Sorry for the wall of text.
It’s finally time to replace my energy wasting server, and I need some advice.
What I have now:
AMD FX8320
Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 R5
16GB RAM
LSI SAS 9300-8i
1x 20TB HDD (Seagate Exos)
1x 12TB HDD (HGST)
1x 8TB HDD (WD Gold)
2x 256GB SSD (Samsung 860 EVO)
1x internal BD reader
Corsair RM650X
Average idle usage: ±100W
Usage:
Unraid, with:
Dockers: Nextcloud, Jellyfin, torrents, reverse proxy setup, and some ‘smaller’ dockers, like Bitwarden.
VMs: Ubuntu Server, Home Assistant.
What I am looking for:
- A system that preferably isn’t a downgrade. This shouldn’t be thát hard :p. It doesn’t have to be a ‘Firebreathing dragon’, but if it doesn’t matter much in idle usage, I wouldn’t mind. Untill now my CPU does what I need for performance, it’s just the obsene Watts it uses that forces me to replace it. I might like a bit more headroom to play with for future proofing in case I want to play with some Dockers/VMs for more heavy workloads, that I turn off when not in use, so extra cores would be nice. I rarely transcode with Jellyfin, maybe a few times a year when I’m away from home. The movies that I’ve ripped are done with MakeMKV, so uncompressed. My ‘Linux ISOs’ are, sometimes compressed.
I’m thinking that if I want to do more heavy workloads, I can always build a system for it when it comes to that. 6c/12t should be more then enough, and possibly even overkill.
I’m not opposed to getting a ‘downgrade’, but it needs to be justified. An iGPU/APU would be nice, for monitoring the system at the very least, and the occasional transcode. I’m still a bit unsure about this, though. I’d like the monitoring, since I don’t have that now, and that is véry annoying when I need to troubleshoot the server. I feel like the bottleneck I’m running into with transcoding on my current system is more my upload speed (I only transcode when I’m away from home.) I’ll be getting fiber soon, zo that won’t be an issue anymore.
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Around 25-30W idle with the HDDs spun down. Lower would be awesome, but I’m not sure if that is realistic with my current usage.
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The Motherboard should have at least 6 SATA ports. I currently use 6, but with the upgrade I want to replace my SATA cache drives with m.2, so I free up 2 slots. I’d like to have something like a cache Z-pool with SATA SSDs in the future to keep the HDDs spun down as long as possible.
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At least 2x m.2. No shared lanes with the SATA ports. I need to be able to use all ports at the same time.
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ECC RAM (Maybe just for peace of mind). I’ve read that it is more of a nice to have nowadays than a necessity. What do you think? 16GB should be fine, I’d wager.
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Onboard NIC from Intel. Gigabit should be enough for now. If I want to go 10Gig, I’ll get an SFP card for efficiency.
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mgmt port/IPMI would be nice, but optional if the CPU has integrated graphics.
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Onboard USB port would be nice as well, but optional. Having the Unraid USB inside the case onboard would be a nice luxury.
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Budget: Around €1000-1300. If I don´t need to use it, all the better. If I can get what I need for half the price, awesome. For now it’s purely for the CPU, MoBo and RAM. I can upgrade the PSU at a later date. If the budget allows it, I’d like to replace my 8TB drive with another 20TB Exos drive, and replace the SATA cache drives with 2x 1TB m.2 drives.
In the new build, I don´t want to use the HBA card, since it uses quite a bit of power. I need it now due to compatibility issues with my motherboard and my Samsung SSDs.
I use the BD-drive to rip my movies, so I can’t just remove it. I’m thinking of getting an external USB BD-drive to save a bit of power when not in use, and to free up another SATA port.
I’ve been looking around, but I can´t really decide on one thing or another. I like the boards from AsRock Rack, but it might be overkill. I’ve also read that one of the m.2 drives on those board is shared with the PCI-e 1x and LAN ports. I don’t know how that impacts speed. I’ve seen AM4 boards that I like, but can’t really find nice Intel boards where I live.
I’ve also seen many posts of people that keep running into issues with these boards. What is your experience with them? Would the x570 version over the x470 version be a benefit for me?
For CPUs I’m undecided as well. I’ve found the combination of the AsRock Rack x470D4U (or X570D4U) with a 5650G to be appealing. The reason for the Ryzen PRO APU is that it allows me to use ECC memory. If the transcoding can be done by the CPU for my use case, I could get a CPU, instead of an APU with this, since the board supports IPMI.
I don´t need to break any records with low power usage, just as low as is reasonable for my use case.
I can be easily convinced to go for AMD or Intel, I am completely agnostic about it.
I’ve been considering a pico PSU as well, but with multiple HDDs that all spin up with the parity checks and boot, that might give too big of a power spike. Combined with the fact that they only have 1 SATA power connector and 1 MOLEX. For the amount I need, that feels like a fire-hazard waiting to happen.
Could you point me in the right direction?