---- On Thu, 19 May 2016 13:57:45 -0700 Mark Stodola <[email protected]> wrote ----
I'm in the process of spec'ing some new hardware and am looking at a Supermicro X11SAE (https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SAE.cfm) motherboard. Does anyone have any experience with this board, or at least the C236 chipset with SL7x? Also, can anyone recommend a supported RAID card. Only looking for a 2 drive, RAID 1 setup. I'm presently using an Areca ARC-1200, but think it is a performance bottleneck, as it is only SATAII. They offer a SATAIII, but looks like it might be a bit on the new side and turn into a fight with drivers. I have poked at using software RAID or the onboard Intel implementations, but am not sure how much integrity I can expect, especially when suffering a sudden power loss. I have had good luck with "real" hardware cards and so have a bias toward them. With software RAID, I understand that a separate boot partition must live on 1 of the drives. What happens if the drive with the boot partition fails? Maybe this has already been addressed and I'm just way behind the curve here... -Mark Hi Mark, Yes I do. The X11SAE-M (the mini ATX version) is my all time favorite motherboard. (I am a system builder, among other things.) It runs like a champ with Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. I have used it without issue with my Xfce Fedora 23 and 24 flash drives all the time for various functions I need to use that Windows chokes on. Press F11 to get the boot menu. I use to like the hardware RAID controller. But my experience is that they are slower, unless you are doing some massive RAID5 array or similar. And they take a long time to POST. The C237 chipset comes with RSTe (enterprise RST) RAID, which I see you have played with. My Windows 7 customer with RAID1 on dual SSD's has no trouble whatsoever with it. And my Fedora flash drives eat RSTe RAID for breakfast.. If you are worried about power loss, you should have a good UPS power supply and set up the power down software on your machine to power off when the battery starts to brown out (apcupsd, etc.). In my opinion you should have a UPS anyway (I have good luck with and sell APC's BR700G and BR1000G). And be sure to ask your add-on card's tech support about sudden power loss, as they don't do so well with that either. LSI use to sell a battery to backup setting on its cards. Don't know how that ever worked out. By the way RSTe on the C237 takes care of TRIM for you automatically on RAID drives with SSD's, a feature that is almost non-existant on RAID add on cards. Get you a Xeon processor so you can use ECC memory. Be careful on your choice of Xeon, some have on board video and some do not. Oh yes, and the USB3 ports are bootable. Yippee! And, sound does go through the HDMI port but not the B-I-Z-Z-A-R dport. There is no VGA port, but you do have a DVI port. (You probably already knew that.) You can always cut a SL Live DVD to test away. You should have one of these in your stash of weapons anyway to take care of crashes, etc. Congratulations on the choice of motherboard! HTH, -T
