I will be building this server within the next week, but I’d also like to get some advice from the computation veterans here. This is my first PC build and homeserver. (I have used Docker in WSL2 for a few things that I did need uptil now.)
From a hardware perspective, what rookie mistakes should I avoid while building a PC?
From a software perspective, I’ve been a bit torn. I’ve been considering 3 routes.
UnRAID, with it’s already built in RAID and Docker support.
TrueNAS, with Wendell’s rich guides on setting it up.
Ubuntu, with much more room for tinkering and learning, running docker containers while also having the rest of the resources available for trying different things on the OS. However, I’d like to learn how to go about setting up RAID for my HDDs (not my boot drive) in Ubuntu.
I’ve also been looking at the various kinds of RAID and want one that basically uses one HDD as a parity drive and the rest for storage, so in case one drive fails, data is still salvageable.
I’d be grateful for your support and advice to me, a rookie trying to get into the world of homeservers and self-hosting!
Hw. Make sure you place ram in proper slots. It performas best generally in the slot closest to the cpu and the third one from the cpu. So slots 1 and 3. Not 2 and 4. Don’t use too much thermal compound on your cpu. More or less get a psu more than you think you need. It gives head room for upgrades when and if necessary.
For software. I use proxmox which is fairly easy to learn. It uses lxc (Linux containers) and or vms for running programs.
I have not used unraid as it is a paid software. But from quick glance it looks fairly easy to use. More so than proxmox. Same with truenas.
I think the B-line of motherboards (in contrast to the X-line, your X570, X470, etc) has poorer support for VFIO and has bad IOMMU groupings so you wont be able to do something like Looking Glass very well. This means you will have a hard time (if ever you can) passing through your dedicated USB devices for the VM.
Should you ever need to use ECC, do note that you need the PRO line of AMD CPUs and confirm that the exact motherboard has support for ECC ram. Again, the X line has a better chance of actually supporting ECC vs your B450 mobo
I’ll be honest, I did think about it, but for now I simply did not have the budget for it. But it’ll be the first thing I’ll end up upgrading tbh, along with the case.
Yeah, my total TDP for the system (atleast according to PCPP) should come down to around 160W. So I did go around triple that to be safe. And I think power consumption will only increase with HDDs.
It’s the capacity of one drive worth of parity data in a normal parity RAID configuration. The parity data is distributed across all drives. Just to clarify things so you don’t get confused in mdadm or ZFS.
