Building my first Home Server for multi use

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Hello there you beautiful people :grinning:

At the moment i am looking at building my first own Home Server for a few different use-cases that i have at home and would like to cover in one machine. These use-cases are:

  1. NAS: I dont have Networkstorage at the moment for backups and just burrying data, i would like to cover that with part of the server.

  2. Media storage/streaming: Besides the NAS I also look to open up an instanc over Plex or Jellyfin to be able to stream owned media inside my house to be a bit more independet of the big streaming services. This also falls together with the datagrave point from above because i like to collect media.

  3. Server-Hosting for games: For me and my friends i would love to host some Game-Servers for games like Minecraft, Battlefield, etc. just to have some casual fun.

  4. VMĀ“s for experiments: Here i just want to have a place to experminet with some VMĀ“s to try out things in Linux or other OsĀ“s with out bricking a PC on accident.

That are the 4 Use-Cases that i have at the moment, with a little view in the future i would also think about adding things like my own email-server and cloud-storage.

Now to the specifics: I already did some research and found components that i think would fit me. I aim at keeping the price reasonable at a range of ~400 Euros excluding harddrives. My main concern is powerconsumption as electricity prices in europe can be pretty spicy.

So what did i think about:

Power Goal:

Idle at ~20-30 Watts total draw |Load at ~60-80 Watts total, but if needed for the task more is ofcourse okay

Hardware:

Harddrives: Either WD RedĀ“s or Seagate Barracudas at 4 or 8 TB (depends what is cheaper at the moment) running in Raid 1 or 10 (again depending on price i would get 2 to 4 drives to start out with)

CPU:

Either a AMD Ryzen CPU that has already good Powerefficiency like Ryzen 5 5600G or Ryzen 7 5700X, or an older Intel Xenos CPU or a Core i5 11400F or i7 11700.

GPU:

I am unsure if i need a GPU for things like media-encoding or streaming, here pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Powersupply:

Anything that has atleats a Gold efficiency or higher with a wattage to fit the system.

Mainboard:

Any board fitting to the CPU with good connectivity (SATA ports, PCIe for expansioncards etc.).

Ram:

I honestly have no idea how to size the RAM usage for a server. My gut tells me to just get something like 64 GB and be done with it, but again pointers are greatly appreatiated here.

Case: I still have a old Big-Tower that will fit most things.

OS: Proxmox with VMĀ“s for True-NAS and Linux and other OSĀ“s for Serverhosting (Minecraft etc.)

What now:

So the concrete questions that i have:

Are the Components that i have in mind suited for the tasks that i want to do or did i misscalculate/ over/underestimated anything?

Is it even a good idea to put it all in one server?

Are my powertargets realistic?

Did i miss anything while planning/made big mistakes already?

Is there anything else i should konw about/look into befor starting to build?

Again i thank you all in advance for the help and can at this point just say that i am very excited at the prospect of joining the Home-Server community :grin:

With kind regards,

Althorius

P.s.: English isn`t my first language so please excuse the mistakes i might have made in the text.

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Looks good.
The b450 chipset is less power and nearly the same features as the b550. B450-d4u i think it is called, an asrock rack server board might be good.

Try to get ecc ram if you can budget for it.

Intel a310 is probably the cheapest transcode at lowest power gpu right now. It is lower cost and power than even most of the nvidia t series used.

Lots of people run an ā€˜all in oneā€™ home server. Welcome to the club.

You will want an hba to pass through. Anything 9305 or newer that you find the best deal on.

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This is going to be a bit difficult, but I think we can work with this.

I recommend AMD for power efficiency. You can tune max boost down a 2-300MHz and get some really good results. Iā€™ve got a 5700g in my desktop and itā€™s a breeze to work with. Idles really low, performs well enough that I donā€™t want to upgrade quite yet.

