Home storrage server

Hardware Hub Storage
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My main question is if it is a stupid idea, and I should start small with an old desktop, and buy only drives, or if old used server with raid controller is worth the money.

They are VERY OLD, but also quite cheap….

Sorry for the wall of text below. :sweat_smile:

I narrowed it down to these 4 options:

Dell PowerEdge R510 12-Core 2.27 GHz: 361 €

2x 6-Core Intel Xeon L5640
48 GB (6x 8GB) DDR3 (+37€ compared to 4x 4GB)
Dell Perc/H700 Raid Controller 6G 512 MB Cache
2x Dell PSU 750W PowerEdge R510 (+21€ compared to just 1)
6x Dell 4 TB SAS 7.2K 3.5" 6G HDD (41€ each)

+separately: HP InfiniBand FDR/Ethernet 10Gb/40Gb 2-port 544+FLR-QSFP Adapter 764285-B21: 20.53€

IBM System x3630 M3 12-Core 2.26 GHz: 583 €

2x 6-Core Intel Xeon L5640 2.26 GHz
96 GB (12x 8GB) DDR3 (+70€ compared to 4x 4GB)
2x IBM x3550, x3630 M3 PSU 675 W (+28€ compared to just one)
8x Dell 4TB SAS 7.2K 3.5" 6G HDD 0529FG 529FG (+37€ each)
IBM Hot Swap frame SAS/ SATA 3.5" M3 M4 M5 (+18€ each)

+separately: HP InfiniBand FDR/Ethernet 10Gb/40Gb 2-port 544+FLR-QSFP Adapter 764285-B21: 20.53€

HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9 v3: 587 €

4 front LFF (3.5") Hot Swap disk positions a 4 internal SFF (2.5") SATA fixed positions (+33€ compared to nothing with only front slots)
2x CPU Intel Xeon E5-2650L v3 12-Core 1.80 GHz 30 MB Cache (+33€ compared to E5-2630L v3 20 MB Cache)
32 GB (2x 16GB) DDR4-2133 (+99€ as cheapest option with memory included)
HPE Smart Host Bus Adapter H240 HBA, recommended for ZFS (+82€ compared to HPE Smart Array P440, 2GB Cache, HBA or RAID 0 1 5 6 10 50 60)
2x HP PSU 500 W (+12€ compared to just one, better PSU are way more expensive and 500W should be enough)
4x HPE 4 TB SAS 7.2K 3.5" 6G HDD (+41€ each)
HP InfiniBand FDR/Ethernet 10Gb/40Gb 2-port 544+FLR-QSFP Adapter 764285-B21 (+20€)

HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 v4 24-Core 2.20 GHz 8 TB SAS: 743 €

2x CPU Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 12-Core 2.20 GHz 30 MB Cache
2x HP 4 TB SAS 7.2K 3.5" 6G HDD (FREE part of the bundled server)
32 GB (2x 16GB) DDR4-2133 (+99€ as cheapest option with memory included)
HPE Smart Array P840, 4GB Cache, HBA or RAID 0 1 5 6 10 50 60
2x HP PSU 500 W (+12€ compared to just one, better PSU are way more expensive and 500W should be enough)
10x HPE 4 TB SAS 7.2K 3.5" 6G HDD (+41€ each)
HP InfiniBand FDR/Ethernet 10Gb/40Gb 2-port 544+FLR-QSFP Adapter 764285-B21 (+20€)

I would like to use that storage for home everything (backup, images, media library, security cameras, maybe even steam library).
They all come with 2 years warranty.
Give me all ± for these configurations, you can think of, I listed prices on “configurable” parts.
I did a quick check on DDR4 and I can not do significantly better by going no memory, and buying it separately right now, so that is possible future upgrade, even though storage does not really need that much memory, but can use it for cache, which is my intention with the DDR3 options, and plan is that there will be battery backup for whole house.
I do not care about noise, because I plan to put it in a basement to a climate controlled room. (original owner of the house intended it for wine, but I think server is better :smiley: )

Sorry for that wall of text above. :sweat_smile:

  • Do you think DDR3 is too old? (I seen Wendel recently saying it is coming back :rofl: )
  • Do you think these prices are reasonable?
  • What would you pick differently?
  • Do you have any other suggestions?
  • Anything else?
2 Likes
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Ddr3 is not too old

I would advice accelerated raid since these are HDDs. The battery backed cache might possibly outperform even the ramdisk backed cache on those machines. Mdadm does have its advantages for portability and flexibility though. I’ve not used mdadm for a few years, but I recall it always having intolerable seek delays and cache sync times on large-memory NUMA systems.

