Looking to update my Supermicro X7SBE that has been running unRAID since 2010.  This means I have not kept up with Supermicro products for the last 14 years. Looking for something to last another 15 years.  It will replace my current X7SBE in the Norco 4224 case.  I will probably get 3 LSI 9400-8i and so would like a board with at least three x8 PCIe slots.  I would like to use M.2 SSDs drives for things like cache.

 

1. Is X14SBI-TF a good board?
2. What's a good Xeon 6700 CPU in terms of performance and power consumption?
3. What's this 6 PCIe 5.0 x8 via MCIO connectors and how would I put it to use?

 

If the Supermicro X14 is not recommended (I only chose it since it seems to be the most current listed on Supermicro's website), which other ones like the X13, X12...? I tried looking at the X11 but the Supermicro website says there were discontinued.

 

Edit:

Didn't realized the X14 boards are too new and the CPUs are expensive.  Now I would have to work my way backward to the X13 and X12 to see which are more mainstream.

Edited February 6, 20251 yr by beanmeister

Supermicro makes it difficult to find models, but if you look for specific ones, you can still find them easily, for example I'm currently running the X11SPL-F, which I bought a year ago and was made in 2023.

 

A lot is going to depend on what is available locally to you, I tend to use price-comparison sites and then search for supermicro boards to see what's in stores around. Mostly that's X11 and X12 series, and some X13. So for me that would be something like a X13SEI-F or TF if you need the 10gbit. Or an X13SCL-F if you don't need so much power.

 

For processors, energy efficient mostly depends on how you use them, idle ones don't use much. I usually look up the series of the processors on the intel site and then sort by TDP to get something reasonable, and then of course it's also about availability.

 

MCIO is a connector that plugs in the motherboard, you'd connect it to a backplane or use a fan-out cable to connect them to drives. It looks a bit like a modern SlimSAS-cable but it's not the same. Many supermicro boards these days use SFF-8643 or SlimSAS (SFF-8654) connectors, even for just SATA to safe space on the board.

 

Talking about saving space, you could also use a 9400-16i although for 24 slots the 9305 also comes in a 24i version and the 9600 as well.

 

For M.2 drives, modern Supermicro boards usually have one M.2 slot, some have two, but if you need a lot of slots, you'll need the more expensive processors which come with bifurcation, so you can use a slot or two and split those for M.2 drives if you need more of them.

 

I thought about the 9400-16i, but I was thinking of spreading my drives across as many "data lanes/pathways" to maximize throughput.  For example instead of 16 drives on one PCIe x8 lane, I would use 3 9400-8i cards and have 8 drives on each PCIe x8 slots.  So on the Norco 4224, I would have two backplanes on each PCIe x8.

 

Given that each PCIe x8 slot has its own pathway to the CPU in the block diagram.  If I am writing to a drive with two parity drives, would it be better if those 3 drives are on the same backplane and hence same 9400-8i controller or spread across different backplanes connected to different 9400-8i controllers? 

 

BTW, the X13SEI-TF looks interesting with two M.2 connections.  The X11SPL-F looks good too.

For hard drives, throughput doesn't matter, they usually get to about 200MB/s (1.6gbit) at most, the 9400 is a PCIe 3 chip, which means 8GT or about 1GB/s per lane, x8 so 8GB/s, so you can connect about 40 SATA drives before you run into bandwidth limitations. And it's more complicated than that, because SAS has bigger buffers and queues than SATA, so it only matters for parity-check, for copying stuff between drives data doesn't even have to leave the controller (not sure if it will or not). The 9400 & 9500 also support NVMe with special cables (but it uses 4 lanes per drive so a lot less drives connectable). Anyway, if you don't use that, they also have a SAS_SATA firmware with even bigger buffers and queues.

 

Also, keep in mind an 8i uses typically 10W, while the 16i uses 12W, so it saves some power.

 

Keeping parity drives separate on different controllers and different backplanes makes sense for safety, and if you're going with a 16-port controller you need two anyway (16 and 8 or 2x16), so you can do that. Of course it only protects against a backplane or controller failure, it doesn't protect against motherboard or power-failure. In other words, don't forget raid (even unraid) is not a backup.

 

To give some numbers, I'm currently using a 9500-16i with only 5 10TB SAS drives (Seagate Exos from 2018/2019) and I get about 185MB/s for parity-check, while using the drives as well.

 

 

How does the Supermicro X13SEI-TF with Xeon 4510T sound for my next unRAID server for the next 15 years?  I like the board for the 2 M.2 slots and several independent PCIe lanes.  There doesn't seem too much CPU choices for this board that is under $800.

On 2/7/2025 at 9:09 PM, Wody said:

Keeping parity drives separate on different controllers and different backplanes makes sense for safety,

Why? I'd rather lose 2 parity drives than 2 data drives. Losing parity means recalculating it from known good data drives, losing data drives means trusting that parity was perfectly in sync when the data drives dropped, which is not always a sure bet.

