - if possible.
 

i386

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I've used a intel h5520hc in a 836ba, everything worked normally. (Except the fans ran at 100% all the time, but that's an Intel issue).
Like @itronin said you will need the front panel cables/adapters.

Personally I would go with a supermicro mainboard. They have connectors that allow to monitor the psus & chassis intrusion over ipmi.
 

jack2020

New Member
Feb 28, 2021
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Possible challenges that jump to mind (there could be others - will depend on the motherboard you select):

Challenge #1 - Front panel to motherboard control.
the 836 (like many/most/all of the supermicro chassis) use a ribbon cable to provide front panel connections to SM motherboards which typically have a common pin/purpose pattern. This is an easy fix.

To solve you can:
Build your own.
Order one of these in short or long lengths.

Possible Challenge #2 - Suitable power provided by the PSU('s) in the 836.
there was a semi recent report of of someone not being able to power their non supermicro motherboard in a supermicro rackmount chassis (can't find it right now). You'd need to search around the forum for specifics. Example1, Example2 Those are for 846 but same diff for possible challenges.

Possible Challenge #3 - Are you planning to install a discrete GPU that requires PSU power?
If so you may have to craft/create a power adapter cable - if possible.
Hi and thanks for your reply. Building or buying some cables is not a problem. Not being able to power up 3rd party MB certainly is. Don't I will install a GPU, but if I do, it will be a simple low end card.

Thanks again. More research to do.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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I've used a intel h5520hc in a 836ba, everything worked normally. (Except the fans ran at 100% all the time, but that's an Intel issue).
Like @itronin said you will need the front panel cables/adapters.

Personally I would go with a supermicro mainboard. They have connectors that allow to monitor the psus & chassis intrusion over ipmi.
Hi.

I would like to go with SM, but I don't care to have to source older CPUs. An i5 or Ryzen5 CPU would be more than enough for my NAS. Unless I am sleep walking and don't know it, no one else will be opening the chassis (I am a insomniac). Food for thought

Thanks for your reply.
 

itronin

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Nov 24, 2018
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I'm gonna ask some standard questions.

Are you purchasing this gear new? New motherboard? new chassis? new CPU?
Have you already sourced all the other parts (besides motherboard and cpu) ?
the chassis you specc'ed is a direct backplane (SFF-8087 target I think). Don't need or don't want an expander? You'd prefer SFF-8087 to say SATA connectors?
have you spec'ed the HBA (or HBAs) or planning to use an HBA and a onboard SATA?
what kind of budget do you have? (you mentioned in a different thread, about the cost of SQ PSU's)
What kind of disks do you plan to use? All SATA? All SAS? whatever you can get your hands on?
Is your use case simply as a NAS, no virtualization, dockers, containers, or TBD?

To underscore what @i386 said you will have better luck kitting this out successfully if you use a SM motherboard in the SM chassis.
Its a very nice ecosystem with a lot of flexibility.

Where are you located? US has very good access to used SM gear, EU less so and I think AU and APAC even less.

You may find that you can buy second hand components that meet your needs, PLUS spares for less than buy new. In some cases MUCH less.
 

jack2020

New Member
Feb 28, 2021
17
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I'm gonna ask some standard questions.

Are you purchasing this gear new? New motherboard? new chassis? new CPU?
Have you already sourced all the other parts (besides motherboard and cpu) ?
the chassis you specc'ed is a direct backplane (SFF-8087 target I think). Don't need or don't want an expander? You'd prefer SFF-8087 to say SATA connectors?
have you spec'ed the HBA (or HBAs) or planning to use an HBA and a onboard SATA?
what kind of budget do you have? (you mentioned in a different thread, about the cost of SQ PSU's)
What kind of disks do you plan to use? All SATA? All SAS? whatever you can get your hands on?
Is your use case simply as a NAS, no virtualization, dockers, containers, or TBD?

To underscore what @i386 said you will have better luck kitting this out successfully if you use a SM motherboard in the SM chassis.
Its a very nice ecosystem with a lot of flexibility.

