Looking at mobo with integrated 10G, cant find chipset to check compatibility?

[ee21]

I'm looking at an Intel Atom server board for my build, as am not happy with the consumer grade Ryzen CPU and board I started with. I found this board with two integrated "10G SFP+ Optical Fiber (CS4227)", but cannot find the hardware that drives these ports to check compatibility. "CS4227" seems to correlate to the type of port itself, not the chip that drives them... I'm probably just being ignorant, as this is rather new to me, I've only played around with direct-attached copper using CAT6 cabling..

Can anyone confirm if the 10G SFP ports on this board will work with TureNAS 12? https://www.newegg.com/asrock-rack-...el_atom-_-13-140-019-_-Product&quicklink=true

Out of the box, or manual drive installation required?

 

[Bikerchris]

This post by @jgreco may not answer your question directly, but it does hint that it may not work. There are relatively few that work straight out the box.

10 Gig Networking Primer

This document is now available in the Resources section! Use the tabs above to navigate to the document itself. The current version also follows inside the spoiler tag: Also, if you'd like to repost this elsewhere, I'd appreciate it if you would have the courtesy to ask. And to credit the...

www.truenas.com

 

[jgreco]

That looks like an Intel Atom C3558 based SoC system. In these systems, they often include dedicated ethernet hardware as part of the SoC, with some support electronics. In this case, a CS4227 PHY.

My general guess is that it'd work fine as long as Intel's driver for the SoC's ethernet has been included inm and is sufficiently up to date, in FreeBSD.

However, be aware that there is a possibility it won't.

 

[ee21]

Thanks all. I found an older post here too, last updated about 3 years ago unfortunately, that suggested something similar - that the same drivers were needed as the Intel X552. I will likely give it a shot, as if it works well, it makes that board an incredible value.

 

[jgreco]

I've got some similar Supermicro boards with the X552, but they are in use as hypervisors. They are nice.

 

[ee21]

I was hoping for Intel-onboard like most Supermicro's but the price point and features on the one I linked look very attractive. I likely am going with Chelsio T520's for my hypervisors I'm building out, and probably will pop a third in my SAN box just to take advantage of the extra port on the VM hosts..

On that subject without derailing the thread too much, I can't seem to find any info on the T520-BT What are your 2-cents on this card? - assuming it really is a 3 pack, else the price point isn't even worth it: https://www.amazon.com/Chelsio-T520-BT-Dual-10GbE-Adapter/dp/B07BCNSPFR

 

[jgreco]

You or I are confused.

"Intel-onboard like most Supermicro's"? Would seem to refer to Supermicro's habit of including high quality well-supported discrete Intel ethernet components, even to the length of creating a custom variant like the X9SCM-IIF with 2x 82574L's because the 82579LM on the X9SCM-F wasn't supported by ESXi at the time. This is definitely different than the prosumer workstation or gaming boards where you're likely to find similar boards but with random Realtek grade ethernets.

But there is *no* ethernet chipset needed with the Intel SoC's, because the ethernet support is built into the SoC.

These SoC's are intended for applications such as software-defined networking, unified threat management hosts, etc., and by having a single chip that can do most functions right on the SoC, it makes it easier to design specialized appliances for these tasks.

So I definitely consider the SoC LAN as "Intel LAN" and to the best of my knowledge these show up as X552 parts, but I don't have a 3558 to check so this is just my offhand guess.

 

[rvassar]

Interesting board, but make sure you check the CPU spec's and match it to your application. Single thread Passmark score is 569, total score 1650. That's roughly equivalent to 1 core of an 8 year old Sandy Bridge i3...

 

[ee21]

You or I are confused.

"Intel-onboard like most Supermicro's"? Would seem to refer to Supermicro's habit of including high quality well-supported discrete Intel ethernet components, even to the length of creating a custom variant like the X9SCM-IIF with 2x 82574L's because the 82579LM on the X9SCM-F wasn't supported by ESXi at the time. This is definitely different than the prosumer workstation or gaming boards where you're likely to find similar boards but with random Realtek grade ethernets.

But there is *no* ethernet chipset needed with the Intel SoC's, because the ethernet support is built into the SoC.

These SoC's are intended for applications such as software-defined networking, unified threat management hosts, etc., and by having a single chip that can do most functions right on the SoC, it makes it easier to design specialized appliances for these tasks.

So I definitely consider the SoC LAN as "Intel LAN" and to the best of my knowledge these show up as X552 parts, but I don't have a 3558 to check so this is just my offhand guess.

It's definitely me being ignorant of how this works. I'm used to the gaming boards you describe that have Realtek chips on them mostly, but your explanation makes very good sense.

 

[ee21]

Interesting board, but make sure you check the CPU spec's and match it to your application. Single thread Passmark score is 569, total score 1650. That's roughly equivalent to 1 core of an 8 year old Sandy Bridge i3...

Will be using this box as a SAN, and as such, don't believe in running PLEX on it, among literally any other plugin besides possibly Asigra, although was somewhat irritated you could not install a plugin at the top level without installing a jail, and may very well ditch that idea as well.

It'll be running a dozen or so iSCSI targets, with a maximum of two initiators/clients connected. 2 pools, one with flash and one with spinning disks; 6x500GB SSD in the first pool, and 4x4TB HDD in the second for now. Number of disks likely not to grow due to limitations of my 2U chassis, although plan to upgrade to bigger disks eventually. Standard compression only, not looking for dedupe or anything else fancy.

I may be putting another Chelsio T520 in as I mention for a total of 4 10GbE ports, counting the 2 integrated on the motherboard. Didn't think those used too much CPU though. Other than that, that's really it, I'm going for simple yet professional for reliability. I've read elsewhere this CPU or even the 2558 sound like they work fine, as long as you are expecting it to function as a pure NAS device... Am certainly open to recommendation for something better though. I was having a hard time finding a board with newer silicon than that, around the same price point.

 

[rvassar]

Will be using this box as a SAN, and as such, don't believe in running PLEX on it, among literally any other plugin besides possibly Asigra, although was somewhat irritated you could not install a plugin at the top level without installing a jail, and may very well ditch that idea as well.

Ok, I was just making sure you had checked that and had matched it to your expectations. It might be interesting to post some software RAID performance figures for the SSD pool when you're done.