Question Intel 13th gen motherboard recommendation with raid support

[drakejest]

Hello can i ask for some recommendation on what motherboard has the best raid support?

• The most ideal setup would be 4 m.2 NVME slots which i plan to mirror RAID ( 2x mirror and another 2x mirror, 2 separate mirror RAID). But it would seem hard to find a mobo with 4 nvme slots so instead i dont mind comprimising to a 2 m.2 NVME (will be mirrored together) slots and atleast 2 SATA slots (will be mirrored together).
• Has atleast 1GB/2.5GB ethernet.
• An HDMI/Displayport.
• Compatible with ddr4 ECC memory (not sure if this matters to a motherboard)

It will be used as a local server, so features that help it run 24/7 with fewer problem is a plus. What would be the cheapest board that fits this criteria?

 

[hotaru.hino]

A few points that I can't be bothered to organize into cohesive paragraphs:

• There's no LGA1700 boards that support DDR4 ECC. You're going to have to look into server boards, and even then they'll likely be a generation behind (though I haven't caught up with the server side of things)
• While I'm not an expert in this field, the more I look into this, the more I see that using hardware RAID solutions is increasingly not a good idea. See
  View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RI
  
  As an alternative to RAID1, the one I'm seeing is to create a ZFS pool and use ZFS mirroring. From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...ght-ironwolf-disks-two-filesystems-one-winner

If you're looking for raw, unbridled performance it's hard to argue against a properly-tuned pool of ZFS mirrors. RAID10 is the fastest per-disk conventional RAID topology in all metrics, and ZFS mirrors beat it resoundingly—sometimes by an order of magnitude—in every category tested, with the sole exception of 4KiB uncached reads.

ZFS' implementation of striped parity arrays—the RAIDz vdev type—are a bit more of a mixed bag. Although RAIDz2 decisively outperforms RAID6 on writes, it underperforms it significantly on 1MiB reads. If you're implementing a striped parity array, 1MiB is hopefully the blocksize you're targeting in the first place, since those arrays are particularly awful with small blocksizes.

When you add in the wealth of additional features ZFS offers—incredibly fast replication, per-dataset tuning, automatic data healing, high-performance inline compression, instant formatting, dynamic quota application, and more—we think it's difficult to justify any other choice for most general-purpose server applications.
ZFS still has more performance options to offer—we haven't yet covered the support vdev classes, LOG, CACHE, and SPECIAL. We'll cover those—and perhaps experiment with recordsize larger than 1MiB—in another fundamentals of storage chapter soon.

• Or alternatively, you might be asking for an overkill configuration for the server you're running. Is this going to support a business or is more of a hobbyist thing?

 

[drakejest]

A few points that I can't be bothered to organize into cohesive paragraphs:

• There's no LGA1700 boards that support DDR4 ECC. You're going to have to look into server boards, and even then they'll likely be a generation behind (though I haven't caught up with the server side of things)
• While I'm not an expert in this field, the more I look into this, the more I see that using hardware RAID solutions is increasingly not a good idea. See
  View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RI
  
  As an alternative to RAID1, the one I'm seeing is to create a ZFS pool and use ZFS mirroring. From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...ght-ironwolf-disks-two-filesystems-one-winner

• Or alternatively, you might be asking for an overkill configuration for the server you're running. Is this going to support a business or is more of a hobbyist thing?

This is for a medium business server, i was actually given a specs to build, but the spec given was a literal potato a modern office computer was significantly better, yet they gave me a decent budget and was told to use all of it (1250$). So i said what the heck might as well build them something nice.

So even though intel i7 13700k supports ECC , no motherboard can utilize that feature? I read that AM5 has built in ECC would this be a better alternative? How important is ECC anyway (original spec didnt say if RAM is supposed to be ECC, but i doubt it looking at the specs) ...

As for the RAID problem, im not really the one responsible for software as another person will be doing it. the bios it the closest thing to software that i will configure on this machine. I see if hardware raid is problematic then i still want to look for a board with the original specs, and just let the other guy handle the raid in software. But i can see that it is possible that there are already plans of using software raid since the spec requires atleast 4 drives.

AFAIK they will be running ubuntu onto this machine, and will be a sql server

 

[drakejest]

By the way how do you pick drives for ZFS? I would assume the OS would be on the separate drives as to those drives that will be used for zfs? so i should pick my drives to be something like

drive0 : 250GB SATA SSD for OS
drive1: 1Tb sata SSD to be used by zfs
drive2: 1Tb nvme SSD to be used by zfs
drive3: 1Tb nvme SSD to be used by zfs

can the OS drive be included in zfs?

 

[USAFRet]

Apart from any RAID, what is the actual backup routine for this server, and all the associated workstations?

 

[Eximo]

DDR5 itself has partial ECC, so you could just switch to a DDR5 board.