Those Dell Perc accelerators just refuse to die. My H830 is old enough to have been through 2 battery replacements and its still handling my constant abuse perfectly.

Also ramdisk as a cache on ECC might become a choke point. Ddr4 especially suffers from being slower just from having ECC enabled vs disabled.

If ZFS is your intention, then ram amount nor CPU compute is of any issue here, but rather memory and pcie throughput of the platform might be of concern.

Does Hewlett Packard still exclusively make boards that fail in 2 years or less?

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I think all these boards are way older than that, more like 10 years… If you would ask me a year ago I would not expect to consider something from that era, but times change.

1 Like
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FIY, the HPE servers from this generation (depending on firmware and version), will run the fans at full speed if they don’t have HDD with the right firmware to report the HDD temps.

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My NAS is in an ancient big tower case (2000-2010’s era), these should hold 8-14 HDD’s (3.5”) if hot-swapping is not a requirement. Get a 450W PSU or better (for large amounts of drives), a workstation mainboard (intel 8th gen or newer), as much RAM as budget allows, at least 4 drives and an OS of choice, not being Win-OS :roll_eyes: For just 4 drives, the onboard SATA will usually suffice, when you expand to (or start out with) more then 4 drives, add an HBA to your shopping list. LSI-9300 series or newer (or comparable clones from Aliexpress) will do.

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Just glancing at it all, initial impression is that is a lot of old power hungry outdated enterprise gear to just serve files and have really pretty minimal amounts of storage space. Especially if this will be on 24/7 with security cameras or similar.

You would almost certainly be better served by separate devices, a standalone or combo console Unifi NVR of some kind could be a great security camera option assuming your cameras are compatible (you don’t have to use only their cameras with their NVR). A Ubiquiti or uGreen NAS would make a lot more sense longterm for basic always on easily accessible data, or a more DIY Truenas build. Drives are expensive, but that won’t change for at least a few years, and it won’t go back to pre-AI panic days, can always buy a larger NAS and only populate some slots now.

You have the initial hardware cost, then the cost to power everything 24/7 which with old enterprise gear will quickly eat any “savings” you had buying old gear vs new gear, plus tons of compatibility issues and “features” that manufacturers added that made their product worse back then on purpose.

Other thing to consider with any NAS, NVR, old enterprise gear or similar is how much network traffic it will see, because a big pile of 2k or 4k cameras will put a decent constant load on it and really hit the drives, then trying to read or write data from the same device/ drives won’t be great with a single do it all box with some resources tied up 24/7. You should have 2.5gbe in the house at a minimum, ideally 10gbe or SFP+ at 10gigabit or fiber at higher speeds on devices that can/ will utilize it. If those servers don’t have 10gigabit or SFP+ built in that is another power hungry NIC that needs pretty decent cooling to keep functional, especially so if it’s a qsfp+ 40gigabit NIC and you won’t be able to actually take advantage of the speed due to the hardware and limited drives.

I would recommend browsing & searching Reddit /homelab for people looking at buying and running old enterprise servers 24/7 and the plethora of people moving away from that gear due to power cost, noise, heat & footprint. Also search threads on power draw and cost to run stuff.

IMO for a single family house with no business needs, no profit from running the gear, it makes OK sense to run old enterprise gear as a backup that only runs occasionally. Then run a decent NVR for cameras, then either a DIY Truenas rig with a LSI card and some drives, or a purpose built NAS.

Don’t forget a good UPS to power it all, and protect your data.

