Between 2 motherboards and flashing controllers

[Rigor_M]

Hi all,

 

I'm new to unraid but seen the stuff this can do 

 

i'm in instance of purchasing my hardware and confronted between 2 motherbords.

 

I would like my setup to do : storage of course, a couple of VMs, and a couple of Dockers.

 

both are supermicro

#1 : X11SSH-LN4F with v5 e3-1230 xeon processor and 32Gb DDR-4 RAM

#2 : X10SL7-F with v3 e3-1231 xeon processor and 32GB DDR-3 RAM

 

setup #1 is latest (i think) but dosent have a LSI controller and 8 SATA ports directly connected to the C236 chip

I know that #2 is quite older (a bit more than 3year old) but has a LSI controller that need to be flash in IT mode to work with unraid

 

 

Thank for any advise on this 

J-F

 

What would be the best choice AND do I need to flash anything on setup #1 ?

[DoeBoye]

Purely from a specs viewpoint, I would go with the newer board.

 

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10SL7-F.cfm

https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSH-LN4F.cfm

 

More upgrade options down the road:

• Newer CPUs
  
• Supports 64GB or ram vs 32GB
  
• PCI-E 3.0 on all slots
  
• Extra PCI-E 8x slot
  
• Quad LAN vs Dual
  

 

The extra 8 ports on the older board is nice, but the extra PCI-E slot you get could be used with an 8-port controller if you need the ports, and you're still left with two PCI-E slots. Also, in this day and age with 10TB HDs available, 24-drive servers will probably become more and more rare.

 

If price is not an issue, I would definitely go with the newer one. That said, are those the only two options? Personally, I'd try and find a board that had a few extra PCI-E slots, especially since unRaid is morphing in to much more than just a NAS (VM etc). 

[Rigor_M]

The 4 ports is something that is great. and further more, I have a 24 gigabit switch Layer2 with LACP support so, I should be able to make a 4Gig trunk.

 

The 8 ports on the newer board is a bit short on me since I have almort is not all the HDD to fill those ports.

 

but Yes, going towards the newer version.

 

I dont actually need more slots as I dont want to put GPU cards and have them passed to VMs. (only windows/linux without GUI). so I think this board will do nicely