Hi all,
My old and venerable microserver is starting to show it’s age so it’s time for an upgrade. It currently holds 2x 32gb retro SLC SSDs for zfs and 2x 4tb mirror.
Non negotiable specifications.
Must have ECC ram.
Must have room to upgrade to at least 2x more spinners.
Mobo must have 4+ memory slots as only 2 will be originally populated.
Mobo must have 1x pci-e slot for future upgrade.
So I’m opening it up to the floor for suggestions on hardware. Cases, mobos, etc etc.
ECC pretty much limits your selection to Intel or high end Ryzen / Threadripper motherboards.
4+ memory slots limits your motherboard range to mATX or above.
All motherboards today have at least one 16x PCIe slot, and this is compatible with all PCIe cards (x1, x4, x8 and x16).
The Antec P110 Silent seems to satisfy your needs for hard drive spots, but I am pretty sure there are better cases out there.
Gen 8 Proliant are pretty cheap on eBay now. By spinners I’m guessing you want huge 3.5" drives, so that would be the “LFF” chassis. A DL380 will have several expansion slots.
What do you use the server for? Do you have a target capacity in mind? Why do you think you need ECC and 4 ram slots?
Some more info on your use case would helpful as there may be other ways to achieve your objectives without locking into specific hardware specs.
EEC ram as I’m using ZFS.
In terms of case. That is open to debate but must have removable drive trays.
For a small NAS build, I like the Fractal Design Node 304 case myself. Half the size of a mid-tower, decent price, 6 drive bays, but two huge problems from your standpoint;
Here is an example build if you can live with those two limitations, I have not included ECC RAM since PC Part Picker does not seem to list that:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Krfzq3
A controller card would allow for a much less expensive build though, see this for instance:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/RKVKWb
And just add this:
Probably better to go bigger, but I’d say that is how small you can go without resorting to pre-built NAS.
I was referring to “use case”, not the case.
Apologies if my post was unclear. I’ll try to restate my question.
I am specifically trying to understand what data you are looking to put through your server and the zfs pool. If it is mission critical scientific datasets with realtime in-memory processing of large arrays, or large databases which need coherence, then yes I’d agree with you ECC is important. If you are just storing some cat pictures and a rip of your Glen Miller CDs, then don’t waste your money on expensive RAM, focus on backups and storage resilience. This has been debated to death but ECC does nothing for zfs file system integrity, it only helps pick up errors during in memory processing, which is a fraction of a second if all you are doing is playing a video of Tiddles riding on a roomba.
So to restate the question,
do you just want to store static data with integrity and access it from time to time from more than one device. If so don’t constrain yourself on ram as a consideration, or
are you running a “production” workload where the server will be holding live data in memory that will be edited in memory and used randomly. In that case ECC may add value.
I would also say consider the source when referring to ECC ram.
Not just in this case, but in general. Any corruption on a laptop before saving to the server’s zfs pool will be reliably preserved.
If an OP does not bother with ECC on the ingest source, it would almost be redundant on the destination?
Like, food for thought.
Coming from a consumer background, I’m new to ECC, and overvalued it’s effect…
Also, regarding ECC, this blog post shines a spot on it.
TLDR version; unless your data is mission-critical as in, millions will be lost if this data is corrupted, then no, it really isn’t important. If it was, ECC would have already been part of every single DDR4 RAM stick sold today.
Thanks for all your input and help.
in terms of use:
The NAS is multi purpose. Currently it has 2tb set aside for general home NAS duties (mostly films), 1tb for backups (home computers), ~500gb for a NFS store for a vmware testbed and the rest is used for high compression/dedupe of text files.
So it’s really a jack of all trades for home/tinkering use.
I want ECC simply because I’m happy to pay the extra for peace of mind.
You might like: ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T (at provantage)
or it’s smaller cousin: ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T (more available almost anywhere)
The smaller one is mini-itx and you can load it up with 128GB of ECC in it’s 4 slots , has dual 10gig nics, and you can use two of those oculink 4x SATA breakout cables (you only get one with the board) to connect up to 8x sata disks.
There’s threads on the forums about these boards with more detail and people’s experiences. I think they’re a worthy spiritual successor to N36L/N40L (bless their tiny little cpus), but a lot more powerful. Add some noctuas and a dist filter on a case, and it’ll be great!
Asrock support told me that all of their X570 and B550 boards fully support ECC UDIMMs, and I can say that at least the B550 Steel Legend does.
32GB Samsung UDIMMs (M391A4G43MB1-CTD, M391A4G43AB1-CVF, M391A4G43AB1-CWE) are only a small premium over non-ECC sticks.
If you’re confident enough, I’d definitely recommend finding an old Dell or HP SAS2008 RAID card, and flashing it to IT Mode to be used as an HBA. Preferable over one of the cheaper ones that breaks out to SATA, and gives you the option of using SAS drives, which you can sometimes pick up on the cheap.
There’s a list of cards here, and there are quite a few tutorials around guiding you through how to flash them.
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