Server upgrade (part 2)

So FreeBSD ran stable on my latest Ryzen setup for at least 18 hours. I guess it’s safe to say it’s stable now.

The x1 graphics card has arrived, and it works without problem. It sure is nice having a tiny graphics card. Maybe I should get more of this.

There were small hitch after I changed back the SATA cabling to connect to the HBA. Some of the drives weren’t detected properly for some reason. Fiddled with the cables a bit and thankfully everything came back up normal.

With this, the upgrade is mostly done. Apart of the ethernet card which I’m still waiting for arrival of the ones with correct bracket and ECC RAM which will be a while until I save enough money for.

There’s also SMR drives situation. I recently learned that manufacturers have started switching to SMR drives which has relatively low random write speed. That explained why the resilver time was so horrible back when I upgraded the pool. Thankfully it can buffer some burst load although it’s not always enough for ZFS operations. The read speed should be mostly fine so I’m thinking of keeping these drives until they die which then I’ll buy normal PMR drives for the replacements. Unfortunately, those will be a bit expensive.

Oh, I almost forgot one more upgrade coming whenever this pandemic situation is over. I’m thinking of taking home a pair of 500GB-ish SSD currently sitting idle in work dev server. I can use them for my home partition as the (NVMe) disk is getting full at 70% and my home directory somehow accounts for 100GB (20%) of it. Slightly slower home directory will be a bit sad but it’s better than having full disk.

Unrelated, but looking again, I considered getting X470 motherboard instead of X570. It’s a bit cheaper and doesn’t need fan. It also has better PCIe configuration at x8/x8 instead of my current X570’s x16/x4. Too bad one of the M.2 NVMe slots is only PCIe Gen 2 x2 (the cheap one). That’s a bit on the slower side for NVMe disk. Still, I probably should’ve gone with that one. I might even be able to fit x16 graphics card on the x1 slot. It’s too late now. RIP me.

There’s also the ASRock Ryzen server motherboard which price quite a lot lower than I thought at 30k. But that one is, well, more expensive. And involves buying directly overseas.

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