While I'm not a heavy FreeBSD user I can offer you some advice on hardware at least based on my own experience.
If you want things to work as good as possible go with Intel chipset and LAN. AMD chipsets works (mostly) but you'll have worse performance and you wont get an Intel NIC which performs much better than Realtek or Attansic. which you usually find on AMD motherboards. A general tip is to go for business chipsets as Intel like to call them, Q35 (I have a few of those and they work very good), Q45 and Q57. By doing so you can be sure to get Intel NIC and they aren't much more expensive than your average motherboard and also usually carries some kind of remote management. Having in mind that FreeBSD may/may not support the newest hardware around I'd guess that Q57 needs -CURRENT for now but I would highly recommend it as Socket 775 is slowly dying. ASUS P7Q57-M DO looks like a very nice board if you want "bleeding edge" have in mind though as time of writing support for NIC doesn't seem to be in FreeBSD but I guess its a short matter of time (82578DM). Pair it with the slowest Core i3 CPU you can find and you have a very nice solution. If you step up to i5 you get hardware encryption =) If you want legacy Intel DQ45CB should be a pretty nice choice with supported LAN out of the box. Intel Pentium E6300 should be more than enough for storage. Both MSI and Gigabyte also makes Q-chipsets motherboards but they don't seem to widely available in the US and their boards should be fine too. Since you want to have more than 5 HDDs you need a controller card of some sort, in that case I would recommend you to have a look at the Supermicro ones mentioned in the post. http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=59735&postcount=5 UIO is just a backwards PCIe slot so turning it around till make it fit although you mean need to secure it somehow. They may be a bit hard to find but you can find a few sellers on eBay too. What I don't know is how the motherboards will react if you pop one in which you need to do some research on. As for memory you'll need at least 2Gb but 4Gb is highly recommended if you're going to use ZFS. Just make sure the sticks follows JEDEC standards and you'll be fine (Corsair Value Select series or stock Crucial are fine). //Daniel _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