AMD does have better ECC unbuffered support, but you must pick a motherboard that does support that.

I would look at a Supermicro board and a Xeon rather than a consumer grade system if I were you.

 

[drakejest]

Apart from any RAID, what is the actual backup routine for this server, and all the associated workstations?

Im not exactly sure as to how its actually is implemented as im not privy to that information, but i know there is a cloud backup, and offsite backup, and a guy physically copying data to a harddrive to be placed in a vault somewhere.

Also i do not think the old server has a proper raid setup on it. this is a 10+ year old machine using off the shelf components from its time.

watching the video from level1 it became clearer to me that raid is not a solution anymore, and i would be better off with ZFS,

 

[USAFRet]

Im not exactly sure as to how its actually is implemented as im not privy to that information, but i know there is a cloud backup, and offsite backup, and a guy physically copying data to a harddrive to be placed in a vault somewhere.

Also i do not think the old server has a proper raid setup on it. this is a 10+ year old machine using off the shelf components from its time.

watching the video from level1 it became clearer to me that raid is not a solution anymore, and i would be better off with ZFS,

Bottom line - a RAID array is only good for continued uptime, in the event of a rare physical drive fail.

Not knowing your whole environment and workflow, I can't say that a RAID 1 or above is a good idea or not.

 

[drakejest]

DDR5 itself has partial ECC, so you could just switch to a DDR5 board.

AMD does have better ECC unbuffered support, but you must pick a motherboard that does support that.

I would look at a Supermicro board and a Xeon rather than a consumer grade system if I were you.

how does the DDR5 ECC compare to actual ECC rams of DDR4? are they that worse? Unfortunatly im not allowed to get second hand systems and xeons and threadripper is way over the budget.

 

[drakejest]

Bottom line - a RAID array is only good for continued uptime, in the event of a rare physical drive fail.

Not knowing your whole environment and workflow, I can't say that a RAID 1 or above is a good idea or not.

this is what i realized also , and since SSD are less prone to breaking without throwing early signs of errors is what led me to stop chasing RAID, if i must do raid i might as well use zfs.

My current problem now is do i really need "real" ECC or the DDR5 ECC sufficient.

 

[USAFRet]

this is what i realized also , and since SSD are less prone to breaking without throwing early signs of errors is what led me to stop chasing RAID, if i must do raid i might as well use zfs.

My current problem now is do i really need "real" ECC or the DDR5 ECC sufficient.

Unless you know you need "real" ECC and why, you probably don't.

 

[Misgar]

Two of my TrueNAS Core ZFS RAID-Z2 systems (6-drive and 8-drive arrays) are built in old HP Xeon servers with DDR3 ECC RAM.

The other two RAID-Z2 systems (both 8-disk arrays) use standard mobos and non-ECC RAM. Hard disks are either SAS or SATA (but not mixed in the same array).

I'm not too worried about the lack of ECC support on two systems, but I don't run a commercial business and I keep a number of backups.

I had no problems moving an old 8-drive RAID-Z2 8-disk SAS array from an HP server to standard desktop system, fitted with an LSI HBA controller flashed with IT-mode firmware.

Disk transplants from a system with a proprietary hardware RAID controller might be more difficult. You should consider how easy it will be to recover a RAID system, if the main computer hardware dies in a few years' time. Maintain frequent backups.

 

[hotaru.hino]

how does the DDR5 ECC compare to actual ECC rams of DDR4? are they that worse? Unfortunatly im not allowed to get second hand systems and xeons and threadripper is way over the budget.

Standard DDR5 ECC only makes sure that the data going out of the RAM module is fine. It does not account for the data in the DRAM chips themselves.

"True" ECC means it's covering the data in the DRAM chips.

 

[Eximo]

There are 'consumer' grade Xeons, just so we are clear.

https://www.newegg.com/intel-xeon-e-2334-lga-1200/p/N82E16819118389

Intel® Xeon® E-2334 Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz) Product Specifications

Intel® Xeon® E-2334 Processor (8M Cache, 3.40 GHz) quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and more.

ark.intel.com

Previous socket, but still available new. Paired with the right board you can certainly get unbuffered ECC.

That was just the first model I grabbed, there are plenty between $200 and $400 with varying core counts and clock speeds.

 

[drakejest]

Standard DDR5 ECC only makes sure that the data going out of the RAM module is fine. It does not account for the data in the DRAM chips themselves.

"True" ECC means it's covering the data in the DRAM chips.

so this DDR5 ECC is true for intel and AMD right? i have read that AMD has some offerings on "full" ECC

 

[hotaru.hino]

so this DDR5 ECC is true for intel and AMD right? i have read that AMD has some offerings on "full" ECC

Standard DDR5 ECC covers both Intel and AMD.

Regarding AMD supporting ECC, that's still up to the motherboard to allow use of the feature. But otherwise yes, Ryzen 7000 processors can support ECC.