Opinions on H370m boards

[WackyWRZ]

Building a new NAS / Fileserver and looking for a good mATX or ITX board with 6+ SATA ports to pair with a Coffee Lake Pentium. I've narrowed the best options down to the Gigabyte H370M D3H and ASRock H370M Pro4. I've not built anything since Haswell and am somewhat out of the loop on the newer boards. I've never used ASRock before, had problems with Gigabyte before, and have been relatively happy with Asus - I just don't see anything really decent from them in the lower end range. Their PRIME boards seem to lack VRM heatsinks which probably not a big deal, but seems like a cheap-out.

Just wondering what opinions on the newer stuff is, or if I am overlooking something here!

 

[Blaylock]

I agree with you on the ASUS lower end boards not have VRM sinks. There have been reports of them running too hot also which is unnerving.

For a NAS that is running at stock I'm sure a H370 will be more than enough. I've had a few ASRock boards and they are pretty solid. They had some issues about a decade ago, maybe a little less but seem to have that issue resolved.

Will you be using a dedicated Raid Controller?

 

[WackyWRZ]

Right now I am using a Dell Poweredge server, with ESXi that sucks down the juice for about 4 VMs (Domain Controller, File/Plex server, backup, and a couple test servers). Thing is pulling like 180W at idle, because it has RAID cards, and a video card for Plex transcoding. The new system should be able to use the QuickSync and eliminate the video card as well - planning to use the Fractal 804 case.

I had planned to just try UnRAID instead to simplify things, and just use the DC as a VM on it and put Plex in a docker.

I do have a couple LSI RAID 9265 cards, but was hoping to just use the onboard SATA and avoid another card drawing more power until I add more drives down the road.

 

[Blaylock]

I doubt you'll find a mico or mini board with more than 6 sata ports is why I'm asking. Plus if you populate the M.2 slot you'll lose one or more sata ports.

 

[WackyWRZ]

Interesting - I didn't realize that populating the M.2 would cause a loss of SATA ports!

 

[Blaylock]

It can. On my ASRock and on the one you're looking at it does.

 

[E-Tech]

There are 2 M.2 slots on the ASRock H370M one is dedicated for Type 2230 WiFi/BT adapter. The other is an Ultra M.2 slot. This slot if occupied by an SATA based M.2 drive will disable SATA port SATA3_1. If however that slot is occupied by an NVMe based M.2 drive then the SATA3_1 slot will remain available.

Overall I would buy the ASRock board. They are rock solid these days and very little if any issues. Just check the QVL list for components so that you buy the right parts.

What OS are you going to run?

 

[WackyWRZ]

Interesting - I didn't even know you could put an SATA M.2 in there either!

Planning on running Unraid.

 

[E-Tech]

Unraid, interesting choice. It uses a form of storage pool technology that is not really raid for multiple disks. Such systems in my experience are very robust. I run one myself that uses FreeNAS and a ZFS filesystem which is similar to Unraid.

I would suggest that you plan for 1 GB of RAM for every Terabyte of storage capacity. That will give you maximum performance. Unraid makes use of a data cache in which you can configure a drive to act as a cache for data to be staged for writes to the storage drive pool. If I were building this I would get a large capacity M.2 NVMe drive as I could afford and use it as a cache drive. If your network is tuned right you should get well above 750Mbps transfer rate. In fact you should hit 1Gbps depending on the data your moving.

 

[WackyWRZ]

I'll have 4x4TB so I'll probably do 2 parity and 2 regular. I looked into FreeNAS but it looks a little more complicated - and everyone says ZFS "needs" ECC. I'm sure you can get by without it though. ESXi works for me outside of the power draw - honestly I could install it on the new machine but I want to try something different. I work full time in IT, so I get to "play" with ESXi enough all day haha. Plus I want to be able to spin drives down during the day when no one is home and overnight to conserve some more power.

Also have an 850PRO 512GB SATA I was planning on using for cache and the VMs until I can get an NVME. Running Cisco switches so I think the network should be OK. Getting the MATX gives me enough slots for more HBAs and I can always throw another NIC in for LAG if I find I need it.

 

[E-Tech]

Well, you can do dual parity if yo use Unraid version 6.2 but with 4 drives I would go with just 1 parity. You can expand it later if need be. You can get near Gigabit speed form a 1 Gig network pretty easily. The main thing to watch out for are devices not running or capable of Gigabit speed as they will make all the rest run at slower speeds too. I run Jumbo frames on my network which gets me in the 650 + Mbps average transfer rate with ease. Some will tell you Jumbo Frames are not necessary or don't work, I find just the opposite. The trick is again, make sure all your devices support it or else it will not work.

Your 850 PRO will be okay for cache, I suppose you could use an NVMe drive to host VM's which would be awesome.

 

[WackyWRZ]

I can get the same ASRock PRO4 board in Z370 instead of H370 for about $10 more... Worth it? Maybe for future use cases or better build quality?

 

[Blaylock]

The ability to overclock would make it worth it to me. Unfortunately, you do lose the USB 3.1 Gen2 ports for Gen1. I know this will be primarily a file server so the USB may be a bigger loss. Otherwise they appear to be very similar.

 

[E-Tech]

I think you would be fine with the H370 board. Both boards are essentially the same spec so the choice is yours.