Aliexpress NAS motherboard with BKHD C612NP Intel Xeon Processor E5-2650 V4

[emesix]

Hi there,

Currently i am making a "cheap" NAS with a mix of old and new hardware:
Inter-Tech 48.3cm IPC 3U-3508
8x 16TB Toshiba drives
AMD Ryzen 2600 6 core
Asrock motherboard
32GB of ECC memory
StarTech.com 8 Port SATA PCIe card

While searching for components i saw this board:

Xeon 12 core CPU
10x SATA 600 onboard
1x PCI-e 16x
4x 2.5Gb Lan Intell 226
https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005006102911885.html
http://bkhdpc.com/zhuban/96.html

Is there somebody with experience with this board? Or any other BKHD equipment? Because i am wondering if it worth the 200euro gamble.

 

[Ericloewe]

Oh my god, I226s? That means they're actively manufacturing those or were until recently! Where are they getting PCHs from? The sockets!? Wow...

Because i am wondering if it worth the 200euro gamble.

No. You get to save maybe 100 bucks over a reputable board (and that's only because supply is a bit tight on the motherboard side at the moment) and in return all you have to deal with is:

• Unknown build quality
• Likely worse firmware situation than reputable OEMs (and nobody's accusing them of shipping good firmware)
• Likely built out of parts that fell off a truck in the shadiest alley of the shadiest part of Shenzhen, in the middle of the night. In the rain.
• Intel 2.5 GbE NICs - a fantastic way of paying more for worse reliability and drivers with no meaningful benefit in throughput
• Two DIMM slots? On a Xeon E5? That's miserable.
• This thing has a BMC, so the manufacturer doesn't even need to develop a creative software implant that can compromise the host system from the system firmware, they can conveniently run on the BMC, in a Linux environment, instead of tricky System Management Mode stuff.
• On the off chance this is not deliberately loaded with malware, there's a pretty good chance that it's involuntarily loaded with malware, given the miserable security record even big OEMs have when dealing with ASpeed BMC stuff.
• Audio? They're cramming an LGA 2011 v3 system onto a MicroATXish form factor and they waste board space on freaking audio?

To top it all off, if you're not picky about the exact configuration, you can get full Dell R630s, with two CPUs and some DRAM, for under 400 bucks. I don't know why this thing exists, but I strongly recommend that you stay far away from it.

 

[danb35]

I don't know why this thing exists

It'd make a hell of a mini-ITX NAS. RDIMMs mean there's room for plenty of ECC RAM. The E5 has plenty of horsepower (of course, it burns lots of watts, but...). Ten SATA ports should allow for plenty of drives. Remote management. Sure, it won't be nearly as well-engineered as an R630, but for people who want a compact NAS it seems like checks lots of blocks. Well, other than "trustworthy manufacturer"...

 

[MrGuvernment]

I wish more people @Ericloewe considered all of that with these rather questionable items that can be bought on Aliexpress..with how far China has infiltrated devices around the world, that we know of, not including those we do not know of yet, AliExpress is the last place I would personally buy anything from.

 

[danb35]

with how far China has infiltrated devices around the world, that we know of, not including those we do not know of yet, AliExpress is the last place I would personally buy anything from.

I don't really see the logical connection here. By and large, any tech you buy will have been made in China, no matter where you buy it. If you're concerned about them "infiltrating" devices, I'd think the manufacturing would be a much greater concern than retail.

Eric mentions a number of valid concerns about this unit. "It's listed on Aliexpress" doesn't belong in the top 10, or even the top 20.

 

[Ericloewe]

It'd make a hell of a mini-ITX NAS. RDIMMs mean there's room for plenty of ECC RAM. The E5 has plenty of horsepower (of course, it burns lots of watts, but...). Ten SATA ports should allow for plenty of drives. Remote management. Sure, it won't be nearly as well-engineered as an R630, but for people who want a compact NAS it seems like checks lots of blocks. Well, other than "trustworthy manufacturer"...

On a pure specs level, it's very compromised to cram in the I226s, on the rear of the board - that's why it only has two DDR4 channels, the space typically used to route the other two is occupied with PCIe and the I226s themselves. The main reason why I don't think this thing has a place on the market is that the ASRock Rack EPC612D4U-8R exists (also available with 10GBase-T instead of 1GBase-T. This thing seems to be smaller than MicroATX, but that's an academic distinction since it's way too big for the vast majority of MiniITX chassis.

 

[Jailer]

On a pure specs level, it's very compromised to cram in the I226s, on the rear of the board - that's why it only has two DDR4 channels, the space typically used to route the other two is occupied with PCIe and the I226s themselves. The main reason why I don't think this thing has a place on the market is that the ASRock Rack EPC612D4U-8R exists (also available with 10GBase-T instead of 1GBase-T. This thing seems to be smaller than MicroATX, but that's an academic distinction since it's way too big for the vast majority of MiniITX chassis.

If form factor isn't a limiting factor the Supermicro X10SRi-F is a valid option. I've been looking at these boards to replace my aging rig and this seems to be a good option for the LGA 2011 v4 family of CPU's with better memory support.