throughglassdarkly
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I'm building a Home ZFS Server, mostly for media storage and encoding/streaming. The ATX case I'm planning to use has enough space for three 5-in-3 SATA backplanes, so I need a motherboard that can expand to take at least 15 SATA ports. Maybe something with:
> 6-8 SATA ports, good number of PCI-e slots for additional SATA cards/NICs
> 8 DIMM slots would be great, but I'd settle for 4 if necessary
I was initially considering a C2D, but finding reasonably priced motherboards with enough SATA ports and ECC support has proved difficult (I found a Supermicro server board with 6 SATA ports selling for US$330 locally -_-). I read that most of AMD's processors have support ECC, so I was hoping to find a cheaper motherboard so I could spend more on the CPU.
I'm completely lost when it comes to AMD's CPUs, though - can anyone make any recommendations? Should I be looking at Phenom x3/x4 or would a x2 be enough? What about Opterons? My budget for the CPU+Motherboard is flexible, anywhere from $150-$300+.
> 6-8 SATA ports, good number of PCI-e slots for additional SATA cards/NICs
> 8 DIMM slots would be great, but I'd settle for 4 if necessary
I was initially considering a C2D, but finding reasonably priced motherboards with enough SATA ports and ECC support has proved difficult (I found a Supermicro server board with 6 SATA ports selling for US$330 locally -_-). I read that most of AMD's processors have support ECC, so I was hoping to find a cheaper motherboard so I could spend more on the CPU.
I'm completely lost when it comes to AMD's CPUs, though - can anyone make any recommendations? Should I be looking at Phenom x3/x4 or would a x2 be enough? What about Opterons? My budget for the CPU+Motherboard is flexible, anywhere from $150-$300+.
