Home Server upgrade

Hardware Build a PC
1

I’m thinking of upgrading my home server, here’s an overview:

Current situation:

DELL Precision T7500

  • CPUs: 2x Intel Xeon X5550 (total 8 cores 16 threads)
  • GPU: GTX 970 MSI
  • BOOT: 32GB USB 3.0 stick on 2.0 port on mobo (UNRAID)
  • MOBO: DELL dual socket T7500
  • STORAGE: 3x 8TB Seagate shucked HDD (2 pooled one for parity)
  • CACHE: btrfs mirror of 840 and 850 evo (both 256GB SATA-600)
  • RAM: 48GB DDR3 (I think ECC REG+BUF)
  • NIC: 10GBe mellanox 2 card
  • SATA: Dell H310 (LSI 9211-8i) in IT (jbod) mode
  • SSD: 128gb 830 evo for windows / dedicated VM passthrough

Services

Docker (24/7)

  • Home-Assistant (with MariaDB database) & Z-Wave USB + Bluetooth USB passthrough
  • Nextcloud (with MariaDB database & Redis cache)
  • Emby (with Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr)
  • Spotweb (with MariaDB database & Deluge/SABNZBD)
  • CalibreWEB / Lazylibrarian
  • Caddy Reverse proxy
  • TVHeadend + OSCAM (with USB passthrough)
  • Organizr v2 dashboard
  • Ubiquity Unify
  • InfluxDB
  • Grafana
  • Mosquitto MQTT broker
  • Wordpress (with MariaDB database)
  • Bookstack
  • FireflyIII Finance manager

VM’s (intermittent use)

  • Windows 10 with GPU + SSD passthrough for gaming/ windows only applications

“Wishes”

  • IPMI-like solution (but thinking about rolling my own with RPI)
  • More performance-per-Watt
  • Good IOMMU seperation
  • Re-use what I can
  • keep total price below 1500 euros
  • keep some kind of upgrade path (both in perf and io expansion)

IDEA #1

Total: € 1.315,67

IDEA #2

  • Keep GPU + all storage
  • second gen ryzen or 1st gen threadripper (depends on mobo)
  • mobo with 10gb networking, get rj45 10gbe module for sfp+ port on switch
  • get normal DDR4 ram, also 32GB

IDEA #3

  • go EPYC, but as cheaply as possible, doable for about 1500?

As you can see I’m thinking of ditching my power hungry & super old all-in-one home-server and going for team red, I’m really liking what they are doing with ryzen/threadripper/epyc. I’m having problems with unraid losing sync resulting in reported errors on either the parity or the data disk (but never at the same time, and no SMART errors), also, sometimes it takes a few reboots before my non-LSI attached storage devices are showing. Software-wise I’m thinking of going linux + snapriad&mergerfs, so I have more control over what’s going on (and maybe can try-out nvidiadocker, lookingglass, and all that sort of candy).

I’m eager to know what you guys think & and open to ideas. :smiley:

2

idea 2 but ditch the seagate drives and go for western digital

if your old hardware is working ebay it

3

agreed stay away from seagate and syno

4

I know about the bad faith in Seagate drives. However, I have a hot-spare and with protection against single drive failure (by the use of a parity drive) and good (automated & off-site) back-ups I’m willing to take the risk and ride them out.

If I can get WD’s for the same price as I could ebay these of I maybe would, but I’ve had these ship overseas because we don’t get really nice deals in Europe.

5

what’s with Haswell EP / Broadwell EP C612?
That’d be two gens newer platform wise, up to 4 generations cpu wise if i’m not mistaking.

And how about used parts? Engineering Sample CPUs?

I’d estimate a used ES rig to go below 1K€ easily with at least 10 ok clocking cores.

That’d be the only downside that i can see, lower clock on the Xeons so desktop cpus outperform them.

For example,
my e5 2628L V4 65W tdp ES cost me 120€ and clocks rather low,
1.5Ghz base and 2Ghz boost on a few cores.
1000cb points in cinebench r15 with all 24 threads at1.7ghz.

150€ board, 32GB Reg ECC for around 250€ easily, 60€ NOCTUA cooler, would be a total of 580€ for example.

Another rather salvaging option would be sandy / ivybridge C60?
You could keep the ram. Cpus are cheap, 2670V1 perform pretty ok.
And if you go ivybridge, dual CPU and such, you can get a pretty fricken powerful machine. Someone on STH found 2695V2s for 180$ on ebay for example.

Another option would be absolute specialization, a low power atom, xeon d or what ever build only for the storage, cloud and few other things, and then a dedicated box with the horsepower for virtualization.
Maybe you do a Workstation upgrade to incorporate that into it?

6

You could do something like the SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SDV-TLN4F-O if you want a smaller form factor/less power comsumption, or do something like two systems, one for storage/HTPC and another for VMs