I’m building a home server which will have 15xHDD. It’s going to store a lot of data and it needs to maintain fast read speeds across the drives - ideally close to 200 MB/s per drive.
I’ve decided on a few of the components but I would love help picking the remaining parts before I order the full system.
HDDx15 = Seagate Exos 7E10 (SATA)
Case = Rosewill 4U 15 Bay Server Case
CPU = Ryzen 9 5950X
I would appreciate recommendations for motherboard (2.5 Gb/s Ethernet), RAM (thinking 64GB with option to increase to 128GB in the future), PSU (that can handle all the drives), CPU cooler and a HBA card. I don’t need a GPU.
I’m in the US. Budget to go high-end on the remaining components but open to suggestions which are good value for the performance right now (hence why I’m going with the 5950X instead of 7950X as it’s the best price/performance for what I need).
And you state that you don’t need a GPU, but with a 5950x you are going to need one unless you have a server-grade board you can manage over IPMI. Using a 7950x would get you an integrated GPU, but then you are going to have issues with 128GB RAM.
No I won’t be using ZFS. The drive setup is custom for special software I’ll be running which requires each drive to have it’s own partition. But I am now thinking that 128GB RAM would be ideal.
Will I need a GPU w/5950x if I’m running it headless and only ssh into the server? I do have an old GPU I can use if required (GTX 1060). Could the GPU impact performance in any way with a headless setup?
A quick search finds that it depends on the motherboard whether you can boot without a GPU attached. See for example https://dc.sheridon.de/which-am4-mainboards-boot-headless-without-gpu, although I am not sure how reliable it is, as the Level1Techs discussion linked to for one motherboard doesn’t mention whether it boots without a GPU.
I wouldn’t imagine having a GPU attached would affect the performance of what you are doing, but that would be something you would have to test.
Another alternative would be to use an Intel SKU, as most have SKUs with iGPUs.
You likely won’t, but that 1060 may come in handy in case your motherboard defaults to not booting without one, so you can set this up and then remove the GPU afterwards.
As a 5950x user, I had 2 B550s motherboards, and both did POST without a GPU. My first one, an Asrock B550 Steel Legend, did so out of the box without any issues.
My current one, a MSI B550 Tomahawk, required a bios update before I could disable some option related to booting without a GPU, but afterwards did so without any problems too.
I think it’s possible to convince most AM4 boards to boot without a GPU, the issue is that occasionally you will need to see what’s going on in the boot process - that’s when you need a GPU. If your normal setup does not use a CPU with iGPU (such as the 5950X mentioned - or an expensive IPMI) and you don’t leave a PCIe slot open (because you used the available PCIe slots otherwise), you will have a mess because there is no way to troubleshoot boot issues.
@PeteJ You have to connect your 15 HDDs somehow physically to the motherboard. Best option IMHO is a SAS HBA (e.g. LSI 9xxx-16i or a smaller LSI 9xxx-8i + extender card).
I hope your special software is managing your HDDs effectively. Otherwise close to max bandwidth throughput performance (200 MB/s per drive) is unobtainium. You will find lots of help here how to achieve this with ZFS, which is why the question was asked.
Look for a motherboard that contains multiple physical 16x PCIe slots that are electrically configurable (bifurcation). Ideally you should be able to use a single slot in 16x or 4x4x4x4x configuration, two slots in 8x/8x or 4x4x/4x4x configurations.
This will provide you with options to expand your current plans to include multiple fast NVMe drives to support the HDDs.
Such motherboards are readily available for AM4, not many for AM5 and those are outrageously expensive.
I have the Rosewill 4U 15 Bay Server Case and like it, but wish I had spent a little more money to get externally accessible HD bays (such as in the Rosewill 4U 12 Bay Server Case ) or even a build-in SAS backplane(s). Take this feedback for what its worth.
Thanks @jode, re: Rosewill 15 Bay vs 12 Bay is it purely speed to access the drives or were there other things you disliked about the 15 Bay? I feel the extra 3 drives might be worth the time to swap drives vs externally accessible drives.
That’s exactly my reasoning for getting that chassis. In hindsight and after changing drives a couple of times I can say with confidence that had I not already sunk money into this I would go with some easy 2U or similar compute unit connected to a used NetApp or similar JBOD shelf.
I have the Rosewill equipped with a 360 AIO attached to the middle fans which together with the ootb case fans make for quiet strong air flow. HDDs on scrub duty reach 35C. CPU, RAM, mobo stays nice and cool, too. In that sense the Rosewill chassis exceeded my expectations.
Extracting the bays to access HDDs is quite painful and always requires a full disconnect of all wires. That entails the power, data wires for 5 drives, plus the molex for the built-in fan.