Globemaster Server..... Under Development....

This picture of C17s at "final assembly" in Long Beach is appropriate for my "Globemaster" server build. It seems to have taken forever! It started out as a build based on the Supermicro "X7" generation motherboard. These were LGA771, Xeon boards that were contemporaries of the early "Core" processors. So yeah; it's a bit older. To make a long story short, I never did get that board up and running correctly, so I decided to jump forward.

Forward to the X9 generation. That's LGA1155 and Intel C202/204 chipset, which on the desktop side took the Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors. These are for much smaller processors as compared to the X7 that I had started with. There's only 4 RAM slots and one processor socket, but it's got what I need. My board is a very commonly available X9SCL. I chose this board, because it's cheap (about $50) and commonly available. It also can take regular i3 cpus and DDR3 RAM. But I have higher aspirations than that!

I want to use ECC memory (which is recommended for FreeNAS), so I also needed to use a Xeon processor as well. Of course, me, being me; I want this thing to be as low powered as I can. Although there are 12 Xeons that will work for this board, I want one of the 2 low powered versions. The E3-1220L (20w), or E3-1260L (45w). That's versus the 80 or 95w that the regular E3 gen processors normally run! Since the E3-1260L is almost impossible to find, I settled for the E3-1220L that I found for about $110 out of China on eBay. Although it only runs at about 2.2Ghz vs. the regular ones which range from 3.1 all the way up to 3.6Ghz, I figured that a file server would be fine with the lower speed.

It turns out that, that part was easy. The hard part was finding the correct memory to work with the board and processor! First of all, it needed to be ECC, and that's along with the correct type, speed, etc. For servers, it's complex. Finding DDR3 that ECC wasn't very hard. Finding it that's "unbuffered" that's also in a halfway decent density was the issue! The board maxes out at 32Gb, which means 4 modules of 8Gb each. I can't really afford that at the moment, but I can do 2 modules for 16Gb. What I'm probably going to end up doing is to pick up 8Gb in 4 modules here locally. I hate to do it that way since at least 2 will end up being pitched at some point down the road when I want to upgrade. But I can get myself going at $25 vs. trying to find the ghost memory and having the machine wait for who knows how much longer!