C226 based board

[5teve]

HI Guys

Just wanting some ideas thrown into the pot..

I am just sourcing all the ingredients for a server / workstation for a small business / home based business to replace an ageing server / workstation. I'm still working on which raid 6 card (mainly due to sourcing issues in Aus)

I had my eyes on the asrock c226ws board, it seems well priced and featured and is a nice combination of server/workstation type duty. Again I'm having issues sourcing the board in Aus and what I am wondering is-

• Is there an equivalent ATX board out there (most seem to be mAtx for the c226)
• Is the C226 chipset a good chipset (reason I wanted it is that it has more choice of CPU support, although a xeon e3 1200v3 will be going in it) or would i be better off looking for another chipset board.

Ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks

Steve

 

[HellDiverUK]

I'm pretty sure for Haswell Xeons, your choices are C226 or C224. I think the only difference between the two is the number of USB3 ports and the speed of the SATA ports (2x6G and 4x3G on C224, 6x 6G on C226).

I'll chime in here with the usual "using your server as a workstation is a piss poor idea" sentiment. Splitting the two is beneficial, and might even end up cheaper - buy a cheap PC for workstation use, and buy a cheaper server for server use. Or even just buy two reasonable office PCs, use one as a server...you get the idea. All your eggs in one basket is just a recipe for omelette.

 

[5teve]

Thanks Helldriver.

Sentiment acknowledged and understood, however its the way I have been doing it for a good number of years.. and its worked for my usage case. I'm not an IT guy.. just a fiddler that can get by.. just!

All data is backed up on a freenas box (HPn36L running zfs) daily and raid 6 gives me a bit of redundancy. The 'server' bit is really only serving files (business and media to mediaportal HTPC), and is on 24/7 (my needs are simple compared to nearly all of you guys) and this way saves room as I dont have anywhere that is out of the way and cool enough (house can get to 35+degC as we generally dont use aircon) We have a couple of laptops and other workstations hooked into the network, as well as the HTPC. If the server / workstation stops working I can get the data fairly quickly from the freenas box. If we were properly office based, I would be running a separate server as per your suggestion.

I'm pretty sure the c226 supports all haswell chips whereas the 224 only supports xeon e3 and i3 cpu's - I guess it gives me a few cpu options down the track...

Thanks

Steve

 

[5teve]

Hmm.. after doing some research i have now come across a supermicro barebones server from amazon that will ship to Australia.. $408usd delivered, c226 chipset, PSU etc. The only issue I can see is that it only holds 4xhdd + 1x 3.5 fixed but has a space for 4x 2.5 (with optional cage) but looks big enough for 4x hdd. Has anyone used this chassis and managed to squeeze 8x 3.5" disks inside? unfortunately if it has 4x 5.25 bays i'd be able to use my hdd bay.

Steve

 

[HellDiverUK]

As usual Supermicro's web site is so slow it's unusable, so I'm only going by Google Images. Looks like the case either comes with an 8-way 3.5" backplane, or a 6-way 3.5" backplane with one 5.25" bay, and an external 3.5". A 4-in-1 adapter would give you your 4x2.5" drives. That's the way I see it.