FreeBSD on Intel Z77 motherboard

[peterh337]

A bit of an obscure Q....

The FreeBSD compatibility site (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/faq/) doesn't answer it.

We currently run a low-load FreeBSD web/email server, with a backup at another site, using some ancient PCs. The plan is to move these to modern low power SSD-based boxes.

This is the box (http://www.quietpc.com/products/systems/sys-fc5-z77) we are looking at and this is the motherboard (http://www.quietpc.com/products/motherboards/ga-z77m-d3h). The MB spec is here (http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4192&dl=1#sp).

This stuff is all "IBM compatible" so it "should just work" :) but e.g. this (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyNDg) suggests there may be issues. OTOH that last link is the I7 CPU whereas the MB in question is an I5. But not even booting up is obviously a big problem. They also couldn't get a USB mouse to work.... There is very little online data on people running FreeBSD on modern hardware.

I wonder if anyone here has any experience, or can suggest another good quality no-moving-parts box which is known to run FreeBSD?

For example, this (http://aleutia.com/products/fanless-pc/d2-dual-core-mini-atom-pc) is another but rather lower spec box we looked at, which we can't be sure if it will do what is needed (we are running some PHP/HTTPS stuff) but the company is totally nonresponsive to emails or phone calls.

[Milo Minderbinder]

Don't reinvent the wheel
Just buy Mac Minis with OSX server preinstalled. OSX is based on FreeBSD

Apple (United Kingdom) (http://www.apple.com/uk/macmini/server/)

They even have the SSD drives you want as options, though personally I'd stay away from those. I don't believe the technology has advanced far enough for SSDs to be reliable enough yet in a business server envorinment (this is where I stand back and wait to be shouted down....) My comment is aimed at SSDs in general and not against Apple

[Mac the Knife]

Why don't you just try it out?

Cost=0

Mac

[rgbrock1]

Milo:

Our IBM AIX boxes used SSD storage for "mission critical" applications i.e., production.

As do our HP OpenVMS systems for database usage.

SSD's have come a long way over the years and are now totally reliable in a production environment.

[peterh337]

They even have the SSD drives you want as options, though personally I'd stay away from those. I don't believe the technology has advanced far enough for SSDs to be reliable enough yet in a business server envorinment

Interestingly I've had a zero success rate with SSDs lasting more than their warranty in desktop machines (which is fortunate, depending on how you look at it ;) ) but that was under winXP which is constantly thrashing the registry (a write per second, constantly, according to some tests I did). SSDs work great on laptops, even under XP, presumably because the OS has been stopped from doing that for obvious HD power management reasons.

This was with Intel and Crucial SSDs.

But when they work they are great, and run very cool.

We did this here a while ago. The wear-evening algorithms which SSDs are supposed to run (without any OS co-operation i.e. no TRIM command support from the OS) should spread the wear but this merely translates to a maximum amount of data which can be written to the SSD before every flash block has reached its write limit (~10k writes). With a say 130GB SSD the figure, for Intel ones, is of the order of 40TB of data, which is not as much as one might think. One could reach it in a year or two in a desktop PC doing a lot of stuff.

Why don't you just try it out?

Cost=0

Not if the vendor offers no warranty that it will run an "unsupported OS".