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Hi Guys,

I had been building enterprise level appliances for small-medium businesses for years, at least the software integration aspects. Basically an business operations center in a box (everything from firewall, NAS, next cloud etc, to business critical applications like quickbooks or sage, and other supportive services/apps all in the one box). Yes, Yes single point of failure bla bla, but we had the support operations to back it up, and the systems were passively clustered for failover (on or off prem)

Anyway I never had too much to do with the Hardware Architecture hence my post.

I would have done this sooner, but it just didn’t seem worth the effort for what I needed in the past. Now with a new family I’m thinking more about protection, and localising some of the services we use from the evil overlords. (think Nextcloud type services).

I’ll probably run all my local stuff in there, firewall (Sophos), TrueNAS Scale Pi-hole, nextcloud, minecraft, maybe even steam in the future (base security and storage services first ). but never anything workstations related (like rendering, film or photo editing etc)

With that in mind I need your help to think about everything from case, CPU, mem, HBA etc. Headless would be a good idea too.
I’ve got all the storage I need.
15 x Seagate exos 7e200 (ST2000NX0253)
4 x Samsung PM863a 480GB
2 x SK Hynix SE5011 480GB

Budget is 500 to 1000.

I’ve thought about a 2nd hand server, but the upgrade path is always challenging,

Also with the storage I’m probably going to 3d print something like this:

I’d like to go IcyDock like Wendall showcased a couple of eps ago, but they’re pricey, and don’t offer the density for 15mm high drives, I found a couple of alternatives, but think it might be better to 3d print, then I can self manage vibration etc.

Let me know your idea!

Cheers,

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I don’t have a solution, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

For HBAs, a decent source for confirmed-working used is Art of Server’s eBay store. He’s also got a YouTube channel with a variety of useful info, whether you purchase or not.

But that brings up one constraint to look at here, which is I/O. Most of the cost-effective HBAs are going to be PCIe x8 for 8 SATA-compatible ports, so with 21 drives you’ll be looking at either a board with three x8 slots, or two x8 slots + 5 SATA ports on board. Three x8 slots will not exist in desktop-targeted hardware, so this area is going to limit your options. Commercial and server-targeted boards will have more I/O, but also higher cost.

You’ll also need room for multiple ethernet ports. Do you have any particular speed requirements here (both Internet and NAS)? Desktop boards with multiple ports do exist, but are less common, so this may require available PCIe expansion too.

It doesn’t sound like you have anything particularly compute intensive planned, so it looks to me like CPU and RAM are basically going to follow from the board options, rather than being terribly important ahead of time.

Chassis options are probably going to depend on expected environment. You mentioned 3D printing mounts, so it sounds like you’re looking for one with a bunch of 5.25" bays. Does that mean desktop form factors, not rack? Rack opens up some options for 2.5" mounting (and sometimes hotswap backplanes) included, but higher cost than desktop chassis. Note rack doesn’t necessarily mean on rails, for some chassis it’s also possible to remove the rack ears and get a form factor that looks more like an A/V console device. Bring your own rubber feet though.

With sufficient room for large fans, cooling can be made fairly quiet, which would leave all those Exos as the main noise source. It’s difficult to damp their hum without suppressing airflow too; is this going to be located in an area where low noise is important?

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Thanks @Quension!
All great points!
I did a quick search and it seems I can pickup a reasonable 2nd hand 1900 series threadripper bundle for under 500 here in euros which would give me enough PCIe lanes hadn’t thought of the total required, so thanks :+1:t2:
This would cover expansion slot requirements as well!

Noise shouldn’t be a problem as the server will sit in the same room as our heat pump water system… ie loud :smiley:

Thanks for the thoughts! Hopefully I have a setup by Christmas :christmas_tree:

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