Mini ITX Server Build

I'm building a small home server, but ain't too sure on which case to look for. The motherboard will be Mini ITX, and need 2 Expansion brackets.

The main thing I need is room for HDD's, I have about 3 now, but plan to add 2 more. So about 5 3.5" drive bays. Aesthetics are somewhat important, but not as much as functionality. 

 

Could you guys (and gals) recommend me some cases for this. Thanks in advance,

One

that atom board we just reviewed and is still on the home page is just about perfect.. the 4 core version is $279 and the 8 core version is about $350 street. Mobo and CPU. Pretty good deal. One PCI-e x8 expansion slot. Node 304 is a fantastic value but lian li has cases with 8x 3.5 bays, but  pricier.

 

That Asrock review is what just sold me on making the server, but wasn't sure as to go with that, or choose an i3. Which would be better for accessing media from multiple PC's ? Will be using FreeNAS btw.

Node 304 looks pretty good, like the looks, and perfect amount of HDD space. Still looking for other alternatives 

unless you have a microcenter near you, the atom. It is hard to find an itx board that supports ECC (i3 supports ECC but you've got to get a C226 chipset if you're going socket 1150-- no ECC on z87 because intel sucks).

For freenas, if you plan to use ZFS, the little atom supports ECC ram, and you should get ecc for sure.

The 4 core will be fine for what you want to do, so the price to beat will be $279. It uses so little power that for the power supply literally any junk computer of the last 10 years will work fine for the power supply. On the test bench I had a dell 205 watt power supply from way back in the day and even that was overkill.

You might be able to find a z77 + 3rd gen i3 that supports ecc. Some z77 itx boards actually do support ecc with the i3 and the xeon. you have to be super careful/paranoid about that, though.

 

 

Quick question for you wendell as you do have the same Mobo and its on the topic, Z87-WS, On release it supported ECC memory but officially now it does not. However if you were to throw an E3 Xeon 1200 CPU, Would it support ECC Memory?

I know for a fact that with an i7 it will boot with ecc memory but will not use the function. Im also looking at building a nas and feel that the atom might not be sufficient for my needs. 5+ systems using a nas at the same time :\

P.S. I dont mean to hijack this thread.

haha this story is more epic and completely insane than you know. Uber insane. I spent hours and hours and hours figuring this one out. 

So the short answer is no, z87 has done away with ECC. It might post, but it won't use it. Note that i3s support ECC as well as Xeon -- i3 makes a perfectly competent 'small server' platform. I've been running a 20-odd extension i3 Asterisk voip system since gen3 i3 came out, ecc, the whole works. works great. 

anyway, back to your question. So intel did this awesome thing. Z87 docs say ECC is supported. Boards support ECC ram. all of the "Intel Confidential" chipset/sampling supports ECC. 

At the last minute, the retail batches of the chipset, they lasered it off apparently. They wanted an additional layer of segmentation between 1150 and 2011.

Here's a dirty secret though that'll get me flamed alive and came up during some of our earlier freenas videos because everyone was all firebreathing omg you must have ecc blah blah blah: memory densities now are such that on the silicon there is a limited ability to deal with errors even in non ecc modules. If you want the proof, see the jedec ddr4 spec where they're moving the crc to the bus. (this is detection, not correction, and the specific kind of error is primarily alpha decay). You can test this by, for example, running memtest 86 on a ddr3 machine for a few months and not experiencing any single bit error (the math, in terms of density, alpha decay, etc says there is like a 99.9999% chance you would have experienced at least a single bit failure in 3 months). Now ECC is awesome because it's end to end, bus wiring issues, etc. don't get me wrong -- errors can occur at many different levels of the system. What I'm talking about is literally inside the chip only, and not that great, but it was because ddr1/2 had a massive bit-flip rate from alpha decay, cosmic rays, or because manufacturers didn't know what they were doing) 

But Intel is ditching it in z87 and I suspect the reason is segmentation but the reason it doesn't matter as much is because error handling stuff is being added to the jedec standard in ddr4 (they're explicit that this has nothing to do with ecc modules per se-- the ecc is another, more robust, thing).

So if you want ecc on socket 1150, you've got to get C226 chipset. Thanks Obama! I mean.. thanks intel! I still can't get over intel got rid of that in the final chipset release. What evil trolls.

Yeah.

 

p.s The atom is probably fine even for 5 systems. What sort of torture test can I do to test it for you? The other day I was re-copying my dvr'd set of star trek the next generation (its like... 200gb or some such) at wirespeed (100mbsec+) while streaming another show to my tablet (transcoding) and it was fine. I peeked at the cpu usage, on the 8 core, it was like 276% but everything still felt snappy. and smb was smb-ing like champ, which is a killer w/freenas. we've got a c226 asrock mobo video coming up. it's a very economical but more powerful alternative to the atom. you'd need to get a 1230+ to match/best the speed of the atom for a lot of things, though. 

 

One of the reasons I bought my Z87-WS was because it was supposedly one of the few Z87 boards that supported ECC. Good to finally have an answer. 