Where are you located? US has very good access to used SM gear, EU less so and I think AU and APAC even less.

You may find that you can buy second hand components that meet your needs, PLUS spares for less than buy new. In some cases MUCH less.
I had a look on ebay and the shipping cost are insane for many of the items that I am looking at. So I will be buying new chassis, MB, CPU. Haven't sourced the RAM, still looking at them. Have a list for HBAs. Yes SFF-8087 connections. I will be reusing my currents HDDs which are SATA.
Yes this build is purely NAS (Storage). VM server build will be down the road. I have spec'd out the 2x 2.5" hotswap addon for the chassis to hold the OS (mirrored). The 16 bay chassis should hold me over and allow enough expansion for years to come. The MB will need 3 good PCIe slots to hold 2 HBAs and 10GB NIC card. The 10GB NICs will be for data xfers and backups.

I have lots of photos that I have taken and I shoot RAW. I rip all my music as FLAC, have ripped all my tv shows and movies. I don't compress. I want the best video quality.

I am located in Canada.
 

itronin

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Nov 24, 2018
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I am located in Canada.
You might take a look at the LSI 9400-16i if it is not on your list...

Yes. the Bay shipping costs tend to be insane from the US across the border.

There are some re-shippers folks have commented on and I've been known to occasionally ship small items across the border. Not sure if the borders are still closed or not nor whether you are on the West Coast near Vancouver... There is a very nice 846 (yeah bigger than you want) but with the correct power supplies and an overkill SAS2 expander sitting on the Bay for local pickup in Bellvue WA.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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I live in Ontario and I also don't drive, oh well.

That card was not on my list. At first I was going to say not supported by FreeBSD/TrueNAS, but I remembered to check out the specs for the card to see what chip it uses. It uses the 3416 which is listed. So I will add it to my list.

I started building computers in the very early 80's. Yeah, I am old, almost 60. Was quite easy figuring out what parts to get, but you needs the smarts to put it together. Lots of dip switches and/or jumper, prevent IRQ conflicts and such. Now one spends more time checking more ahead like if I used this M.2 slot, what I/O do I lose and such. My very first computer was the Apple II clone and I built it from scratch. I had to solder every part on the bare board. I soldered about 8 in total (2 for myself and the rest for others). I even built the IBM XT clone from scratch. I played with a few microcontroller and wrote a fair bit of firmware for myself and later on as part of my first job. The Intel 8031 was the first. I designed and built my own Logic Analyzer based on that controller. My first LA was based on the 65C802 which was a 16bit version for the 6502 used in the Apple II. Had to stop working with electronics in that form as I would get some headaches and strange feeling, that was about 1989. Sold off all my parts and gear. I started back into again back in 2017. Doing Home Automation stuff as well. Well enough blabbering from me.

Once again, thanks for your help.
 
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nivedita

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Dec 9, 2020
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The 9400-16i I think will be overkill: it is a tri-mode model that supports attaching NVME drives in addition to SAS3. The backplane on that chassis only supports SAS2/SATA, so 9200 series should be enough, or 9300 if you want something more current.

I would also take a look at the X11SPH-nCTPF/-nCTF motherboards, they have fewer PCI-e slots than the X11SPL-F, but they come with support for 18 drives (8 SAS3 via SFF-8643, 8 SATA via SFF-8087, 2 SATADOM) plus 2 NVME ports, and 10Gbit networking builtin for about $150 more than the X11SPL-F. They're basically perfect for a 16-drive NAS + 2 boot drives, and will let you add an NVME caching layer if you want as well.
 

itronin

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Nov 24, 2018
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The 9400-16i I think will be overkill: it is a tri-mode model that supports attaching NVME drives in addition to SAS3. The backplane on that chassis only supports SAS2/SATA, so 9200 series should be enough, or 9300 if you want something more current.
If by support you mean the backplane uses SFF-8087 connections which are typically found in SAS2 expanders, HBA's etc. then sure.
Multiple folks (@i386 in this thread even) have documented that that the SM Direct backplanes or "A" style work fine at SAS-3 speeds and to be clear there is NO expander in the chassis OP specc'ed.

