Hello to all - I have been lurking for a few days and have decided to make the jump. This being my first server I sure could use help in picking which MB to go with (will use server for videos (mostly bluray) and some music streamed to both Macs and PC's). I have narrowed it down to two choices : Asus M4A88TD-M (which has 6 SATA3 outputs ) with an AMD Athlon II X2 260 CPU to take advantage of the faster throughput of SATA 3 OR a Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525 Mini ITX (probably slower but more stable). The Supermicro might cost more but I think I can use the 2 sticks of ram I have leftover when I upgraded my Macbook Pro last month (that would even out the cost). I am looking forward to hearing from the forum members who have alot more experience than I.  Much appreciated....Junkyard

the Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525 Mini ITX should be able to use the mac ram as I recall.

 

Very stable mobo.

Read http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5133.0 That's for the D510 version but it still applies.

 

some of my thoughts on the D525 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12799.0

 

I'll probably end up buying another one of these myself.

 

I know nothing about the Asus,

but I am sure you wont see any speed/performance increases with green drives on SATA3 vs Sata2. the limit will be the drive, not the bus. The only advantage to a Sata3 might be if you used a sata3 SSD for a cache drive. that would be expensive and not worth it.

it is a desktop board so probably not as stable. and it has a realtek NIC some people say those can be flaky. (The Supermicro has dual Intels)

I agree, the Supermicro is a better choice for stability and features.  Integrated IPMI is a feature that you didn't know you needed until you have it, but once you do you won't want to go back!

 

SATA III is basically just a marketing gimmick when applied to hard drives at this point.  There are no hard drives available today capable of saturating even SATA I, let alone SATA III.  For SSDs it matters, for today's hard drives it does not.