Louwrentius

If you want to build a home server, it may be advised to actually use server-grade components. I documented the reasons for choosing server-grade hardware already in an earlier post on this topic.

It is recommended to read the old post first. In this new post, I only show new hardware that could also be chosen as a more modern hardware option.

My original post dates back to December 2013 and centers around the popular X9SCM-F which is based on the LGA 1155 socket. Please note that the X9SCM-F / LGA 1155 based solution may be cheaper if you want the Xeon processor.

So I'd like to introduce two Supermicro motherboards that may be of interest.

Supermicro X10SLL-F

Some key features are:

• 2 x Gigabit NIC on-board
• 6 onboard SATA ports
• 3 x PCIe (2 x 8x + 1 x 4x)
• Costs $169 or €160

This board is one of the cheapest Supermicro boards you can get and it has 3 x PCI-e, which may be of interest if you need to install extra HBA's or RAID cards, SAS expanders and/or network controllers.

Supermicro X10SL7-F

This board is about $80 or €90 more expensive than the X10SLL-F but in return, you get eight extra SAS/SATA ports, for a total of 14 SATA ports. With 4 TB drives, this would give you 56 TB of raw storage capacity. This motherboard provides a cheaper solution than an add-on HBA card, which would occupy a PCIe slot. Hoever, the's a caveat: this board has 'only' two PCIe slots. But there's still room for an additional quad-port or 10 Gbe NIC and an extra HBA if required.

• 2 x Gigabit NIC on-board
• 6 onboard SATA ports
• 8 onboard SAS/SATA ports via LSI 2308 chip
• 2 x PCIe (8x and 4x)
• Costs $242 or €250

Overview of CPU's

• Dollars are from Newegg, Euro's are from Tweakers.net.
• Euros are including taxes.

I'm responsible for a file server with about 5 terrabytes of data. The file server is based on Windows 2008 R2. I've noticed extreme memory usage on the server. After a reboot, it slowly builds up until almost all RAM memory is consumed.

So I googled around and found this post and it turned out I had the same exact issue.

I've confirmed with the tool 'RAMmap' that NTFS metadata is the issue. Microsoft also created a blog post about this.

The author of the first article resolved the issue by adding more RAM memory. But with 16 GB already assigned, I was not to happy to add more memory to the virtual file server, eating away on the RAM resources of our virtualisation platform.

I could never find a root cause of the issue. In that case, you need to obtain the 'Microsoft Windows Dynamic Cache Service'. This application allows you to configure how large the medata caching may grow.

Please note that this services is not a next-next-finish installation. Follow the included Word document with instructions carefully and configure a sane memory setting for your server. I limited the cache to half the RAM available to the server and this works out well.