Home Server Upgrade

[jjackstar1]

So over the last month I have been collecting some parts to upgrade my home server. Finally got things working how I like and excited to share

What its running
CPU: Ryzen 5 3600
Motherboard: B550 Aorus Pro V2
RAM: 64GB Cosair LPX
GPU: Nvidia Quadro K2200
PSU: Cosair RM750x
Case: Fractal Define R5
HBA: 2x HP H220 (some rebranded LSI card (Flashed into IT mode))
Drive Cage: 2x SilverStone FS204B
Spinning Rust: 8x 4TB (7x WD Red and 1x Ironwolf)
SSDs:8x WD Blue 250gb SSD
OS: Unraid 6.9.2

Overall the upgrade went well and there were no major project stopping hiccups, the HBA cards do run hot still after I added small fans. I am currently 3D printing a 80mm fan mount to solve that.

Had to do the old hex edit trick to prevent the Quadro producing Code43 in a Windows 10 VM. After that was sorted, Plex was able to transcode and I am also able to offload some Blender renders to the same VM.

The Silverstone drive bays are awesome! Very surprised with the build quality and the box says it also supports SAS disks, providing you have a SAS controller on the other end. The 2 cooling fans in each enclosure has left the drives only getting to ~27 degrees on a sustained load. Also handy that its all powered off of 1 sata power connector for the 4 drives.
10/10 will buy again.

Anyway, here are some pics

That’s all for now, feel free to ask any questions and I hope if someone was looking for some ideas you got some
Have a rippa day/night

[felixthecat]

What kind of load is on the SSDs / What are they being used for?

[jjackstar1]

4 of them are just being used for cache drives for the larger array and will never see a huge load due to the 2.5gig on the board being the bottleneck.
The other 4 are in a pool for VM’s. Normally have 7 VM’s running doing a range of things from blender renders (scratch disks on that array) and PostgreSQL for my projects, PXE boot server etc.

Migrating the data over saw speeds of around 600mb/s, could be quicker but I saw most of the load was on a single thread hence the Ryzen 3600 became has become the bottleneck. There are probably some settings I could tune but I’m happy with that for now.