[Build review] Planning AM4 home server, NAS + light virtualization

Hardware Build a PC
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Edit: since this is slowly turning into a log of my build planning journey, here’s a link to Geizhals where I maintain the current list

To get the intro out of the way:

I’d use PCPP, but not all the parts I want to buy are available there, neither does it support Poland, where I come from. My preferred retailer is morele.net. When mentioning prices, feel free to use either US or EUR too, but please indicate whether it is a US pre-tax price, or a EU price with VAT.

Build purpose

In order of importance and probability I’ll do it:

  • NAS
  • CI runner
  • DNS cache
  • firewall
  • random assorted VMs
  • VPN

The build

After hemming and hawwing, I’ve decided to go with new parts, mixing consumer and server hardware. From what I have seen on local used market, I can get a T620 with dual 2860v2 for maybe 20% less, but 1) I’m not a fan of buying used hardware 2) as a consumer in Poland I get a two year warranty on everything, by law 3) power usage 4) I’m a DIYer at heart.

Parts

Storage pool

Edit: I’m confident bifurcation will work.

If bifurcation works

Those Kioxia drives have insane price per gigabyte, lower than most 2.5" drives. I’m also planning to run some CI runners on this server, so having fast random IO is a bonus.

If bifurcation doesn’t work

Five Crucial MX500 500 GB.

We do not have much of data - no collection of DVDs/BDs to rip. I am expecting an initial ~500 GB of data from various sources around the home. So let’s go all flash, because why not? I’m not entirely sure how lifetime compares between SSDs and HDDS.

Motherboard

I’m considering one of (listed from cheapest) (I answered myself write the analysis for there):

X470 is simply the cheapest board I could find right now. B550’s four GbE ports are nice if I decide to run a firewall. If I go with the NVMe pool, the SSD ports remain free for a possible future upgrade, and I can add a HBA or a better NIC in the future. The X570 has a lot of SATA ports, but if I go NVMe storage pool, I can’t add another PCIe card, except in the 4.0x1 slot.

Huh, guess I answered myself, the winner is the B550.

RAM

Two sticks of 16 GB JEDEC 3200 memory, probably a bit low, but I want to limit my expenditure at the beginning.

Boot drive

TBD

CPU

So, this will be one of the regular Ryzen CPUs, somewhere between 3600 and 5900X, with the selection depending solely on my budget. Heck, 5800X3D is better for gaming than 5900X? I might swap the 5900X in my main rig.

I considered buying a 4650G/4750G PRO, for possible future swap with my main 5900X, but I won’t be upgrading my main rig anytime soon, so it’s kinda… meh. Worst case mom’s next PC won’t be 3L but 10L.

(Sidenote, has anyone benchmarked ZFS on 3DV$? I know Wendell tested it for builds and it had no improvements).

PSU

I don’t think BQ offers 10 year warranties on anything but the Dark, so it will be a Corsair, specific model TBD.

Case

NR400 - I already own it, plain and simple. The case itself has space for four 2.5" and three 3.5", but I have the ODD variant and can buy a six drive dock for the 5.25" bay if needed.

Closing words

I was gonna write that 10 GbE is expensive. I just nabbed for 10 GbE in a lucky buy.

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you will want a PRO CPU of some sort so that ECC RAM can be used.

bifurcation has worked for me on AMD stuff for a long time. every RYZEN board and all the way back to AM2 has all worked fine, even on the lowest end consumer AMD boards. Thats not to say it has always been 100% reliable, but work arounds can usually be adequate.

Asrock consumer boards also feature the same ability to use ECC with a PRO CPU. you may not NEED the RACK variant unless you really have a reason for it, in a home lab i would save the money.

intel 10gbe cards in Enet and SFP+ can be had for under 50$ now on used market. less if you are patient.

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Huh, non PRO CPUs don’t support ECC? All ARR has to say on that topic is

*For AMD Ryzen Desktop Processors with Radeon Graphics, ECC support is only with Processors with PRO technologies

and not a word about the non-iGPU models.

For the NICs, you just replied to my question about the IBM NICs, so here’s hoping I manage to get them working.

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@Zedicus I found this link: [Motherboard] List of AMD Ryzen™ Processors with support for ECC memory | Official Support | ASUS Global - seems like 5000/3000 CPUs support ECC

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the early RYZENs had ECC on NON pro models. Technically EVERY RYZEN could support ECC, most mainboards do not initialize the ECC support. ASROCK does on all their mainboards BUT it seems to be random what CPU model they allow to initialize. SAFE BET is a PRO version.

if they say it in a CPU compatibility list though, you are good to go.

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I can confirm that Vermeer Ryzens work fine with ECC on the X570D4U. I got the -2L2T version of AsRock with 2x10GBit.

Asrock Rack just mentioned that in the datasheet because normal APUs don’t like ECC, but otherwise any normal Ryzen does.

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Many thanks, that’s one worry off my mind. Now, if only ECC UDIMMs weren’t twice the cost of non-ECC

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I bought my 32GB sticks @170€ and normal sticks were like 130-140. About half a year ago. But memory prices are always volatile, but ECC is more stable in pricing. I recommend getting the Kingston Server Premier UDIMMs, most of the forum users with X570D4U use them.

