BD770i based offsite backup server, storage setup suggestions

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Hi! I’m slowly planning out a somewhat sensibly budgetted offsite backup server for me and my dad to backup our NASes and other data to (I might do a separate thread about mine at some point since I have some ZFS related questions).

For the case I’m planning to use a rackmax rm-1921 which I have laying around. Only 6 bays for harddrives, but me and my dad don’t have too much data (yet), so it should be more than enough for now. There’s also plenty of empty space to velcro strap some SATA ssd’s and a PiKVM to if needed.

As for the motherboard and platform, I was planning to go for an ARM board for the power usage, but since something like the Solidrun LX2 is basically vaporware and very expensive and the ITX-RK3588 has some horrendous limitations, I had to look elsewhere (any other suggestions are very much welcome).

I came across the BD770i which seemed like a good candidate to me. My plan was to get an HBA in the x16 slot and leave the m.2 for the quick stuff. The networking is enough as-is because the colocation place has 1GbE max per rack server. Lastly (for now) I’m planning either 32GB or 64GB RAM depending on the recommendations. I know ZFS benefits from a lot of quick RAM depending on the amount of storage and if I want to run some VM, it’ll of course need more.

So I have a base setup planned with a case and everything else, the problem I’m running into is that I’m not all too familiar with having a sane ZFS storage setup. While I know about getting CMR drives when speccing out the 6 3.5" bays, as for SSD’s I’m getting dizzy reading all the threads about specifically getting enterprise drives, optane and the like for caching, so I figured getting some drive setup suggestions for my usecase would be a good idea.

Any help is appreciated! Please let me know if you have any questions.

TL;DR: Sensibly budgetted ZFS backup server at a colocation place with 1Gbps bandwidth at max.
BD770i (Ryzen 7 7745HX)
Some HBA
32GB RAM
Rackmax RM-1921 (6*3.5" bays with some open space for 2.5" drives and pikvm)

Problem I’m running into is that I do not have a clue how to modestly spec this out with regards to ZFS setups, to make back ups the least amount of a pain as 1Gbps bandwidth allows.

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I would avoid Minisforum stuff overall but that’s just me…
ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F or B650E-E (Intel NIC) + Ryzen 7600 + Micron 32GB DDR5-5600 ECC UDIMM 2Rx8 CL46 | MTC20C2085S1EC56BR | Crucial.com ?
I’d say a decent ASM1166 card but some have reported issues with AM5, I’m not able to test it myself right now (there’s a bios upgrade available). LSI 9211-8i works but it’s getting very old by now and newer generations needs more airflow which might be an issue.

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Okay, any specific reason? They’re quite popular and I like the cpu and connectivity the BD770i comes with.

Sorry, that’s ATX. Only mini-itx and micro-atx fit in the 2U case I have.

I have a question about this chip. Is it gonna spread the pcie bandwidth across those 6 ports or how does it work? I think 2 lanes of PCIe 3 does about 2GB/s which is not enough for 6 SATA-600 ports right?

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Poor QA, unknown aftermarket support (BIOS/Firmware, warranty support), Realtek NIC (most likely, I’m not going to download a ~1.2 driver package to figure out as they can’t spec it), no ECC support (hard requirement if you care about your data) to name a few.

Spinning rust will never top out SATA bandwidth except for possibly cached reads so bandiwidth is fine especially if you’re 1-2.5Gbit.

No idea if a decent ITX/or mATX board that does AM5. Might find something on utilizing Intels platform though.

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That’s entirely fair, I found the formfactor, price and less aggressive (laptop) power setup appealing. Sad that it does not support ECC.

As far as data goes, I’d love to know your (and anyone else’s) suggestion as far as storage goes. Like I said, 6 3.5" spots and some space I can cram away some 2.5" drives. Do I set those up in some way as far as parity and caching goes? I was thinking to at least get SLOG set up on either m.2 drives or the 2.5" ones and just leave the 6 HDD’s mirrored.

AsRock Rack B650D4U looks interesting, needs more SATA ports, but has plenty pcie expansion. I’d love if AMD released Ryzen 3 7000 series cpu’s to limit power usage and price a bit, but I guess you can’t have everything…

Otherwise some Atom C**** board may be good too.

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The AsRock N100M is where it’s at right now, expecially for low power needs like an offsite backup. You absolutely would be wasting that BD770i. Especially if the max transfers are 1Gb/s.

