Gigabyte MF51-ES0 for an SSD NAS?

[Alexdi]

I'm considering this board for an nVME-based NAS. The appeal is that it has built-in dual 10Gbe, remote management, a bucket of PCIe lanes that I hope can be bifurcated, and it's relatively inexpensive. I'm also considering ASRock X570D4U-2L2T and B550D4U-2T, both of which have bifurcation, PCIe 4.0, and potentially lower power draw and better single-core performance than the Intel platform, though cost more and would support maybe 6 SSDs in total.

Does anyone have experience, positive or negative, with the Gigabyte board?

 

[Tech Junky]

Gigabyte

Wouldn't be my first choice but, they seem to be making better boards these days. My issue is how they divide slots/lanes.

For the 6*drives though it depends on how much capacity you're talking about and whether or not you use M2 or U.x. I started off last year with the same intent and went with a MOBO that could hold at least 5 M2 drives 1 OS / 4 Raid and then switched gears to U drives instead because you can get double the capacity for half the price. Instead of using 4*4TB M2 drives ($800) I went with a single 15.36TB U.3 ($950) and don't have to deal with Raid anymore. I had been running spinners in R10 for a few years and just wanted to get more speed, less physical space needed, lighter weight, and some other ideas. The 2.5" NVME U.3 though weighs a few ounces vs the ~12# of spinners. The U drive of course could be a single point of failure but, since it's a bit more stringent as designed for Enterprise / DC use it should hold up just fine. However, I stated with some Micron versions that both took a crap and lost their partition tables within a couple of hours for one and less than a week on the other. I switched to Kioxia though and haven't had an issue since install (~6mo). Another thing is Micron's tend to run hot where the Kioxia in my case just sits around 40C.

I rebuilt from an Intel setup to AMD though as well. I'm just using an X670E board / 7900X / 32GB. If I were to want to run multiple U drive I would get a quad M2 adapter card / 4*M2 oculink adapters / 4*cables. The 2 additional drives would have to be used with the M2 sockets on the board and 2 of them would work at Gen4+ speeds with the 3rd being Gen3.

 

[Alexdi]

I think we're on parallel paths. My current setup is a X9SCM with 6x6TB in RAID-6 on an LSI 9361, fronted by PrimoCache with a 970 Pro.

When it works, it's fast, though hotter and noisier than I'd like. But I'm tired of troubleshooting drive failures and sense errors and multi-day rebuild times. The RAID exists for speed, reliability, and to have a single partition. Separate U.2 drives strike me as better at the first two and I don't care about the last enough to stomach the complication it introduces.

The new plan is to start with a single 15.36TB U.2 that gets a nightly backup to a 16TB hard drive. After I wrote this post, I realized I didn't really need the extra lanes of the Gigabyte board.

I'm not aware of any X670E boards with remote management. That's a mandatory feature for me. Do you know any of anything preferable to that AsRock X570?

 

[Tech Junky]

I'm not aware of any X670E boards with remote management. That's a mandatory feature for me. Do you know any of anything preferable to that AsRock X570?

Remote management as in ILO / IPMI? I don't bother with that sort of thing and just SSH into the box. If it requires a hands on approach it's easily accessed. There are some "console" boxes you could probably get for remote KVM control.

The board I went with is an ASR but it's the PG Lightning. The issue I had when looking a boards is the crappy splits the other OEMs made with the slots. Plus, I got the board used on Amazon aka return for $160. I figured out the reason they were selling so cheap though was the AGESA BS that AMD uses causes gremlins in how things operate. It took trying a few versions before solving the issues that crept up.

single 15.36TB U.2 that gets a nightly backup to a 16TB hard drive

KISS. Make life simple. I don't bother with backups though. After running the raid for 5+ years w/o issues... I have dual M2's in my laptop for redundancy though and the file server aspect is just to put it where the bandwidth is located both LAN/WAN as it's the router. I only really dove into Raid as something to do rather than a need but, having the space lead to hoarding of data because if you have the space you tend to see it as a challenge to fill it up.