The 9400-16i also works great with TQ backplanes (SATA connector per drive).

The 9400-16i was selling for about $250.00 (OBO) per card for a while on the Bay (US). I know I bought some.

Using the motherboard that OP listed then the 9400-16i is a single slot HH card that will handle all of the front drive connections and at 250 or so is just a bit more than buying a pair of 3008-8i cards which would use two slots. If OP is planning on spinners then the actual bandwidth of an x8 card is not even an issue. For the sake of argument let's say using 50% SAS3 SSD's the PCIE bandwidth is still not likely to really be an issue in real world use cases (and especially if this is network served storage at 10 or 40Gbe). Only if the 50% SSD storage was consumed on the local system would the PCIE actually and potentially become the bottleneck. And btw, an LSI 9300-8i will also bottleneck at the x8 PCIE with 8xSAS3 SSD's running full tilt.

Cabling: to use this HBA with an A backplane you need SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 cables and with a TQ backplane SFF-8643 to SATA cables. SM eStore has both flavors (including a right angle with staggered lengths for the TQ backplane) actually very nicely priced.
 

nivedita

Member
Dec 9, 2020
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If by support you mean the backplane uses SFF-8087 connections which are typically found in SAS2 expanders, HBA's etc. then sure.
Multiple folks (@i386 in this thread even) have documented that that the SM Direct backplanes or "A" style work fine at SAS-3 speeds and to be clear there is NO expander in the chassis OP specc'ed.

The 9400-16i also works great with TQ backplanes (SATA connector per drive).

The 9400-16i was selling for about $250.00 (OBO) per card for a while on the Bay (US). I know I bought some.

Using the motherboard that OP listed then the 9400-16i is a single slot HH card that will handle all of the front drive connections and at 250 or so is just a bit more than buying a pair of 3008-8i cards which would use two slots. If OP is planning on spinners then the actual bandwidth of an x8 card is not even an issue. For the sake of argument let's say using 50% SAS3 SSD's the PCIE bandwidth is still not likely to really be an issue in real world use cases (and especially if this is network served storage at 10 or 40Gbe). Only if the 50% SSD storage was consumed on the local system would the PCIE actually and potentially become the bottleneck. And btw, an LSI 9300-8i will also bottleneck at the x8 PCIE with 8xSAS3 SSD's running full tilt.

Cabling: to use this HBA with an A backplane you need SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 cables and with a TQ backplane SFF-8643 to SATA cables. SM eStore has both flavors (including a right angle with staggered lengths for the TQ backplane) actually very nicely priced.
I was going off the Supermicro specifications which only say SAS2, and the OP says he's only planning to use SATA HDDs anyway. Good to know it actually works at SAS3 speeds.

Re 9400 vs 9200/9300 I was assuming it would cost more because of the added NVME support, but apparently that's not the case. $250 for 9400-16i seems pretty good, weird that the 9305-16i's are listed for considerably more than that. PCIe bandwidth is not an issue, sure.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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The 9400-16i I think will be overkill: it is a tri-mode model that supports attaching NVME drives in addition to SAS3. The backplane on that chassis only supports SAS2/SATA, so 9200 series should be enough, or 9300 if you want something more current.

I would also take a look at the X11SPH-nCTPF/-nCTF motherboards, they have fewer PCI-e slots than the X11SPL-F, but they come with support for 18 drives (8 SAS3 via SFF-8643, 8 SATA via SFF-8087, 2 SATADOM) plus 2 NVME ports, and 10Gbit networking builtin for about $150 more than the X11SPL-F. They're basically perfect for a 16-drive NAS + 2 boot drives, and will let you add an NVME caching layer if you want as well.
I will take a look at the X11SPH-nCTPF board. I can always change out the backplane later on if I need more speed. I ordered the SC836BA-R920B chassis and should have it in about 1.5 weeks. compiling a list of the rest, MB, CPU, RAM, heat sink, 2x 2.5in drive holder for the back for OS boot drives, quieter replacement fans for the chassis, HBA and cables. Would have loved to use a 3rd party board with Ryzen CPU, but not want to risk of problems that other have experienced. Can't afford the time and money wated.

