January 25, 201115 yr I was browsing for motherboards with IPMI and noticed that there are a couple of motherboards that support 14 sata drives out of the box without using an add-on card. They aren't cheap, but it appears they are similar in price to buying an IPMI board plus one of the $100 supermicro cards together. Is anyone using these with success? Two in particular caught my eye, the Supermicro X8SI6-F with 6xSataII ports plus onboard SAS and included breakout cables to support 14 sata drives out of the box for $289 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182207 Along with an Asus that looks like an even better deal at $209 for a board with what appears to be 14 sata ports right on the motherboard. Or am I confusing those ports with something else? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131597 If those fail to be good options I will just pick up a MSI H55 based board, probably this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130268 I need to hurry up and find a replacement for my current board Asus board that turned out to be a lemon while I am still in my 30 day return window, it won't shut down and two of the 8 onboard ports are not compatible with unraid.
January 25, 201115 yr Author Wow, nevermind on the Asus P7F-E. I just did a bit more reading and found that while it has 8 extra SATA ports on the motherboard you have to buy a $100 add on to use them. Same for the IPMI, you have to purchase an add-on card to use it. Out goes that option.
January 25, 201115 yr I originally had planned on attempting to use that Supermicro for my replacement build, however even though it has the onboard SAS (which might be compatible come 5.0 beta 3) I found that I was putting too many eggs in 1 basket with the limited expansion slots. However there's a great review on this server blogging site - http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-x8si6-f-motherboard-review-including-onboard-lsi-sas-2008-controller/ which almost pushed me to get it. I even contacted the owner to see if he could do a quick unRaid test for me but never heard back other than he'd see if he could do it (it was remotely located from his location). After that I turned to the X8SIA-F which looks like a truly FANTASTIC MOTHERBOARD... my gripe at this point however is that (as most know) socket 1156 is on its way out and the Xeon based 1155 hardware (consumer based Sandy Bridge hardware was announced/released a few weeks ago) is literally less than a month from being announced. I'm trying to hold out for it but the X8SIA-F motherboards are becoming scarce online, most retailers say that it is now ordered directly from manufacturer. My goal is to go shoulder deep into an ESXi based build with unRaid floating on top of it. If the new Sandy Bridge hardware is going to give significant benefits (speed and energy efficiency) at the same cost... I want to wait. I too want IPMI which is why I'm going the enterprise level route... that and I also scored 8GB of ECC memory for $90 not too long ago.
January 25, 201115 yr Author I'm a bit lost with all of the options really. My budget isn't too tight but I just can't figure out the best route to go. I thought about going 1155/Sandy Bridge which I could do for not too much money but since the boards out are all consumer boards I would lose any ability to do IPMI. Plus, if I picked up one of those new boards I would probably want to go with a UEFI bios but I have not been able to confirm from anyone here if unRaid is UEFI compatible.
January 25, 201115 yr I'm a bit lost with all of the options really. My budget isn't too tight but I just can't figure out the best route to go. I thought about going 1155/Sandy Bridge which I could do for not too much money but since the boards out are all consumer boards I would lose any ability to do IPMI. Plus, if I picked up one of those new boards I would probably want to go with a UEFI bios but I have not been able to confirm from anyone here if unRaid is UEFI compatible. I have an ASUS P8P67 Pro w/ i7-2600k. unRAID boots fine, but the NIC drivers for that board werent built in to unRAID yet. It has been suggested that I try again once 5.0-beta3 is available.
January 25, 201115 yr I'm a bit lost with all of the options really. My budget isn't too tight but I just can't figure out the best route to go. I thought about going 1155/Sandy Bridge which I could do for not too much money but since the boards out are all consumer boards I would lose any ability to do IPMI. Plus, if I picked up one of those new boards I would probably want to go with a UEFI bios but I have not been able to confirm from anyone here if unRaid is UEFI compatible. No one can really answer the UEFI question. You will have to contact LimeTech about that. As for the other stuff. My suggestion is to visit the Hardware Compatibility Page and use the board that is listed for the 20 drive beast build. It is a very nice board and with an i3 CPU you will see pretty good idle power consumption. I just build a server for a customer using this board and it is very nice. The only thing I found was that adding drives can sometimes kick the flash drive down the list on boot priority. Since you have IMPI it is not a huge deal, just kind of annoying.
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