3 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Why? I'd rather lose 2 parity drives than 2 data drives.

I guess in the end it doesn't really matter, since you can lose any two drives and re-create their contents, but if a controller fails, and takes drives with it, it feels safer because parity can replace any drive, but a data drive is only itself.

12 hours ago, Wody said:

parity can replace any drive, but a data drive is only itself.

Parity can only replace a drive if all other data drives are good. Parity drives by themselves are worthless, they contain no data. To rebuild a data drive all the other data drives are needed, plus parity.

 

Consider this scenario.

2 Parity drives, 10 data drives. For some reason, doesn't matter how for this example, 3 drives die. If all three dead drives are data drives, you just lost all the data on all three drives. If, however, both parity drives died, and only 1 data drive, you only lost that single drive of data.

 

If data loss is inevitable, as it is when you exceed the failure tolerance of a RAID or Unraid array, only Unraid gives you the opportunity to keep the data on the drives that didn't fail. I'd rather lose the parity drives than the data drives.

That makes sense where I rather lose parity drives than data drives in a HBA, backplane, or disk failure.  Since I can't predict which hardware will fail, the best I can do when deciding how to populate my server so as to not create a bottleneck during disk operations.

 

So in a two parity drive configuration, every time I write to a data drive, I am actually writing to 3 disks at the same time.  So from a performance perspective, is it better to have those 3 disks on the same PCIe lane/HBA and backplane or put each disk on a different PCIe lane, HBA and backplane?

On 2/9/2025 at 2:53 PM, beanmeister said:

How does the Supermicro X13SEI-TF with Xeon 4510T sound for my next unRAID server for the next 15 years?

 

Like a bad idea. Spend 1/2 the amount and replace the system after 7 years. Or spend 1/4 and replace it 4 times - or buy more storage.

 

 

Edited February 11, 20251 yr by Espressomatic

So I'm looking at Supermicro being that I have a few of their old cases and they support IPMI also being a server class motherboard. (my reasons not for others lol)

 

Going Supermicro for my limited needs gives me two options:

The X14SBI supports the Intel Core Ultra processers . While the X13SAE is a solid still quite viable board for the current Raptor Lake generation. I'm leaning towards the X14SBI for a few reasons. The main reason being the X13 came out in 2023 so the April/May 2025 release of the X14 makes it the newest in technology, this is a change in socket meaning it might be compatible for CPU upgrades in the future. It also better supports ECC DDR5 memory. Plus "New" lol

 

The costs are going to be quite similar both boards being at the sub $500 range so no real difference there. The Core Ultra is approx. $150 more but that's just a few dollars a year difference in pricing. Newegg Pricing as of 3/10/2025... Intel Core i7-12700K $211 Intel Core Ultra 7 265K $364

 

Now obviously many of the people on this message board are going to respond with something that boils down to a Rasperry Pi can do all you need. Or the opposite and the purists who wish for some reason it was better and it's not perfectly designed. 

 

For me this will be moving my Plex server to a new box switching from Windows to Unraid for the planned use of adding a half dozen users and then playing around and adding more from there. 

 

I'm confused, isn't the X14SBI (Socket LGA-4710 -> Intel® Xeon® 6700/6500) for a different platform than the Core Ultra 7 which needs LGA-1851 like on the X14SAE?

11 hours ago, gilladur said:

I'm confused, isn't the X14SBI for a different platform than the X14SAE?

Yes, it's server hardware vs consumer/workstation stuff, entirely different purposes. Unraid doesn't really care, it'll run on almost everything, but if you want stuff to work reliably 24/7 for years or even decades, then server stuff is up to it, while consumer stuff fails more often than not. I mean, just looking at the two boards, the server board looks a lot cleaner with a lot less components, so less things to make heat and break.

On 3/10/2025 at 9:34 PM, Crashyoverrides said:

The X14SBI supports the Intel Core Ultra processers

I'm still confused - as far as I understand is the X14SBI using the LGA 4710 for Xeon CPUS - how should a Core Ultra which uses LGA 1851 would fit?

6 hours ago, gilladur said:

I'm still confused - as far as I understand is the X14SBI using the LGA 4710 for Xeon CPUS - how should a Core Ultra which uses LGA 1851 would fit?

Clearly it doesn't, so I think they probably meant the X14SAE instead. But even those are 'old', since the X14SAZ-F supports the Core Ultra 2 series. But the problem with Supermicro boards is often availability, a lot of newer boards you just can't get, or sell out quickly.

15 hours ago, Wody said:

But even those are 'old', since the X14SAZ-F supports the Core Ultra 2 series

The Core Ultra 2 series is the one based on Arrow Lake-S or? Like the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K?