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Right now I’m looking at 240eur for a 32 GB 3200 Kingston stick

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Check german retailers…my usual 3 stores offer them for ~190€. Sometimes your neighbor has the stuff you need :slight_smile:

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Fair enough, I will take a hard look when ordering

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Yeah, my initial price check was off. Looking at Geizhals, I can get the 32 GB ECC sticks for 205eur in Poland, or try to get it sent from DE.

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So, I have finalised my parts list. Most of the reasoning is in the first post, for the new parts it’s below. All links lead to Geizhals.eu, but they are not affiliate/referral links.

Full parts list

Base platform

Storage pool

The total, as of this writing, comes to 1572 Euro, with VAT. For price breakdown, see the full list on Giezhals

Now, for the new additions.

New parts

Case

In my first post I said I would use my NR400, and this may very well happen if I decide not to spend the money. But, there’s a case which fits this build perfectly, is smaller, and I just want it. Plus, TG and server motherboards don’t go well together.

So, the Krux NAOS. From the first moment I saw this case, I wanted to use it in a build such as this.

It’s small, only 22L, which is not much larger than Node 304’s 19.6L. Takes an mATX motherboard. And supports a good amount of drives. In most motherboard and PUS configurations you can mount 8x2.5" or 3x2.5" and 4x3.5". Using an ITX motherboard with an SFX PSU allows adding one more 2.5" or 3.5" drive.

Psu

SFX mostly to have more space inside the case. The price difference between the 450, 600 and 750 models is largely irrelevant. On the other hand lower maximum power would give me better low load efficiency. For now I have put in the 450, since it should handle everything I want to throw at the build.

CPU cooler

I went with a downdraft cooler for two reasons: it’s mostly orientation agnostic, and should help cool the VRM. NH-C14S for performance, and because Noctua validated it with the motherboard, even if I hate the brown.

Boot drive

Honestly? Cheap, relatively good brand, five year warranty.

Now to figure out how I’m going to pay for it…

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This is slowly turning into a log of my discoveries along the way, and the changes to my plan. Hopefully this will be useful to someone in the future.

So, someone on Discord asked me why not the X470 board, and because I learned stuff in the meantime, prompted me to reevaluate.

Observation 1: used dual/quad GbE NICs are dirt cheap (seen some under 25 eur)
Observation 2: X470 allows me to mirror the boot drive
Observation 3: they both cost about the same

I’m warming up to the idea of actually running a virtualized firewall. What I would need for that is: 1) a WAP (since currently I’m using ISP router for WiFi) 2) probably a switch with aggregation support. So, why not both? MikroTik hAP ac3 will do the job just fine.

This was prompted by @Disconsented over in TTP Discord.

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I haven’t tried hAP ac3 … I did use hAP ac2 for a while, it’s a similar chip, wifi is … not as good as one might expect.

I’ve been using a pair of u6-lr in my house for the last year ish … comparatively they’re amazing, even with 2x2 and even with 802.11ac clients I was routinely seeing anywhere between 500 and 700 Mbps whereas hap ac2 … more like 200-320 with that same client.

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  1. ac3 promises an improved antenna over ac2 (3 dB, that’s two times more power)
  2. if I ever get 10 gig networking I will probably get MikroTik switches, so it’s same ecosystem
  3. I’m a CLI guy (seriously, I don’t even use a file manager on Linux) and the console interface in RouterOS speaks to me
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All Ryzen CPUs without an iGPU support ECC fully. The motherboard is the only determining factor. I was running ECC in my home server with a 3600 and then a 3900X on a consumer Asrock B550 board, and it worked fine.

One thing I would be concerned about is if you want to use a GPU in the build for anything, you’re be close to using all of the PCI-e lanes. Might be worth going for a consumer X570S board instead? Asrock support ECC on all of their consumer boards. You’ve then got a bit of extra budget for a better CPU.

Also been using this for the last year and a half. Got proper Wifi 6 support in a firmware update a few months ago, which has made it amazing value. Don’t have any complaints about it.

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I ended up changing my mind to X470 later on. Those two NICs are not worth the inability to mirror the boot pool.

Plex is not within foreseeable future. If I wanted to set up some sort of screen wall setup… Nah, I’d need a second machine. Outside of those two, is there any other reason for GPU? Maaaaybe if I got into GPU compute coding, I could see that one actually happening. But eh, that’s what my main rig is for.

As for consumer boards… hm. I kinda like the idea of IPMI. And I probably won’t be saving much. There’s absolutely no good mATX boards, and I don’t really want to move up to a bigger case. Half the issue is that the Ryzen platform simply is limited with the amount of PCIe lanes (and thus slots).

Ooooh! Cool! That’s great news. Although that IPQ-4019 seems like a pretty old chip (or qcom is just skimping using ancient CPU cores). I wonder if the WiFi will beat my ISP Arris. I think the only Wifi 6 client in my house is my phone. Which is usually off Wifi. Still cool though.

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I’d suggest you skip your motherboard RAID support (on consumer boards). This is simply software RAID with hardware lock-in, Linux software RAID is better in basically every way. (And I’ve only had bad luck with the Intel equivalent software RAID). Use ZFS mirroring or MDADM instead if you want software raid, then you get far better manageability and monitoring.

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“allows me to mirror boot drive” as in has two M.2 slots, so I can have two drives without wasting a SATA port or 2.5" position in the chassis.

Are there really folks out there who’d use motherboard RAID in this situation?