Motherboard choice for 6 HDD RAID and 1 SSD

[wakkawakka321]

Hi,

I was hoping to get some opinions of which ITX motherboard to get for a future NAS build.

The parts are I am pretty sure about:

* HDD - 6 x WD 3TB red
* RAM - 8GB 1600MHz kit
* Case - Fractal node 304
* PSU - Corsair CX430

So I have a kingston V300 120GB SSD laying around and was hoping to use that as boot drive for windows 8 enterprise x64. I'm also drawn towards the idea of an AsRock motherboard as I've had some success with an AsRock motherboard for a previous build but I'm not set on them.

I initially decided on the Z87E-ITX as it seemed to be perfect. 6 SATA3 ports for the RAID 5 array, with an mSATA port for 120 or 128GB bootable SSD. However AsRock support confirmed that the mSATA port is shared with one of the onboard 6 SATA3 ports so that doesn't seem possible. Then I thought about using the kingston SSD with windows to go in a USB 3 enclosure.

After a bit of googling I stumbled upon the FM2A85X-ITX which has 7 onboard SATA ports. I haven't bought AMD for years but I can't really dismiss them for that reason. With that board I would hopefully run the WD HDD's in RAID 5 with the SSD booted as AHCI standalone.

Also, Intel doesn't seem to have widely released low power haswell processors. I had a quick look at the 4570T which appealed to me for the TDP of 35w. Any thoughts on which haswell CPU to get if I go that route would also be greatly appreciated. I don't really want something that is too low voltage, and therefore very low processing grunt, as the server will be used for a bunch of purposes (IRC BNC, torrents, usenet, plex, encoding etc).

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you need to build now, then go FM2 with the aforementioned ASrock A85X board, with the seven onboard SATA6G ports.

No telling how long it will be until lower-power / lower-end Haswell CPUs show up.

(Intel currently has an oversupply of Ivy Bridge parts, so it's unlikely that Haswell Celeron / Pentium / i3 CPUs are going to show up any time soon.)

 

[wakkawakka321]

Thanks @VirtualLarry

It'll probably be a month or 2 before purchase.

Do you see any downside to using windows to go? It should be fast enough as the kingston SSD is around 450Mbps read and write and will be connected via a USB 3 enclosure. It will feel strange running windows on a server off an external disk but if it works it works.

 

[XAEROCOOL]

I am also thinking about building a similar system, its purpose is a little different then yours, so i was thinking about using ZFS2 instead of raid. But have you confirmed if there is room for a ssd in node after putting in 6 HDDs?