My current setup has a UPS powering a Netgear 2gigabit cable Modem, a Unifi UDM Pro Max with 2x 4TB WD HDDs for NVR duty and the router/ unifi console (both SFP+ ports used), a USW 16 port POE switch (only 8 POE ports, one for a USL Gateway, for now just 5 Unifi security cameras, about 35w for those POE devices), a uGreen DXP4800 Plus with 4x 20TB HDDs, a Lutron light hub. 150watts on average for everything running. I had different gear before and it would draw more than that for no real benefit, wasted money buying that gear, wasted money powering it.

I have a usually off Truenas DIY NAS with 12x 12TB drives on a LSI card I need to rebuild with a Supermicro motherboard that has slim sas built in, double 10gbe built in, an 8 core Epyc Rome CPU that is relatively efficient, 256GB DDR4 ECC I got years ago for cheap. I do not run it 24/7 because it draws too much power and would put undue wear on it.

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There are some 2011-3 x99 boards that can use ddr3. Like the HUANANZHI X99-T8. However not all 2011-3 cpus support ddr3. So you would have to find one that can work with ddr3. But you can load it up with like 128-256GB of ram for pretty cheap.

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Based on real usage from testing cameras for weeks now, I expect the average to be below 4 MB/s from all cameras combined.
Even theoretical maximum calculated from “Max Bitrate (Kbps)“ should be like 17 MB/s.
:thinking: Which will go to frigate, and that will send it to storage… well good that I already planned to use one of those HP InfiniBand FDR/Ethernet 10Gb/40Gb 2-port 544+FLR-QSFP for a direct connection between storage, and main server… Thanks for the hint, I did not calculate it before, it seemed too small.

:thinking: From recent video with Wendel, I was under impression, that he was suggesting that such HW is good.

I have quite a few power measuring devices already, so I can get quite a good estimates for the things I already have (in testing runs) of 1.2 kWh per day.
Plus the server running AMD Ryzen 9 7950X for proxmox running frigate, home assistant, …. 3.4 kWh per day.
Single 12 TB HDD costs over 600 €, lets compare it to 4x 4 TB for 41 € (164€), to be cost effective in lets say a decade it would need to cost less to run by 436 €, which means it would need to save over 28 Wh per hour, which would actually put them on par with each other, if there would be no idle time. :open_mouth: I calculated that as I wrote it, and did not expect it to be close within 10 years…

I guess you might have convinced me, to just put drives to that box, those drives use almost no power (I really checked before, but did not multiply it), but as an common saying (at least it Czech) 1000 times nothing killed the donkey.

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Yea I noticed, up to 8 GB sticks are like 1€ per GB or less.

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We all start with like raid 1 or 3 and grow. Its a journey with no prefect answer… 4 - 5 nerds could circle jerk remote backups ….. no limits

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New idea, thanks to actually calculating power cost for 10 years. (Thanks @Agent9 it really helped).
Just putting drives to an existing machine. 64 GB RAM, CPU 7950X.

Is it reasonable to expect “Amazon renewed” HDDs with 5 year warranty to actually work well?

One example Amazon.com: MDD (MD14TSATA25672NAS) 14TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5'' Internal NAS Hard Drive - 5 Years Warranty (Renewed) : Electronics

Or https://www.ebay.com/itm/298491821153 should be new.

Is that a better idea?

Assuming yes (or other drives), I would try ZFS over them plus an SSD, or is that a bad idea? I read somewhere it should recognize it, and use it as an cache. Or should I make new topic for SW side of things? To not mix HW, and SW too much?

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I do not know anyone I could send my backups to, and I guess it would be expensive to pay for the internet traffic, for me price doubles every 600 GB, or speeds drops to 20 Mbs. :cry:

1 Like
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LTO tape. Safe deposit box at a bank.

Cheap Offsite backup.

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That is the thing we with big NAS’s dont find each other through friends. Friend tend to want our plex access for free etc.

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Really? How do you measure the cost of going to bank? That costs time, effort, and money for the travel expenses. I doubt it could end up cheap for me, even if tape, and tape reader/writer would be free.

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Luckily/Unfortunately I do not have friends, so that is not an issue for me.

But interesting question, how do they find each other?

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But back to the question, what do the more experienced people think about:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYTWVS8K?tag=level1techs-20
and https://www.ebay.com/itm/298491821153 ?