Now, spinning disks will consume 5-7w each as long as theyā€™re spinning. I donā€™t generally recommend spinning down NAS drives and/or parking the head, this just causes wear on disks that need to be reliable. So, your 20-30w idle is going to be difficult with spinning disks. That said, I think we can definitely aim for 30-50w idle.

Yes, but also no. I know, not helpful. For encoding, GPUs can be very helpful. Any CPU that has an onboard GPU can be used for some encoding tasks. If you only intend to run 2-3 simultaneous streams from your plex/jellyfin (I highly recommend jellyfin over plex) server, an onboard GPU will work fine, or in the case of the 5700g, you should be able to handle 2 streams on the CPU itself, but thatā€™s assuming youā€™re not going to be having anything else taking up CPU time during those streams. Thereā€™s a few folks on the forum whoā€™ve been eyeing the Arc A380 to do encoding because Intel is absolutely amazing at encoding, the drivers work well on Linux, and for the price (thank you, failed architecture), itā€™s a great deal. That said, you donā€™t have the budget for a discrete GPU right now. Maybe an addition for later.

Awesome, this will save a few Euro. Maybe consider a case upgrade down the line. Does this case also have a power supply you trust? That would save us about 65EUR.

64GB is the dream, but Iā€™m not sure we can really get you there with the ~400EUR budget. I think 32GB is more realistic and will suit your use case fairly well. You can always buy a matching set and upgrade to 64GB down the line if you find you run out.

I threw my recommendations together here, but this is just an initial suggestion:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor ā‚¬190.00 @ Amazon France
Motherboard ASRock B450 Pro4 R2.0 ATX AM4 Motherboard ā‚¬95.40 @ Amazon France
Memory Crucial Pro 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL22 Memory ā‚¬65.98 @ Amazon France
Storage TEAMGROUP MP33 512 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ā‚¬47.47 @ Alternate
Power Supply SeaSonic B12 BC 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ā‚¬64.90 @ Amazon France
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total ā‚¬463.75
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-05-17 05:27 CEST+0200

I put a boot drive in there so that you donā€™t have to rely on your NAS storage for OS storage, allowing you to keep ā€œuser dataā€ on a separate disk from ā€œOS dataā€.

Ahhh, yes.

Something like this is going to be a good option. Of course, youā€™ll need to find something local. Make sure the LSI HBA is in IT mode, or youā€™ll have to flash it yourself.

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No ASUS products.

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Gonna have to elaborate on that one

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No one should buy or recommend ASUS.

Did you miss jayz 2 cents and gamers nexus to just mention 2? Or i could recount a dozen of my own reasons why ASUS is garbage.

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Not to derail the thread; I donā€™t have time to watch youtuber drama.

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor ā‚¬190.00 @ Amazon France
Motherboard ASRock B450 Pro4 R2.0 ATX AM4 Motherboard ā‚¬95.40 @ Amazon France
Memory Crucial Pro 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL22 Memory ā‚¬65.98 @ Amazon France
Storage TEAMGROUP MP33 512 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ā‚¬47.47 @ Alternate
Power Supply SeaSonic B12 BC 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ā‚¬64.90 @ Amazon France
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total ā‚¬463.75
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-05-17 05:27 CEST+0200

Hereā€™s an alternative. Actually, I think that ASRock board is probably better than the ASUS one anyways. Iā€™ll update my original post.

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Hello and thank you for the detailed reply :grinning: :grin:

So i looked up the parts you wrote about for where i am living and now have a more concrete pricelist.

So here it goes:

CPU | Ryzen 7 5700G current price: 154,00 Euro

Mainboard | Asrock B450 Pro 4 R2.0 current price: 79,74 Euro

Boot-SSD | Teamgroup MP33 512GB current price: 36,28 Euro

RAM | G.Skill Aegis DIMM Kit 32GB current price: 64,89 Euro

Power Supply | I actually found a beQuiet 750 W Gold certified PSU in my attic that i kinda forgot about :sweat_smile: :grinning:

That puts the total at 334,91 Euro for the hardware excluding harddrives.