Seems like everyone is jumping into the low power NAS space at the moment and I post the same response as a broken record, though it’s done having the thing in hand and working not out of word of mouth or listening a random tech youtuber talking about it.

Thought about it too, but connectivity is too limited and there aren’t many OSes to choose from.

Everyone goes for the rule of thumb of 1GB per TB though performance on an offsite backup server will never be an issue. It’s just something someone made up one day, but you’re not gonna suffer if you stick with 32GB or even 16.

I’m going to be honest: most of the setups here are far beyond the needs or affordability of mere mortals. Which is not a bad thing, it’s just a matter of fact. If you buy a couple of good quality consumer SSDs, mirror them, as use it to store L2ARC and a metadata to speed up reads and drive access. Writes will not be a problem with a 6 HDDs array over gigabit, it’s easy to saturate it and having more drives helps with the small files transfer.

Anything can saturate 1Gbit these days, you don’t need to go overboard with the CPU or platform. Even the RK3588 you mentioned would be powerful enough to write constantly at 1Gbit on a 6 HDD array. So, beside my recommendation, go for what’s cheap enough, has good IPC and clockspeed and consumes as low power as possible when idle.
If you’re gonna use this machine for other more intensive workloads is obviously not fit for the job to buy a 4 core 6W TDP CPU.

It’s a niche product so it’s popular because nobody else makes it, beside AsRock with some industrial boards that are imposible to find. Minisforum got better at making BIOSes but it’s still a smaller chinese company that can’t compete with companies being 40 years in the field. I got one of their mini PCs for my dad (a 4750G based one, older) and sometimes, for whatever reason, tries to PXE boot like someone changed the boot order or the drive isn’t recognized. The drive inside is fine, 99% life left, no errors.

Dogpoop, stay away from it.

Good suggestion on the controller. Got a Silverstone ASM1166 card with firmware upgrades available and has been working well so far. About the bandwith you’re mixing up gigabit with gigabytes. SATA6 is 6 gigbit/s, while PCIe 3.0x2 is 2 gigabytes/s. You’ll never saturate that bus with 6 HDDs.

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I feel like every reply is going to get longer, but it’s fun discussing this stuff.

I mean I’d love to get rid of my Intel Atom N2800 Kimsufi box so a bit more umph would be good either way hahaha. I’d love to know your opinion on a setup with that AsRock board though. I’m assuming an ASM1166 in the x16 (x2 bandwidth) slot for the HDD’s and onboard for any ssd’s needed? Might be able to mess around with the E-key slot too. Kind of a bummer for the RAM limit though, but I’m guessing that won’t be a problem for a bit from what you said afterwards.

As far as connectivity goes (especially on that ITX-RK3588 board) it should be about comparable with the N100M board you mentioned. Though it has less SATA ports (it’s multiplexed from 1 to 5 so you only have bandwidth for 1), you still get a 4 lane PCIe slot as supposed to 2 lanes. No M.2 worth anything though. Also no swappable RAM.
As far as OS choice goes it’s a bit of a gamble on my part. Upstream support for the RK3588 is pretty good and especially good enough for a headless Server unit. I was planning to do the Device Tree porting work myself, but the thing is kinda expensive new and the only ad I’ve found second hand was for an 8GB RAM model which is a bit sucky to have.

Sounds like what I was planning, thanks!

Yeah I was planning to find a bit of an inbetween in that regard. I’m not quite content with the 50W idle my Ryzen 5 3600 NAS does (admittedly it needs a bit more tuning) and I understand I don’t need that power. I just think I may not be happy with the sort of limited port setups and bandwidth restrictions that are on boards like the ITX-RK3588 and N100M.

Yeah I’ve heard mixed reviews, just think the formfactor and the outputs of the BD770i are kind of intriguing. AsRock Industrial would be exactly what I’m looking for or any other Embedded V3000-/7000-series boards. An alternative for that would be the B650D4U, but like I said, there’s no real low power Ryzen 7000 sku’s save for messing around with PBO2.

Absolutely fair, my hesitance is mostly from setups like the ITX-RK3588 and BD770i where one or two of those SATA ports are used for SSD’s and they gobble up about 500MB/s (per SSD) of the 2GB/s you mentioned. For a board like the BD770i an HBA would probably be a better fit because it’ll need to have a bit more bandwidth. In the N100M board it would fit quite well since you have the onboard ports still of course.

