April 22, 20197 yr This server running on an AMD Athlon 64 has been in operation since 2013, but the Motherboard failed March 2019. Wanting to not need to replace everything, I dug out an Intel based MB from a computer that was collecting dust since it provided all the slots needed to just move all the expansion boards from the old configuration to the replacement MB. Old configuration with failed AMD based MB. Note the drive controllers in PCI slots. Network card from old configuration is an Intel Gigabit Ethernet card in a PCI-e x1 slot. Old AMD MB under test with new power supply, good pictures of the drive controllers, 1ea SuperMicro SAT2-MV8 PCI-X card, and 1ea Promise TX4 SATA 300 PCI card.
April 22, 20197 yr Author New(old) Intel based MB, tested, with new Power Supply installed and old I/O cards. Norco 4116 case ready to be moved back into place after MB/Power Supply replacement. Hard drives ready to be re-installed and re-mapped for use in old unRaid 4.5.3 set-up. Initial BIOS screen after first boot with drives re-installed.
April 22, 20197 yr Author And here is the rebuilt server back in it's home location! Only running 9 data drives, with parity, and a cache drive. The other drives are pulled and ready to be put in service if needed.
April 23, 20197 yr Author Very true. And since I do not have more PCI slots than I am needing to use, I also did not look at which channels may be shared with other devices. I guess I should at least look at my BIOS setup to see if I can squeeze a little more performance out of it. Yes, bottlenecks are there. It has worked well with no performance issues, yet it would be nice if parity checks were a little faster, but it has not caused any problems. I will say that switching over to the EVGA 112-CK-NF77-A1 https://www.evga.com/articles/374.asp motherboard with Intel Socket 775, Core 2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz with 2 GB of RAM has yielded a boost in performance over the previous ECS HT2000 AMD690GM-M2 Rev 1.0A http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Product_Overview/0/1/789 motherboard with AMD Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 with 1 GB of RAM I had been running. I was really looking around to see if I could find a motherboard kicking around, or cheap, with a comparable or better CPU with a full PCI-X slot for my SAT2-MV8, but no such luck, and since it has been my main server, I really needed to get the hardware swap done quickly to bring it back on-line. After all I do have family all over that use PLEX... So again, while I could really upgrade further, stability and usability are primary. Now it is working well again, I hope it will be another 6 plus years before I need to really touch it again. With the age of the Intel based MB and CPU, I am not really sure what to expect for remaining life however. Older hardware I would expect over 15 years more life from it, but with it being where it was in the ROHS cycle when it was all built, it really could fail within the next 3 years easily. (oh the joys of ROHS and reduced reliability)
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.