Best motherboard for many memory slots?

[iceisfun]

I would like to stand up 2-4TB of memory for a rotating image cache not writing to a disk?

These images are not critical to store for long periods, right now we just store a few minutes worth of content.

Suggestions?

 

[ari2asem]

the only platform supporting that much memory is epyc 7002 series, with dual socket setup

 

[zack$]

Dual socket 2nd gen intel scalable are also worth a look. They support up to 4tb 3ds ecc and up to 2tb optane p. memory/nvdimm.

The Intel platform offers more options for your use case.

You can check out the x11 gen Supermicro MBs.

 

[MBastian]

I keep on wondering what your exact use case is. We're talking about an awful lot of money, just for the memory sticks. Depending on the OS and software there might be better options. If you don't need ultra high write IOPS maybe you could get away with some 1.6TB to 2TB x8 high endurance HHHL cards in a Raid0 setup? Anyway, as @zack$ wrote, maybe Optane persistent memory might be worth a look?

 

[NablaSquaredG]

Look at Xeon E7 v2 - v4 series, they support up to 96 DIMMs (24 per CPU), DDR3 or DDR4 depending on the memory boards you get.
Up to 6TB for DDR3 or 12TB for DDR4.

 

[iceisfun]

I keep on wondering what your exact use case is. We're talking about an awful lot of money, just for the memory sticks. Depending on the OS and software there might be better options. If you don't need ultra high write IOPS maybe you could get away with some 1.6TB to 2TB x8 high endurance HHHL cards in a Raid0 setup? Anyway, as @zack$ wrote, maybe Optane persistent memory might be worth a look?

The use case is storing a buffer of all frames from a bunch of cameras that infeed into a vision system in a factory so we can scrub through the data if we want, it uses about 1-2tb per 24h of run time.

* all means frames that actually matter, not frames where for example no motion happened

Right now we use a DC ssd for this, it just seems like something that will run forever with a high memory machine.

And I have a spare p4800x 750gb optane drive I could also use, I might start with that.

 

[T_Minus]

Look at Xeon E7 v2 - v4 series, they support up to 96 DIMMs (24 per CPU), DDR3 or DDR4 depending on the memory boards you get.
Up to 6TB for DDR3 or 12TB for DDR4.

THIS will be the "cheapest" option, and by cheapest I mean the chassis\cpu will be "cheap". The rAM will be expensive no matter what... but 96 x 32GB DDR3 is much cheaper than DDR4, and the performance difference probably isn't relevant for this task.

If you don't need it now I'd wait for RAM prices to drip.

I just looked into this exact thing for a client and outside of initial cost powering this will be $$$ too you probably also want a nice raid10 or raid0 of NVME to handle data movement too.

 

[zack$]

Optane memory is much cheaper than ddr3/ddr4. I'm seeing $120 for 1 x 128GB modules on the bay now.

Despite the platform costs, if your happy with 2TB, Intel 2nd scalable is very attractive owing to Optane.

 

[bayleyw]

I've done this before and the right way to do it is through NVMe drives - 2TB per day is nothing for even a single 970 Pro (good for about 1GB/sec). You only need enough RAM to buffer your longest bursts over 1GB/sec.