Noted

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https://forum.level1techs.com/t/build-log-silent-night-my-own-take-on-quiet-and-power-efficient-nas/

It’s quite long so if you want my tl;dr on it let me know.
It’s capped to 32GB, don’t know why Intel lists it as only 16GB capable.
Yeah, you could go that route with the SATA ports. It would make the most sense for the configuration.

4 lanes all in one place and that’s it. 5 if you count the wifi card slot. Meanwhile, even if the AsRock N100M doesn’t have 4 lanes on a single slot, it has 9 lanes to work with that aren’t too dumbly split.

Yeah, but you’re gonna need to get your hands dirty with it to set up everything (and sounds totally like you wanna do that).
It is kinda expensive for what it is, especially if you want to get 16 or even 32GB of RAM. Though ARM does better with RAM compared to CISC.

There ain’t much that can be done with non-Pro Ryzen CPUs. The most efficient ones are the Pro versions of consumer chips for whatever better C state support, can’t recall exactly.

For a NAS over gigabit anything these days has enough power to transfer at that speed. If it’s a newer CPU with encryption support can even encrypt on the fly at gigabit. If connectivity is an issue you can’t get around it with the alternatives you mentioned.

Very much so, but one thing is experimenting and another is putting something to good use and not having it waste power idling.

Those are pretty comparable to the Intel N skus. Especially now that the N305 is out. If there was a board like the AsRock with that CPU I would’ve bought it even faster! 8 E cores are nothing to scoff at.

If they ever release a Ryzen 3 7000 it might be worth looking into that, if AMD fixed the C states.

The BD770i got a BIOS update to improve the PCIe subsystem compatibility and gained bifurcation support in the process: x8x8, x8x4x4, x4x4x4x4. With a splitter you could realistically use two controllers in a x4x4 application and still retain 8 lanes for something else. Or using an x8 HBA.

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Read it, looks good! I’m just wondering what power usage would be with my planned setup and what PSU would be recommended since I think the PicoPSU wouldn’t like those 6 3.5" HDD’s. RM550x (2021) is basically unattainable here.

From what I gathered there are quite a bit of C-states (not as much as on Intel admittedly), PowerTOP cannot show them though. I think I got my usage of the full system down to 35W idle, but it’s with HDD spindown enabled which is not desireable for latency and longevity obviously.
The PRO sku thing is a bit deeper than that I think. From what I was taught in Wolfgang’s Channel’s cheap Ryzen NAS build, newer Zen 3 based APU’s have some newer, more efficient bits under the hood. They also do not have more than 1 core complex like some of the other chips in the non-APU series have. The PRO sku’s are very popular for these server builds because of the APU advantages, but also that these support ecc that the normal sku APU’s don’t.

It’s mostly for any prospective upgrades I may or may not do. Having the PCIe lanes would be a good thing. I understand that it can saturate a 1Gbps connection as long as the drives are fine.

Yeah… I may have to wait for some more results on that.

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Yeah, a pico PSU won’t do it for 6 HDDs. If you want the same efficiency you need to get a Titanium rated PSU, if you go ATX or SFX.
I would’ve suggested you to get a 12VO system, but I couldn’t find one for the life of me so it’s not doable.

PowerTop shows correctly all the C states available on the system. Some don’t have all the C states, but what matters is reaching C10 and having it available on the system.

Drives these days can sustain spindowns with no issues because the heads get parked beyond the edge of the platter so there’s no risk of the head or the platter getting damaged during those operations. Spindown is crucial to keep the system cool and using less power.

That’s up to you to plan realistic updates for your system and decide accordingly which platform better supports them. You never mentioned budget for the build, if you ever had one.

As people use that board more data will be available.

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Asus TUF GAMING B650M-PLUS might be an option even if it’s only 6-PCB layers from what I can tell.

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Yep was looking at the Prime Fanless TX-600. Bit expensive, but that would be what I need.

Nope, this is a known problem. There should be C-states up to C6 while PowerTOP shows C3 at max iirc. Use this script to see more stats.

Yeah… Guess I’ll come back to this thread when I create some pc part pickers or some local equivalent. Thanks for the input so far!

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Sounds like a great option to work with.

Mine shows C10 just fine, you can see it in the screenshots in the build log thread I made.

I love brainstorming builds! You’re welcome!

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Hmmm looks like AMD heard my pleas for a lower power, interesting AM5 processor. Shame it’s only a OEM sku (8300G). The Ryzen 5’s will probably do too though. We’ll see what the prices will be…