2021-03-01
I recently decided it was time to upgrade my main server, which I have been using to run some of my main services, including web-hosting and file server. I store a fair amount of my music on this machine and stream from it for on-the-go playback.
The old setup comprises the following components:
- Supermicro X10SL7-F mainboard
- Intel Xeon E3-1230L v3 processor
- 32 GB ECC RAM
- LSI 9207-8i HBA card (in IT mode)
The mainboard is very nice, it includes a LSI 2308 chipset for SAS drives which I used to hook in 8 HDDs initially. Later I added the LSI 9207 card to allow me to add more drives.
32GB is a good amount of RAM, but I noticed that with the number processes I’m running combined with using ZFS for my storage needs was hitting its limit. To be fair, this is coupled with the fact that I’m using a E3 low-clockrate processor, for energy efficency reasons. So overall I really wanted to upgrade to something with both more performance and RAM.
I settled on the following list of new componets:
- Gigabyte MD50-LS0 mainboard
- 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650L v4 processors
- 128 GB ECC RAM
- LSI 9207-8e HBA card (in IT mode)
Plus, through some dumpster diving and eBay sniping I got a NetApp DS4246 storage array together with the NetApp PM8003-based QSFP HBA card and cable. This was going to be one serious upgrade!!!