My supermicro X10SL7-F has finally died after 10 long years. It’s probably my fault for some shenanigans I was doing a couple weekends ago. I added an ARC A310 for JellyFin and it didn’t seem to sit property but I went with it anyway.
OS: TrueNas Scale
I need to put a new board, ecc ram, and thinking of using my 3700x. My initial thoughts are to use the following:
I have heard Asrock has fairly good support for ECC and I checked their website and it seemed to me, that it would.
I wiil also be using the Arc 310 and adding a PCI sata card or two.
I don’t need a lot of horsepower for my NAS. My kids don’t stream too much and I watch the occasional movie in my theater. Mostly it’s used for backup of a few of our systems.
The 3700x is current in a system with an MSI Tomahawk B450 and it does not support ECC fully. I figured this might be a good time to get a 9700x upgrade for my DAW system and MicroCenter seems to have a good bundle deal.
Anyone see any issues with the direction I’m going in? Thoughts?
Thanks. You’ll have to clue me on on the acronym QML because I’m not familiar with it. I checked asrock’s site and it showed ECC is supported for that board at that speed.
Most, if not all of my drives have been replaced in the last year. They tend to get replaced once they start having errors and I always keep a few new spares on hand.
it’s also referred to as a QVL or Qualified Vendor List
It’s a list of tested compatible hardware available from vendors.
Microsoft has one as well for Windows Server, VMWare for ESXI & VSphere, etc.
Just increases the chances of things working together.
If you are not doing this professionally and/or in mission critical deployments use it as a baseline and find interoperable components from other vendors.
RAM in particular for high performance servers is the pickiest, but browsing the catalogs for OEM equivalences can save a few thousand $$$ per server.
AM4 and ECC is at best “maybe”, don’t expect it to work as in being used and I wouldn’t go for third party ECC memory modules due to compatibility reasons. Personally I’d stick to Crucial/Micron, Kingston, Samsung in that regard just to avoid potential issues.
If you can do without AV1 encoding the Odroid H4 Plus or Ultra might acutally be viable options. There’s no “real” ECC support but there’s support or inband-ECC which is a pretty interesting variant. odroid-h4:hardware:h4_bios_update [ODROID Wiki] (search for IBECC)
Stay away from that OWC stuff (at least for memory).
I had that kit you’re about to buy fail a year ago and I just got a SODIMM ECC kit that made the NAS reboot at random. Didn’t pass a memtest either.
I have two SODIMM Nemix ECC kits that have been working for the last year. I’ve had a non-ECC Nemix DDR5 kit fail, but they replaced it in under a week.
I would say that 3700X is more than enough. I barely manage to load my ryzen 5 3600 fully at times. If you have kicking around, it probably will not hurt, but I doubt you will ever use all of the cores.
So it might be worth turning off some of the cores on it, but I leave that up to you.
My setup runs mostly on VM’s since this I made the mistake of migrating this machine from a previous OS version to the current a couple of months ago. I am running a turnkey nextcloud and jellyfin installations as VM’s.
Note that my setup has only 2 HDD’s in a mirror, so it might not be fully applicable to your situation. Here are my NAS specs
Ryzen 5 3600
32GB of Kingston 3600 MHZ CL16 DDR4
Asus Tuf B550-gaming (outlet find)
A basic NVMe 3.0 drive for OS
Asus GTX960 2GB
2x 4TB Ironwolf SATA3 3.5" HDD in a mirror
650W seasonic PSU
Note about the displays
From what I have heard, if you are running applications in VM’s, you cannot use the primary host display GPU on that VM if there is no other GPU on the NAS. I think it worked with the on-os appllicaitons, but those have been a little hit and miss from my experiece. TLDR I got burned by updating the OS, not doing a complete reinistall earlier and the application implementation changed quite drastically.
Hopefully I managed to provide something of use for you from my experience!
Quite good plan. ASRock and ASUS AM4 boards have been known to have the best ECC support with Ryzen and UDIMM ECC modules. For your use case your CPU will sit at idle for most of the time and it will have enough power to run all tasks. A310 is great for transcoding.
If you want less power consumption in idle, you could go with a LGA1700 board, DDR5 (with internal ECC-ish protection) and a 4-core i3 CPU. Idle power of Intel is much better since they have monolithic build and integrated iGPU will handle multiple 4K transcoding without a problem, so no need for A310. Selling your old parts would offset the price of new system.
Ok. Got the first system with the 9700x and 48G Ram bundle form Micro Center. It was an hour drive, but it works flawlessly. Pretty happy with that upgrade.
Bought Asrock B550 from Amazon w/ECC ram and it was supposed to arrive Sat but has been delayed until today. Why doesn’t Amazon ever ring the doorbell and just leave the packages outside.
Now I’m thinking of getting silly as I’m looking at pulling the trigger on a 5600G to use in the old MSI B450 Tomahawk Max board which has 64 gigs of ram. I figured I could use it first to build my first Arch system and then later use it as a play thing for testing other stuff. I have an older case running an Intel 2700K that I will retire.
Good luck learning Linux. I’m on that path myself, but I’m still waiting for a few parts for my Proxmox/NAS build.