The price and low power of these new processors is making me consider AMD again. I need a new server - my cloud backup provider is ending support for my OS. Really sucks because the thing just works, and has since day 1. The problem is finding client type motherboards with enough SATA and/or m.2. With dual GBe, although a single is fine. It seems the only way to get high port count is a high end gaming board - I don;t want that. Or spend out the nose for PCI add-in cards to get more ports. My current system has 6 drives plus the OS drive, all physical hard drives, and there's no protection (besides backups) for the OS drive. The drive pooling software i use supports SSD cache - things are not quite there yet where I can afford to make all the storage 100% SSD, though I would love to. Ideally, m.2 pair mirrored for the OS (1TB plenty), 2x 2TB SSD for the cache, and 3 more 6 or 8GB spinny disks. That not only increased my storage (I currently have about half a TB left out of 13TB total available space) but should boost performance. RAM not critical - 16GB is what I'd put in it initially just because I don;t have anythign with less than that, expansion to 32GB woudl be a nice feature if I want to maybe run soem VMs on it as well as being the storage/backup/media server.
6 or 8 SATA plus 2 m.2 that don't disable any of the SATA would be great and allow some future expansion - 8 more than 6 of course. I probably would buy just one 6TB drive and reuse the two 4TB drives I have for now, ideally holding out until 4TB or better SSDs are truly affordable and make 100% SSD. SO the extra spare SATA would be awesome.
Most MBs I find, at least when lookign at Intel ones, might have 8 SATA ports but then say using one of the m.2 slots disables TWO of the SATA ports.
Really looking for some recommendations - I've done plenty of parametric searches on sites like Newegg to try and find boards that meet my requirements. I REALLY don;t want to have to use a $900 gaming board named after some clan just so I can have a halfway decent 'server'. Cost no object, I'djust get a true server MB although I have no need for the processing power of some 18 or 32 core beast, nor do I want to spend more on just the CPU than I did for every computer in my office combined.
On the Intel side, with my current machines I've had great luck with Asrock boards. I have 2 SFF ITX cubes plus my main desktop (which is about 7 years old now - I went with the Asrock board because they certified it would run the basic Xeon processors when most of the others said it MIGHT work but wouldn't list it as compatible - I was adding discrete graphics and the 1325v2 was lower priced and lower power than the equivalent I7.
Things I look for are quiality components - I don;t need uber extra VRM power phases because I am never goign to overclock a server, but I don't want cheap crappy capacitors just because it's only designed for up to the fastest supported processor at stock speeds, either. The one I have is a second gen i3 Gigabyte something or other, I've had that around 8 years now, running 24/7/365.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions..
6 or 8 SATA plus 2 m.2 that don't disable any of the SATA would be great and allow some future expansion - 8 more than 6 of course. I probably would buy just one 6TB drive and reuse the two 4TB drives I have for now, ideally holding out until 4TB or better SSDs are truly affordable and make 100% SSD. SO the extra spare SATA would be awesome.
Most MBs I find, at least when lookign at Intel ones, might have 8 SATA ports but then say using one of the m.2 slots disables TWO of the SATA ports.
Really looking for some recommendations - I've done plenty of parametric searches on sites like Newegg to try and find boards that meet my requirements. I REALLY don;t want to have to use a $900 gaming board named after some clan just so I can have a halfway decent 'server'. Cost no object, I'djust get a true server MB although I have no need for the processing power of some 18 or 32 core beast, nor do I want to spend more on just the CPU than I did for every computer in my office combined.
On the Intel side, with my current machines I've had great luck with Asrock boards. I have 2 SFF ITX cubes plus my main desktop (which is about 7 years old now - I went with the Asrock board because they certified it would run the basic Xeon processors when most of the others said it MIGHT work but wouldn't list it as compatible - I was adding discrete graphics and the 1325v2 was lower priced and lower power than the equivalent I7.
Things I look for are quiality components - I don;t need uber extra VRM power phases because I am never goign to overclock a server, but I don't want cheap crappy capacitors just because it's only designed for up to the fastest supported processor at stock speeds, either. The one I have is a second gen i3 Gigabyte something or other, I've had that around 8 years now, running 24/7/365.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions..
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