Anyway with my business, We do a lot of backups of customers data. The current situation is we backup the HDD directly to a second HDD by use of a USB 3.0 Dock. not exactly the fastest way nor cost effective as HDD's are bumped and knocked about every now and then leading to failed HDD's. I have tried backing up directly to an entertainment machine we have (Business and home in same property and network) It runs 8 1tb HDD. But when we have had more than 2 people streaming from the system, Which happens a lot. Plus we have had in the past up to 8 different systems all backing up to this one computer. Plus other systems streaming video and other data from it. As expected the network and that system gets congested. I dont know the exact specs but i know the CPU is an old Core 2 Quad Q9550. 

Anyway, When we have more than 2 systems uploading or downloading from the system, the bandwidth is not great enough to stream video without interruptions. I know my 4770k with Z87-WS can however im skeptical of the 8 core Atom. The system isnt exactly cheap and for a bit more I can put together a Xeon system that while a little less efficient, would have a lot more grunt to do the workload requested.

If you can simulate say 5 systems uploading/downloading data to your Nasferatu and show that 2 or more systems can stream 1080p video without interruptions, I would be more than convinced.

Yeah, the xeon would probably have a bit more headroom in that scenario. You'll probably want to do LAG or LACP for bonding as well. I'm not sure how I would simulate 5 systems but I can try. The write performance from 5 machines will surely be bottlenecked by the lan -- any reasonable mechanical drive today can manage 100mbytes/sec+ which will saturate gigabit alone. Have you looked into PXE booting? I have a similar need and can PXE boot off of the network with an image I can stream clones to via the network. That box is running a large hard drive array on an older dual socket opteron system though. makes it a lot easier than usb3 mechanical hard drives. and restoring is the same procedure.. just pxeboot from network, restore. doable with ghost even. 

I too was disappointed with intel's move on ECC on Z87.

I'll try to give it a try tomorrow, but my disk array may be the limiting factor as I think with 5 streams it won't be the throughput that's the problem, it'll be seeking to 5 places on disk w/o running into an i/o bottleneck.

those 8 drives in raid? 5? 6? 10?

 

 

Raid0, The system was designed for performance not security and HDD space is precious. But the fact that 3 and at times even just 2 systems streaming video from it leads to a bottleneck. I havent worked out what but the likelyhood of it being the network port or the CPU is low. Theres something going on there, I believe with the motherboard thats holding that system back.

But if there is a way to prioritise connections say a video stream over data backup, I think that would be fine. At the moment its better to copy video to the local HDD then watch. And yet my main system with 3 HDD's in Raid 0 streams video fine while running a game streamed to a makeshift SteamBox. Main issue is I am worried that the atom will greatly underperform compared to a Haswell Xeon system. Not to mention trying to get that 8 core atom system to this side of the globe would be an expensive pain. Cost me $600 just to get my Z87-ws. The Atom would bound to be more.

I use the Coolermaster HAF Stacker 915R for my NAS

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119293

you can add another drive bay to it for 9 drives total

And you can stack them if you get another, then you can run SATA cables through the grommets in the bottom of the top case and add 2 drive bays to the second case for another 9 drives. You can also mount a drive on either side panel, in front of the motherboard, and in the 5.25" bay. And if your crazy you can mod in another drive bay where the motherboard is supposed to go in the second one for another 3 drives; if you did that then you wouldn't be able to fit a PSU in the second case and so you'd have to run the whole thing off of one PSU in the main case. Aaannnnnnnnd theres no limit to how many you can stack......I love the stacker series...

 

That'd be great for if I planned on adding a bunch more drives, but I ain't in need of em'. haha 

At that point, i'd just use the Corsair 900D.

I see, well i'm in Canada, so Microcenter ain't happening. But I will be using ZFS, and ECC Ram, so this might just be the board for me.

Just 2 more questions, if I was to get the 8 core, would it benefit me at all ? What would require the 8 core ?

blam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IGzSYWmeN0

I couldn't quite do 5/2 but I did do 2 and 2. The two transfers combined (about 50 mbyte/sec each) are at the theoretical maximum for the speed you can do on gigabit, while I was streaming from plexweb on a windows machine and streaming to a nexus 7 over wifi. 

The network was for sure the bottleneck. This was on a 5 drive raid z1  

I figured since I was capping out the network with two file copies running (from two different drives in that PC) it's probably about the same difference as if it were five file copies from a plurality of machines? But I can try to retest if you want. All intel Nics all the way around, too, which helps im sure. Oh, and since smb is single threaded no matter what anyway. 

if you're doing like what rudster is talking about where you have lots of stuff going on.. transcoding, file copies, etc. simultaneously from more than 4 clients, the 8 core will benefit you. 

for smb file copies, it's not really that big of a deal, because smb doesn't really take advantage of multiple cores properly unless you have a lot of clients (again, more than 4). But he and I are also doing media library/transcoding and plex can use multiple cores. For most people they don't need it.. but there is no upgrading later. so.. you have to sort of guesstimate.

 

Cheers Wendell, No need to do more. I was looking at upgrading the wired connection in my place so if gigabit is the bottleneck I need to look at my network first. Im surprised at how well the Atom can handle data though. Still might take a step up for a xeon. Better to have extra power than not enough. But thank you for your work Wendell. Its always good to see you on the forum.

i am gonna use the quad core atom board for a network router with pfsense and ubiquiti access points. don't worry, there is also a wired network