Hello, I’ve finally made it over here to the levelone forum from that ‘other’ forum.
I’ve been piecing together a file server build to replace my aging existing build. The existing build has 70+TB of shucked drives running on a LGA775 socket with a modded lga771 xeon and only 8GB of OCZ Reaper DDR2 and a pair of four drive eSata enclosures…
I did have some existing gear I was hoping to use, but I’ve gotten myself to a point where I have some incompatible gear and thought I’d get some suggestions.
Parts that I want to use:
Rosewill 4U rack case with room for a dozen hdd
All the drives I’ll need
Corsair HX1200 PSU
2x H310 HBA cards with cables for 8x SATA drives each
R9 270
The gear I wanted to use but don’t think I can, mainly due to not enough pcie slots for the HBA cards and a GPU other than a really basic PCI card.
AMD FX-8350
Kingston 32GB DDR3
Biostar TA970 Motherboard
Giant cooler too tall for the case
I’m looking for some suggestions. I think I need a motherboard, cpu, ram, and cooler.
Main use of the machine will be virtualized unraid sitting on proxmox with the drives passed through. It’ll run a few other small containers, pihole, dedicated gaming server or two, plex. I’d game on it a little bit if it works out, doesn’t matter if it can’t.
I’m in Canada. I’d like to keep the price under $750 (is that even reasonable). I’d like at least 32GB of RAM, enough PCIE slots for 2x HBA cards, a 10GB NIC I’ll add later on, and a GPU. Used is fine if you’ve got a suggestion of a platform that would be ‘ideal’ to look for. I’ve had trouble identifying a server board to fit in the rosewill case that can hold lots of ram. I’m not entirely sure which direction to go from here.
Is power consumption a concern? Rn the best “bang for your buck” will probably be a used server on eBay. Most consumer stuff is marked up considerably and the amount of pci-e you are looking for is pushing you into enterprise/high-end consumer territory.
You could just buy that, use it as a NAS, then use your parts you have already as your media server that just reads from the nas and performs decoding or whatever you are using the video card for.
Power consumption isn’t completely irrelevant, but I’m ok with it not being a 35w idle.
I do like the idea of the R710, I probably should have started there much earlier. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it only holds 6 3.5" drives and I’d need to find somewhere to hold some more which is why I bought the Rosewill case. Anytime I’ve looked at disk shelves they’re all somewhat expensive and I’ve struggled to identify which would only support up to 2TB drives, so I bought the H310 cards.
Any suggestion on expanding to more drives for the R710?
These SAN boxes aren’t that expensive tbh. If you have the drives already then you would still be way under budget and have more than enough space for drives if you bought that server + a SAN. Maybe just look into how much the interconnect will cost you but I can’t imagine it is much. Fiberchannel stuff shouldn’t be very expensive at all.
You should be able to do a direct fiberchannel connection between the SAN and the server then connect the server to your network.
I haven’t dealt with SAN or fiberchannel stuff so I am shooting from the hip here a bit.
Disk shelves are great value if you really need heaps of drives and power consumption is not an issue
As previous posters have said, given you already have the case the sensible path would be to find a suitable mb/cpu combo … trouble is with the scalping going on you are probably going to be better off selling your parts (and join in the scalpers feast), and buying something like this:
The R720xd is one generation newer than the R710, it holds either 24x2.5 or 12x 3.5 drives, and you can have it with two E5-2650L (8 core, 70W tdp), a dual 750W power supply, 64GB of ECC RAM, a 10Gbit dual SFP+ broadcom network card and 2 years of warranty on parts for ~600USD …
It also comes with an IDRAC (remote management) and will allow you to use your GPU either directly or passed through to unraid/your gaming VM. I think it has 3x full PCI slots plus another 3 low profile ones, but I’m not sure how many of them are taken up by the disk controller …
As someone who has R710 and the R720 servers, I would definitely go with the R720. As much as I love my R710, it is a relic at this point. Fun to play with but too power hungry for 24/7 use IMO. Depending on your use case, I would just go with a regular 720 SFF 8 bay and use a disk shelf for large hard drives. That way you have the expansion options like GPUs and the NvMe drive bay mod if you want.
If not, here is some info about the R720XD:
The XD can hold twelve 3.5” drives or twenty four 2.5” drives depending on the model and you can get the flex bay for either one to add two 2.5” drives. Keep in mind the SATA ports do exist on the XD motherboard as they do on the regular R720 motherboard but the controller doesn’t…I learned that the hard way.
I see a few options available on ebay.ca and another site that are here in Canada to avoid some of the monster customs fees from shipping that. Equipped similar to the gear I’ve already got it still comes out to about $1k CAD except that it would be a whole system, which is a bit annoying since I’ve got at least that into just the PSU, RAM, and case. Then there is the HBA cards. I’m definitely a bit disappointed and surprised that I can’t assemble a partial system that would be comperable for the same price that I can buy a whole used server. That seems broken. I do see a few power vaults too for 600-750 CAD shipped which could be bought later.
I can find an easy use for the motherboard, gpu, and ram that I’ve bought, but the other left over gear would just be redundant.
Is it worth looking at anything other than the dell powervaults? I see a few other brands at various prices. IBM, Nimble, Hitachi. Not worth the hassle of the compatibility challenges?
The Dell’s are definitely a favorite among power users that dabble in server gear. The support is good and parts are easy to get. Also there are a ton of them on the used market.