Supermicro C7Q67 iQ67 LGA1155 Board, Is this ok?

[stepmbac]

I plan on building or buying a 20 bay unRaid server fairly soon. I am getting specs together for the build and found a supermicro board that hopefully will give me a little future proof. I know it may be a little overkill, but I would rather spend more now than go through the time of upgrading later. The board is a Supermicro C7Q67 iQ67 LGA1155 USB 3.0/SATA 6Gb/s microATX motherboard. I plan on using an i3 low wattage chip with the board along with 4gb or 8gb of ram in a norco 20 bay server.

 

Any issues with using this board or setup? Anyone using it? Any lessons learned that can be applied when setting up this board?

 

[Johnm]

This is your third post asking the same question about this motherboard...

 

You asked it here also...

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15035.msg141409#msg141409

 

 

and here where was answered in this thread....

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15030.msg141382#msg141382

 

 

you also have a spin-off thread here..

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15029.msg141834#msg141834

 

 

If you had left it all in one thread, people would know what you are looking for and find it easier to help you. At this point it is just becoming spam...

 

That said. I am pretty sure no one on this forum has that board.

Supermicro desktop boards are usually pretty rare and usually not very good with poor support.

 

This board is also brand new and not available through any of the normal E-tailers. It is also overpriced.

 

Using a little google-fu, I do not see a single review or question about it online, indicating no one has this board.

Personally, I am not one to spend money to be a beta tester for a board that might not ever get a bios update or support.

 

Who knows, maybe  Supermicro finally got it right? Perhaps this is an awesome board for a workstation. After you get past the price, it dose look good on paper.

 

Since you asked i it is a good serverboard. You have to take into consideration that you  are investing a lot of money into a board that costs more then a true server board to add features like dual HDMI and sound that WILL NOT be used used on a server and possibly add instabilities or conflicts.

i also noticed that USB3 is just a PCIe 1x usb3 card using a NEC uPD720200 chipset added to the motherboard according to the  block diagram. you are essentially giving up an expansion slot to have a PCIe USB3 on-board.

 

Also, this board could be a board that only allows a video cards to be used in the 16x port. Although not as likely these days.

 

The only interesting feature on this board to me is it has DOM support. DOM is pretty much obsolete these days and not as handy as a USB header on the mobo. IDK if unraid would boot off a DOM. not to mention DOM's are pretty expensive..

 

If you want a desktop board, I would keep looking at other vendors. you would get more bang for your buck.

 

 

If you want to use a Supermicro Board, I suggest you get a serverboard that is tried and tested with unRAID and just add a USB3 PCIe card. It would still cost less in the end and you then have an option of what usb3 chipset to get. you could even get an IPMI enabled board and still cost less.

 

If you still really like that board and you're willing to pay the premium, the only advice I have then is to get one and let us know how it works. See if you can certify it for others to use.

 

I know I jumped the gun and got X9SCM right when they came out while still untested and I love it.

 

On a side note,

At this point in time, I don't believe any server boards come with USB3. It is generally not needed in the server world at this point. It is still a newish technology and the server world likes "stable, tested devices".

That is likely to change in the future when someone makes a USB3 tape/DLT backup device.

If that USB3 works in unraid at USB3 speed (it might not), you would not see much of a speed boost in copying FROM the usb3 device.

 

You would get about the same performance if you plug the USB3 portable drive into your desktop and copied the data over the network. plus then you get the convenience of drag and drop. A hard drive in a USB3 enclosure is still limited to about 80MB/s average sustained data transfer.