As this one runs under the same chipsets B860, H810, W880, Z890 and the same LGA 1851 why should they not work on an X14SAE which does have the same W880 as the 14SAZ-F?

I think the only difference between these two main boards is the size of the motherboard (which comes for the X14SAZ with the negative effect that they only have 2 ram slots and less SATA ports - the X14SAZ-F in fact have none and the X14SAV-TLN4F only 4).

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/compare?sku=X14SAV-TLN4F,X14SAE-F,X14SAV-F

Edited March 30, 20251 yr by gilladur

The X14SBI-F looks interesting.  I like the fact that the Xeon 6700/6500 series have lower TDP versions than the CPUs supported by the X13SEI-F.

I just have to figure out how I am going to connect the 6 backplanes of the Norco RPC-4224 to the X14SBI-F.

8 hours ago, beanmeister said:

 connect the 6 backplanes of the Norco RPC-4224 to the X14SBI-F.

You'll need either a bunch of SATA-controllers or easier, a SAS-controller like the 9305-24i or 9600-24i, or use multiple controllers. The board itself has only 4 SATA-ports, and the MCIO ports are only for NVMe which the norco doesn't support.

How about this?

Supermicro X14SBI-F

Intel Xeon 6511P
Broadcom 9500-8i (3x) - I prefer to split the drives to 3 of the PCIe 8x slots.

SFF-8654 to 2x SFF-8087 cable (3x) for the Norco RPC-4224 6 backplanes

SFF-8643 to 4x SATA Forward Breakout Cable (for the 4 onboard SATA ports to 2.5" SSD drive cage)

As of now, the only online vendor I can find that sells the motherboard and CPU is NewEggBusiness.

3 hours ago, beanmeister said:

SFF-8654 to 2x SFF-8087 cable (3x) for the Norco RPC-4224 6 backplanes

There's cables for SAS/SATA and NVMe. I know cables from 8654-8643 exist and work for SAS/SATA, but 8654-8087 are only for NVMe and as far as I know nobody makes them for SAS/SATA, at least all the ones I've bought that claimed to be for SAS/SATA did not work.

 

There is one company that makes adapters (Chenyang), so Instead, you may be required to buy 3 of 8654-8643 or 8654 8i-8654 4i cables, and then use 6 of 8643-8087 or 8654-8087 adapters (they cost more than the cables). The adapters come as cards you're supposed to insert into slots, but you can just remove the baffle and use it without it.

 

If you want to spend less money, you can also get 9400-16i or 8i and use 8643-8087 cables. Those also come in NVMe and SAS/SATA variants, but at least those work without expensive adapters.

Wow, I did not realized SFF-8654 to 2x SFF-8087 cable for SAS/SATA were non-existent.  I guess I will look at the 9400-8i instead since I do not want to deal with adapters.

@Wody

Can this cable be trusted to support SAS/SATA?

 

This is a response to an inquiry I emailed to sales of GenuineModules regarding if their SFF-8654 to 2x SFF-8087 cable supports SAS/SATA or just NVMe.

 

Quote

GenuineModules.com

May 13, 2025, 8:53 PM (13 hours ago)

to me

Hi Das,

 

Our CAB-8654i8-2x8087 supports both NVMe (PCIe) and SAS/SATA.

 

Best Regards

Liu Weiguo

Genuine Modules Limited

Flat A516, 5/F, Efficiency House, 35 Tai Yau Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Hong

Mobile/WhatsApp/WeChat: +86-13923759940

[email protected] 

https://www.genuinemodules.com

 

 

My understanding is that some of the pins are different between NVMe and SAS/SATA so it shouldn't work. But it is a good find, and now I want to know as well so I'll purchase some of them in a week or so and once I have them I'll let you know.

Cool!  Looking forward to your findings.

Cool!  Looking forward to your findings.

Got the cables today, and unfortunately the results are as expected. So 6854-8i to 6843 or to 6843+6843-8087 adapter+8087-8087 cable works. I use that with a dumb backplane, and on one computer it detects my array and on the test-computer it detects the two drives I inserted, a 6TB WD drive, and a Samsung 870 SSD. These cable, so 8654-8i to 8087 do not work and detect no drives. Since it says compatible with SAS 4, even though I knew the outcome in advance, I tested with both my 9500-16i (SAS 3.5) and the 9600-24i (SAS 4), connectors identical, result identical.

With a multimeter you can test cables, you connect it to one pin on one end, and to one pin on the other end, and if the pins are connected it shows 0, and if the pins aren't connected it shows 1. I've used this to verify that power-connectors were wired the same, and I should be able to do the same with these cables to figure out what is different about them, and I think I'll end up doing that eventually, but for now, the cables may support all kinds of things, but as tests show, they don't support Broadcom cards in the configuration we need at least.