At this pricepoint i could still include a Asrock Arc A380 as thats only 125 Euro at the moment, or i could hunt for a Arc A580 or Arc A750 when they are reduced somewhere. The question here for me would be what performance plus i could expect from these cards compared to the Arc A380 that would keep me even still under the budget.

To the HBA pass through:
As i understand it (and please to correct me if i am wrong) it allows the VM (in my case Proxmox) to talk directly to the connected HDDĀ“s which will bring me on the proside a bit faster performance and easier configuration and on the contraside a slightly harder time configurating VMĀ“s (mind you i just learned about it and read a bit of documentation). Is that something i should be doing from the beginning or is that also a good upgrade for a later iteration of my server or would that mean i would have to re-do everything?
For that it would be grat if someone maybe has some more information i could read my-selfe into :grinning:

All in all with the current prices i could either build a server with the above listed specs + a Arc A 380 + the mentioned HBA (even though i am unsure about the usfulness for me), or the same specs + a Arc A580/A750, or as last a system that also has 64 GB of ram from the get go.

If i overlooked something please do not hesistate to tell me, i am gratful for all the help/pointers i can get :grinning:

At this point i also have to just say thanks for the help that i already got :grin:

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My two cents here;

  • Yes, it is possible to put this all in one server especially to start with, though I do recommend separating NAS and other server uses. The reason for this is that the NAS is going to have the occasional hard drive failure, and that will take a lot of compute resources to get back online.
  • Cheap m.2 storage devices are slowly emerging, that are interesting if your storage needs are modest (< 20TB). The ā‚¬550 Asustor Flashstor 6-bay SSD NAS is an interesting alternative, I think for your all-in-one use case it is not a good fit but for a split setup with low storage needs, it is a fairly competitive player and can even beat a couple of spinning rust scenarios on price (given 6-8 bay setups). The fact that it has a power draw between 12W idle to 24W at full load, is just icing on the cake, and as I have explained in other threads, every watt you save is ~8.75 kWh per year for a 24/7 device. Linking to give options of what is out there, but I think the compute is too weak in this case. :slight_smile:
  • If you want to upgrade your case, I can recommend the Fractal Design Node 804. Only drawback is that it is limited to mATX motherboards.

Other than that, your setup looks pretty sweet already.

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Yeah, but thatā€™ll likely put you outside of your power consumption goals. Same for adding an HBA (+7-11W).
Youā€™ll have to struggle a bit with features vs. power consumption. The decision is ultimately yours.

This setup will give you plenty of horsepower that should satisfy your requirements.

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none, you would need to pass the GPU through to the VM for it to be used for transcoding, (in the future VGPU may be an option) so going higher end thean even an a310 is not useful.

i think it needs done at the very beginning as it will save a LOT of potential headache with disk passthrough and other issues. passing a single HBA through is actually easier than trying to do some of the other ways of virtualizing a NAS.

an a310, lowest cost HBA, and as much ECC RAM as you can get, would be my choice.

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I would seriously reconsider this, these can easily be SMR drives. For RAID Iā€™d stick with CMR - so WD Red Pro / Seagate Ironwolf, Ironwolf Pro.

WD is known to sneak in SMR drives in their ā€œNASā€ disks.

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also, having an HBA would allow you to buy left over SAS drives. they are usually dirt cheap and a easy way to get multiple TB of storage.

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Ohhh, excellent! I was a bit worried I went over your price point.

That BeQuiet Gold PSU will be a bit more efficient, so Iā€™d recommend going with that, if itā€™s not older than 5 years.

Iā€™m not super familiar with the A380 and others in the lineup, @PhaseLockedLoop may be able to provide a bit more info about pros/cons of it, I just use the integrated intel GPU to do my jellyfin transcodes, since Iā€™m just running containers on my NAS.

