I've been prepping to upgrade my server to support more drives and just as I was about to snag all the bits, I can't find the ROMED8-2T motherboard I'd planned to use in stock anywhere for a reasonable price and it seems to have doubled in price everywhere in the last two weeks.

 

I was able to snag a CSE-846 and am expanding from 6+2 to 16+2 /w ideally space for up to 22+2 /w 2 mirred NVME cache drives. I'm currently using an AM4 board but am maxed out on PCI slots to add the additional 2x LSI 9201-8i's to support the additional drives. The backplane in the CSE-846 is a direct pass-through and not an expander so I need direct connections for each drive which is one of the big reasons I was swapping over to the ROMED8-2T.

 

Primary purpose is storage + Plex (lots of hardware encoding using quadro).

 

Ideally I'd love for the board to have a BMC and support at least 5 PCI slots + 2 NVME slots. Doesn't have to be AMD. On-board 10GB NIC would also be icing on the cake and save me another slot. If there's a supermicro alternative that would drop right in, that'd be even better.

 

If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

 

 

You could get a 16i controller instead of 2x8i, that will save you 1 slot.

 

I had to RMA my ROMED8-2T cause of a NIC not working, ASRock doesn't have any stock of it and it's been a month now that I'm without a board.

 

They offered me the same board with Broadcom NIC controller instead of the original Intel X550, but it appears the new board is missing the rear USB-C port, so I'm still waiting on ASRock to provide a replacement solution.