upgrading to X9SCM-iif and Norco 4220 ?

[crankbearing]

Hey All,

 

I am thinking of upgrading to the SM board(only for reliability and impi only) and swapping cases. The board has 6 sata on board and the 4220 has 5 8087 b/p connectors. So it looks like I will need one reverse cable and 4 8087 to 8087 cables for my AOC S/M controllers Which means I am basically loosing 2 sata connectors on the board. How did you all deal with this or this basically the only route to take? I have 15 drives now, so the 20 bay case will do me for a long time to come, 4 of the drives in the server now are empty. My other thought is to just use a I3 std CPU I am not planning on zen or the like only impi.

 

Want to verify this is the correct ram for the board. http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139077

 

How is the dual lan implemented and how does that help with network traffic is it double up or act as one in and one out.

 

rgds,

 

Dave

[c3]

That memory is correct.

 

You can use two reverse cables and lose to drive bays, or the four 8087-to-8087 and use the full 20 bays. Do you need 18 or 20 drives?

 

Several people have used the i3. It works great.

 

[Chris Pollard]

I bought some converters that let you use 2.5" drives in the expansion slots in the back of my chassis. :-

 

http://www.misco.co.uk/productinfo/productinfo?productCode=153914

 

Mine is a re-branded 4224 case however.

 

[crankbearing]

Thanks for the replies, I ordered it all this morning will update, found a 1240v2 locally for 250$. Other then DOA is there anything I should be concerned about with an open box Xeon processor.

 

Thanks,

 

Dave

[Chris Pollard]

not really,  I have bought plenty of used CPU's,  pretty much they work or they don't... 

[crankbearing]

Thanks, I thought as much, I guess overclocking is not a big concern. Are you running your sas cards side by side in the x8 pci-e slots? Did you play with MDsync tuning at all on your system with the SAS cards? I read through that thread well glanced over it yesterday for a while. The 4220 also supports 2 2.5 drives above the hard drive cages if I wanted to add a cache drive, I do have a kingston 90Gb ssd sitting on the shelf doing nothing.

 

rgds,

 

Dave

[crankbearing]

Got the new board and I ended up with Kingston 8GB unbuffered ecc for a total of 16Gb. setup the board as a test bed to get familiar with it last night, ran memtest all night with no issues, did a wrote only pre-clear on three 1TB test drives so far so good. I ended up getting a 3220 for 100$ new on clearance so that is the cpu I will use.

 

I have set ipmi to dedicated and disabled lan 1 as I was seeing several RX drops on 5.04 and on 5.05 using lan2 I am seeing drops as well but not as many as on lan1. kvm was a bit of a drag to get working ended up having to add the site in java configuration to finally get it working from either a browser IE or IPMIView. I will likely continue to test for the rest of the week and get some rack rails for the case and install and test on the weekend. I will update to a better ipmi cable when I put the server in the rack to test the RX drops.

 

The board is 2.0A bios and I updated the ipmi firmware to 2.38 that was the other key to kvm working for me.

 

rgds,

 

Dave