Thanks for your input.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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That's not correct.
I have that chassis with the A backplane and it supports sas3 (with hdds and ssds).
Hi. I know just little about SAS, what part of the backplane makes is support SAS3. For the main part, I know that SAS3 is 12Gb.

Thanks.
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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what part of the backplane makes is support SAS3.
The "A" and "TQ" backplanes are passive backplanes, the electronical signals between the devices and hba/raid controller go straight through. There are no active electronics like sas expander involved.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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If by support you mean the backplane uses SFF-8087 connections which are typically found in SAS2 expanders, HBA's etc. then sure.
Multiple folks (@i386 in this thread even) have documented that that the SM Direct backplanes or "A" style work fine at SAS-3 speeds and to be clear there is NO expander in the chassis OP specc'ed.

The 9400-16i also works great with TQ backplanes (SATA connector per drive).

The 9400-16i was selling for about $250.00 (OBO) per card for a while on the Bay (US). I know I bought some.

Using the motherboard that OP listed then the 9400-16i is a single slot HH card that will handle all of the front drive connections and at 250 or so is just a bit more than buying a pair of 3008-8i cards which would use two slots. If OP is planning on spinners then the actual bandwidth of an x8 card is not even an issue. For the sake of argument let's say using 50% SAS3 SSD's the PCIE bandwidth is still not likely to really be an issue in real world use cases (and especially if this is network served storage at 10 or 40Gbe). Only if the 50% SSD storage was consumed on the local system would the PCIE actually and potentially become the bottleneck. And btw, an LSI 9300-8i will also bottleneck at the x8 PCIE with 8xSAS3 SSD's running full tilt.

Cabling: to use this HBA with an A backplane you need SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 cables and with a TQ backplane SFF-8643 to SATA cables. SM eStore has both flavors (including a right angle with staggered lengths for the TQ backplane) actually very nicely priced.
Wow, lots to digest. In the future, I might have a small pool of SSDs, most likely SATA because of the price, but who knows.

Thanks.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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The "A" and "TQ" backplanes are passive backplanes, the electronical signals between the devices and hba/raid controller go straight through. There are no active electronics like sas expander involved.
That sounds right. Of course, the PCB has to be of a good design. Bad design would causes capacitance and inductance which would cause issues.
 

jack2020

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Feb 28, 2021
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I want to thank you all for your help. I have compiled a list of the parts I need to build my new NAS in the lab env. I already placed the order for the SC836BA-R920B chassis and should have it within in a week or so. The MBD-X11SPH-nCTF is the primary MB that I am thinking of getting after it was mentioned here to me. Just want to be sure that I can flash the LSI-3008 to IT mode. This MB is not cheap here in Canada, but I don't need to get any HBAs, so I save there. Finding all the cables I need was some work and placed a couple of call to supermicro to get some answers. Now got to triple check my P/N, links, prices and be sure I have al the right parts in my spreadsheet.
 

itronin

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You should be able to flash that to IT mode - lots of help in the controllers forum for that. For example. Even though you are not cross flashing vendors I suspect you'll have to wipe the SBR and replace it with the IT mode one. could be wrong though. A step a lot of folks forget (even though its in about ever set of directions I've seen) record the SAS address of your LSI 3008 before you do anything.

Since you have a direct backplane I'm guessing you are going to use both the SATA ports and SAS ports to connect to the backplane?

edit - internal SATA ports are SFF-8087 - not sure how I spaced that.

And SM support helped you figure out the vaguaries of the SFF-8087 to SATA reverse breakout cable (sata ports being host and SFF-8087 being TARGET)? That tricky part has hung up more than a more few folks of late.

I at a minimum would be happy to take a look at your parts list if you want to post it and would like an additional sanity check.

I think you will enjoy this build and (IMO) you are selecting very good/great components! I look forward to hearing how this turns out!
 
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