May 28, 201313 yr Long time lurker, first time poster. I have been running unraid 5 rc10 on an old machine, primarily streaming to Tivos and raspberryPIs. I have been looking to upgrade to a purpose built machine and virtualizing unraid, my torrent machine and my WHS box, as well as running test machines. I was getting ready to pull the trigger on a X9SCM-iiF, but newegg has been out of stock. I did some looking and found this page - http://supermicrotalk.com/index.php?topic=99.0, and the X10SL7-F looks pretty exciting with 12 on board sata drives in a server motherboard. I know the board is not yet released, but anyone have any issues off the bat with waiting for this board for my next build? Thanks!
May 28, 201313 yr The boards look very nice ... but unless something's different with the new chipset, I do not believe you can pass through motherboard ports to ESXi virtual machines => so the large number of SATA ports are irrelevant for UnRAID use if it's in a VM.
May 28, 201313 yr Have to agree with garycase. On board SATA are mostly useless in an ESXi set up. I also prefer the four 8x PCIe slots of the X9SCM over the two 8x and one 16x of the X10SLM, which would be the equivalent in this series. The only card that can really take advantage of that 16x slot right now is the RocketRAID 2760A, and at $620 bucks I don't see a lot of takers for that card in our segment of the market.
May 28, 201313 yr The only card that can really take advantage of that 16x slot right now is the RocketRAID 2760A, and at $620 bucks I don't see a lot of takers for that card in our segment of the market. This is an interesting thread ... and the system he builds uses a 2760A http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=27460.0
May 29, 201313 yr X10SL7-F probably has an LSI on board controller for the 8 blue connectors and that would be passable in ESXi. The two white connectors are probably SataIII connectors and the 4 black are probably SataII connectors and all probably use South Bridge so would only be usable as Datastore drives.
May 29, 201313 yr It would be ideal if there would be two SATA controllers on the board where you could send one to esxi and use the others for esxi itself...
May 29, 201313 yr It would be ideal if there would be two SATA controllers on the board where you could send one to esxi and use the others for esxi itself... Interesting idea ... but given the propensity of UnRAID users to always want MORE SATA ports, I think just plenty of PCIe x8 slots would be a better choice
June 4, 201313 yr Author The link for the new board is http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm. It looks like the 8 blue ports are on an embedded LSI 2308 controller on the PCIe bus. Anyone know if that could be passed through? The other 6 sata ports are on the PCH chipset.
June 4, 201313 yr The link for the new board is http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm. It looks like the 8 blue ports are on an embedded LSI 2308 controller on the PCIe bus. Anyone know if that could be passed through? The other 6 sata ports are on the PCH chipset. It's likely it could be passed through.
June 4, 201313 yr I agree ... since they're on a distinct controller they can most likely be passed through. However, until someone actually gets this board, installs ESXi, and actually tries it, we won't know for CERTAIN if that's the case
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