I was thinking the Ryzen Threadripper 7945WX (or equivalent 5000WX) Pro (smallest, 12 core) might make a great platform for a data server. The motherboards don’t have many u2 connections though (only one slimSAS). With 128 PCIe lanes I should be able to drive around 20 x4 NVMe drives. But how do I connect all the drives to the board? Are there dedicated u.2 expansion cards? Do I use 4x m2 x16 cards and m2 to u2 cables? I am interested in connecting it eg with some 100Gb/s connection to another server for deep learning.
Why not Epyc, since that’s what they’re actually built for?
I didn’t realise there were Epyc cpus that are actually cheaper than threadripper. small epyc 7003 are the clear choice. Do you know any epyc boards that are made for storage systems?
Generally speaking the important functions on storage systems are on add-in cards. HBAs, RAID cards etc.
Thanks. From what I read, on a system with such a powerful cpu, it’s advisable to use software raid over hardware raid cards