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A_AmericanELectricFlag for United States of America

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Best Server Board For The Money

I'm tired of half-stepping my office server. I suppose you could consider what I do with the hardware a hobby but I also run my business out of my home and it  very much relies  on the VMs and data stored within.
I tried to upgrade my host without doing my diligence with the research. Now I'm paying for it and everything is running in limp-mode on the backup server (at least I have one of those) until I get t he new board.

My wife is going to make the new board my Christmas gift so as soon I complete this post I'm going to box all of this up, send it back and pace the floors until that day. Very exciting stuff!!!!
Phillip suggested a couple of boards and that may very well be the one to go with but I would like to give you experts more detail about the environment so that we know we are getting the correct board for the job.

 So here is the criteria I would like to see on it:
The existing board is ATX but I can see studs in rack-mount case for larger

Real raid onboard with bbu

Dual processor and maybe (but probably not) LGA1150 slots. I have this new  (1) Xeon 3.4.
If LGA1150 not a good option then we can just get 2 new processors

Lots of DDR3. The existing server has 32G of server memory

Gigabit NICs. 10 Gb/s would not do me any good beyond my switch anyway.

Also the existing case has a cheap backplane with individual SATA and Molex connectors for the power.
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A_AmericanELectric
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Does the Intel S2600CP4 meet have the same raid specs as the 2 boards you recommended earlier?
I just realized that I misunderstood Phillip's response regarding the appropriate board.

Phillip:
"I suggest using a proper server board with a server grade RAID controller and the flash "battery" option for the RAID controller."

The board does not have the server-grade raid controller on it. You are suggesting I buy one in addition to a board like the S2600CW2. I was thinking it had the good raid controller on it.
 So you were probably confused by some of these questions.
This changes some things.
Thanks, AC
Avatar of Aaron Tomosky
Supermicro has some with onboard LSI mega raid that work well.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/

Look for sas2 in the hdd column.
You didn't mention where your bottlenecks are. These days the bottleneck is mostly disk i/o so increasing ram/cpu won't fix much.
Thanks for that aaron. So the sas2 in my search terms for all brands. What about sas 3?

I've been looking at Intel 2600cw2 but it I cna't tell if I'm able to buy a key to enable the sas for that booard or not.
Theres the Intel S2600CO that has the raid controller and its obvious. You can see the cooling coil for the chip.
Alos, probably going to leave the existing server intact and go with DDR4 and an LGA2011 for the new build
I'm on my mobile for now so it's hard to go through their huge list of boards. They tell you exactly which controller is embedded and you can see the two sas ports on them if you view the picture. There is a matrix pdf somewhere, I remember being able to search for sas, ipmi, nic type (I wanted onboard 10g) last time I needed a board.
Hey David. Its just an overall performance issue. I'm hosting Hyper-v with 6 guests and running owncloud and PLEX on 2 of those. So I need more under the hood. I have no network workstations at all. Just my desktop that I'm typing on and its go a lot under the hood
If you are going new, they have a ton of barebones kits with case, psu, and main board.  They also have some cheap sas controller pci cards if you like a board that doesn't have one or just need more.

Are you looking for onboard raid 5/6 or just an HBA for zfs or something like that?
Onboard 5/6
what would be a good search term? I've been leaning towards intel this time like the last 2 on the bottom of this page but its real hard to tell if I can buy a key for some of these or not.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dfinancial&field-keywords=intel+motherboard+with+sas

Definitely interested in the barebones ande I'll start poking around with that.
Can anyone recommend a good rade card with the battery back up for Around 300. I will more than likely be purchasing one of the Intel boards that were mentioned so I would like it to be able to move over there without losing my array
I  chose the Intel RS3WC080
sorry you misssed this post
"I'm thinking of maybe buying a decent raid card now so that I can rebuild my LD and then letting her buy me the board. Then I can move the card to the new boar without losing my data"


So I purchased the Intel RS3WC080 from Amazon just now and it will be here tomorrow
Here I go again getting beat down by my own ignorance!
I guess this card is SCSI HD and requires a SFF-8643 cable which I don't have
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Aaron Tomosky
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Thanks buddy. I got 2 OTW.
Presently I have all WD Red 2TB for the LD and I have the hyper-v host (S2012R2) running off of a new 3TB Red but I have that 2nd cable coming for more storage.

 What would  make the most sense to run the Hyper-V host keeping in mind that I plan to move this over to the Intel board Dec. 25th and I havent licensed this copy of S2012R2 yet:

Leave the 3TB plugged into the motherboard and move it to the new board?

Create a RAID 0 or 1 (with another 3TB purchase)? seperate from the raid 5 (or 10) storage array and move it to the new board?

Setup the array and install windows on it move it to the new board?

I'm probably going to ask her to get me the DBS2600CW2 then I can take my time building it since the array will be running off of the old machine.
file:///C:/Users/ACE.APES/Downloads/543634_Intel_Server_Board_S2600CW.pdf


p.s. I plan on getting with all of you regarding the possibility of integrating the other 2 servers off of the 1 card
sorry to double dip. I'll post a new Q
Boot To Raid Card Or AHCI?