# Quick hardware replacement - AMD?



## spork (Jun 11, 2011)

Hi all,

After some power issues the other day I think my old dual-xeon home server box is ready for the junk bin.  I was already having some issues with my PCI-x SiL3124 cards seeing a fourth Samsung F3 1TB drive and now it seems like the Sil card is getting even weirder.  Firmware update has done no good.  Drives work elsewhere.  I think it's time to let go and get a new board, CPU and RAM at Microcenter tomorrow before I end up wasting more time with a bunch of old/questionable hardware.

I just want something cheap - this thing is mainly just a zfs fileserver.  I'm finding plenty of affordable stuff with 6 SATA ports onboard if I go with AMD, but I'm not at all familiar with their chipsets or consumer cpus these days.

The board I'm considering is this:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0332667

It claims to have a "SB850" southbridge.  Does FreeBSD like this and enable all 6 ports as AHCI?

Any pointers to general AMD/FreeBSD info appreciated, I'm really out of the loop on this.

Thanks!


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## mav@ (Jun 11, 2011)

I personally prefer Intel, but I did some successful tests of SB850 with ahci(4) on ASUS M4A89GTD PRO board.


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## spork (Jun 11, 2011)

Thanks for confirming that.  I may end up with Intel, it all depends on what's in stock when I get to the store.  I'm trying to keep board, cpu and RAM under $200.

Speed isn't really an issue - this is replacing a dual-xeon board from 2001 or so.  I just want at least 6 onboard SATA ports that work reliably.

When this is done I'm also going to have two almost new PCI-X Sil3124 cards.  If you know of any developers that could make use of those, please let me know.  They just aren't playing nice with these Samsung drives.  The cost of replacing those cards with something better (and the PCI-X requirement) means that buying a new board/cpu/ram is cheaper...


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## wblock@ (Jun 11, 2011)

Before replacing the motherboard, check the power supply voltages.  The BIOS might do that, HDT shows some, possibly there's ports software that will do it also.  Also inspect the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard for bulging or leaking.

Oh, and PCI-X cards can work in a normal PCI slot, depending.


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## spork (Jun 11, 2011)

wblock said:
			
		

> Before replacing the motherboard, check the power supply voltages.  The BIOS might do that, HDT shows some, possibly there's ports software that will do it also.  Also inspect the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard for bulging or leaking.
> 
> Oh, and PCI-X cards can work in a normal PCI slot, depending.



The PSU should be OK, it's only a few months old.  Also the one drive that's the most problematic has no issues in an external USB case, and for fun I also powered it via the case when testing in the server, just to help rule out power issues.

I think the SATA card would probably be a bit too slow in a normal PCI slot.  Might be useful in a pinch for something or other though.

The machine is just old.  Doesn't even support 64 bit processors, and it's main purpose is as a home media and backups box with ZFS.   Moving to something newer would at least let me not have to fiddle with all the tunables to make ZFS work properly on 32 bit.

Also if anyone has a yay or nay on AMD SB710 chipset, that would be helpful.   Lots of boards at Microcenter seem to have that and they all have onboard video which would be handy (this is a console-only server, don't care about X).


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## ikreos (Jun 11, 2011)

I second wblock's post. Check your PSU voltages and the capacitors on the motherboard. Specifically the ones near the power rectifiers. I had a board 8+ years old with faulty caps and first changed the PSU thinking it was bad. I installed some new capacitors and it works just like new.

I have an SB770 based board that works fine. AHCI and everything else works great (you may also have to enable it in the bios).


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## spork (Jun 11, 2011)

Just another datapoint - mbmon actually works on this old Supermicro board now.  All the voltage levels look spot on and are not varying under full load.

Thanks for the SB770 tip!


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