Iā€™m assuming that you plan to virtualize TrueNAS, with proxmox being the host operating system (what is running on the bare-metal). HBA passthrough will allow TrueNAS VM to see the PCIe device as if it were physically connected to the VM. Allowing TrueNAS to control the disks with no tomfoolery from the Proxmox OS in the middle. This gives you the best performance in TrueNAS.

The configuration is more difficult, but the payoff is well worth the configuration challenge. That does leave your other VMs with less direct attached storage, so you may want to spend another 50 Euro to upgrade that SSD to a 1TB disk.

I donā€™t think 64GB of RAM is necessary for you just yet. Youā€™ll do well with 32GB while you get started, and once you make the determination that you want more, itā€™s never difficult to buy another kit.

The key to the value of a dedicated GPU (also an option for upgrade at a later time), is if you need more than 2 streams simultaneously, or more than 1 4k stream simultaneously. If you do need that, you will benefit from GPU offloading. Though, that will also require PCIe Passthrough.

Ohhh, thank you! I must have missed those messages, thatā€™s a great insight to consider. For me, that equates to $2 USD per year, per watt.

Oh, the A380 is something to the effect of 10w idle, 75w max. This will put you well outside the power consumption requirements. Even considering that transcode-only will probably only be 35-40w.

Yes, SMR drives are terrible for a NAS, you will be in a lot of pain if you wind up using them in conjunction with ZFS.

Is there any data on reliability of these drives? Iā€™ve always been wary of going that route.

Thatā€™s what weā€™re here for!

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A310 is the one he needs

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The SSD is really bottom of the barrel in terms of quality, I know itā€™s ā€œonlyā€ a boot SSD but at least try to get something somewhat reasonable. The Crucial P5 Plus is for sale currently at 44 EUR in .de

The linked HBA is likely not genuine with all the things that entails, I donā€™t even know why youā€™d need a HBA as you have a built-in controller thatā€™ll do just fine. If anything you can go for a ASM1166 or possible JMB575 controller board which will do just fine in your setup if you need more ports.

I would highly recommend that you go for sticks that follow JEDEC such as the Crucial RAM linked earlier, Kingston (KVR/ValueRAM) or Samsung to mention a few and you want 3200Mhz memory.

Skip on the ā€œNASā€-branded stuff and just go for enterprise rated HDDs, pricing is the same and theyā€™re better in pretty much all ways.

Toshiba MG08ADA800E or Seagate Exos 7E10 (ST8000NM017B) for 8TB drives as an example

You probably also want to look into getting a pulled Intel/Broadcom NIC to replace your builtin Realtek one to make your life easier in the end.

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Genuine or not, thatā€™s definitely a gamble. The reason for a PCIe HBA is so that it can be passed through to a VM. Lots of systems have difficulty passing through onboard components and I canā€™t verify without a doubt that the SATA controller on that board behaves properly.

I havenā€™t had issues with Realtek in a good 10 years. Not sure why everyoneā€™s still bent out of shape about it.

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In that case I would honestly suggest that you (and people) in general make it clear that source (seller) is unverified and you may not end up with a genuine/new card.

Because Realtek NICs are not suitable both software and hardware-wise if you care about reliability. Thereā€™s a reason why you donā€™t see any network gear using Realtek except cheap consumer or possibly entry level business equipment (depending on your definition of entry level I guess). That being said, Realtek may work but you might also want to factor in time etc if itā€™s worth the minor savings.

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Me neither. I admittedly donā€™t have special requirements, but the Realtek NIC in my 24/7 system is behaving just fine.

Thatā€™s a pretty strong statement. Do you have any source from the last, say, 5 years to back that up?

Lots of people here developed strong opinions about hw/sw manufacturers, I certainly do.

Iā€™d just love to separate opinion and facts in the discussions on this forum.

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Sure, point me to enterprise gear using Realtek hardware.