Howdy, after my SSD died last week and having to resurrect my server I realized most of the parts are 10~ years old, and I think it’s time replace it given I get so much value from it (big realization after it died).
I’m located in Canada, I’m looking to build something with 16-20TB of storage, budget is very flexible but my quick PC parts picker build is around $2000 so lets go with it.
My main uses are:
Plex
Downloading large quantities of Linux ISOs
IRC bouncer/web client
NAS running ZFS
I ideally want something lower power and as quiet as possible, looking to buy new for longevity reasons. Not interested in gambling with surplus or used hardware without a compelling reason.
My current Server is
Xeon E3-1240v3
Z97-A
2x8TB shucked WD Reds (10 years old)
2x4TB WD Red pros (3 years old?)
GTX 750
My primary questions are
Last me as long as possible / another 10 years (Nervous about recent intel CPUs cooking them selves)
System stability (I don’t want random reboots like I get on my Ryzen 5800 which is why I’m not making my desktop my next server)
Low power, for lower heat
Cheapest way to get 32GB ECC (including price of GPU) if possible (not a hard requirement, but nice to have if it’s not too expensive)
Cheapest way to get HW transcoding for Plex
So I guess what’s my best options? I’ve seen the L1 videos about the mobile chip on mobos which peaked my curiosity but also don’t need anything fancy.
[Intel-wise] Core Gen12 having effectively Ø worries, across entire stack
Core Gens 13/14 having most troubles with K-Skus [occ. talks, of a non-K getting charred]
I only have experience, with the 12100F-- very tame [regardless stock HS or 3rd party]
HW Transcoding → Intel A310 [AV1 native and 0 PCIe supplemental power req’d]
For low power intel is still the best choice. The iGPU will probably suffice for transcoding, my I3 12100 server for similar workload does a great job with that.
Beware you’re not getting ‘real’ ecc with this board and memory, only the on -die part and not the traces to the cpu (I.e. once the data leaves the die it’s not error checked any more). For real ecc you need a w680 board and ecc dimms.
The cpu is maybe a bit overspecced but if you’re planning to do 10 years with this system it’s probably a good idea. The degradation worries are rather with the i7/i9 K models, a 14400 should be ok (I think it even still is alder lake rebadged so I think it’s safe.
These are mutually exclusive for the cheapest way. Cheapest ECC is either a used Xeon system or a Ryzen with very specific motherboards. Cheapest hardware transcoding is a low to midrange intel client CPU with an iGPU.
Do you happen to know if this has sata power plugs inside it at all? I had a random thought about using one of these with m.2 to u.2 converters to run a bunch of 1.5TB Optane drives off ebay for a NAS. lol
Though Im guessing 20w per drive is probably going to reach a power limit pretty soon and wouldnt be able to populate all 12 slots.
I don’t think you won’t get anywhere near enough airflow in there to deal with U.2 drives. And if you have to remove the shroud, you may as well use external PSU with all the SATA power you need.
Have you seen the Mikrotik ROSE data server? Basically the same strategy in wiring for maximum bays with minimum lanes per drive.
All screams HDD to me. Some cheap 6-12 core Ryzen, 32/64GB DDR4/5 ECC, maybe board with 10Gbit networking (to save a PCIe slot) and a bunch of SATA ports.
HDDs…Toshiba MG series Enterprise has great €/TB. Another mirror with 20TB on top of your 2x8TB? With ZFS you can just add new mirrors.
Had the same years ago. Eventually went to the landfill…was using way too much power and I couldn’t convince me to upgrade the memory and bought new stuff. Venerate CPU indeed
A bit more expensive than 7000-series but Zen 5 goes come with a few nice features over Zen 4 (more AVX512 instructions and better efficiency). You can use a generic cooler, you dont need anything fancy. An “OEM” AMD Wraith Prism Cooler off eBay will do fine.
32Gb ECC RAM, availability seems to be a bit spotty in .ca overall
Agreed, for this use case HDD performance is easily sufficient to saturate 2.5Gb, $/TB of hard drives is 15-20, for SSDs it’s > 50… I’ve had good experiences with my toshiba drives so far and they’re much cheaper than seagate/WD.
I personally don’t like AMD for this use case because Intel Quicksync is great for transcoding and idle power is MUCH lower; for AMD you can find cheaper ECC supporting boards however.
Can’t go wrong with low-end Ryzen for homeserver CPU. I decided on 7000 series over 9000 series myself. Incremental increase and AVX512 wasn’t worth the 40% upsell to me. But 6,8,12 core are all great homeserver CPUs. Just tweak them to 65W TDP and you can go really easy on cooler, heat and power that way and it’ll still be overkill for most stuff.
DDR5 is still really expensive for ECC modules. Availability in Europe (had to get QVL Micron DIMMs lately) is better than 3 years ago, but still very niche and thus pricey. DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are certainly the best budget option, but also comes with fairly old platform like Zen3.
I got 6x MG08 16TB…doing gods work for 3 years now, no troubles. A bit noisy for a living room use case, but otherwise total workhorses for great price/TB.
That’s probably THE reason to go Intel, especially for PLEX. But could also be a A310 GPU in the PCIe slot to cover that. Depends. I don’t have experience with Intels recent generation, so @dizzy 's recommendation also tends into the Intel direction (Ultra 5). But W680 was a bit disappointing to me, so I remain cautious for W880. I’m mostly the “who has the best board for me?” guy and am AMD/Intel agnostic.
You certainly want 1-2 M.2 SSDs for ZFS, be it L2ARC or special metadata vdev (religiously motivated choice, both are great). But consumer boards always have 2 slots and they can be purchased later as an upgrade.
Same here. That’s how I ended up with the SIENAD8-2L2T as my choice which is quite an efficient platform, but given OP’s budget it’s hard to recommend here ($650 board, $450 8024p cpu, then RAM plus an A310 if he needs HW transcoding… would be looking at at least $2.5k if I had to guess)
I should ask, OP: is HW transcoding really required? I used to think HW transcoding was necessary to have a good experience, but I’ve looked at the data and every single one of my clients does direct streaming for video, and the only thing my box is transcoding is audio sometimes which is easy for the CPU to do
If I wasn’t building a cluster, I’d take Siena (EPYC 8000) any day. Great stuff as premium homeserver without having to go super expensive CPUs and high TDP figures. I still mourn not buying the 8224P, great bang for the buck with lanes and RDIMMs.
DDR5 ECC isn’t very hard to get, I can’t really say that its more expensive than DDR4 ECC sticks when it wasn’t being phased out.
It all depends on your use-case, I do like my 7900 (non X) at 65W but I have hard time recommending it over 9000-series given the much better efficiency per clock/core and extended instructions set when the difference in price is rather small.
Running the same. Great CPU for a homeserver. Bought it a couple of weeks ago and it was either 7900 for 297€, 9900x for 450€ or EPYC4004/5 for 460€. ~150€ more for the 9900x was a bit much for my taste. Especially because I have VMs potentially migrating to a Zen3 node, making AVX512 kinda pointless if you have to disable it in KVM. But YMMV
7900 is the silent workhorse with 2x CCD and good cache per CCD on a budget with same TDP possible (65W) as 6-8 core SKUs.
Budget was $2k-ish, so I figured why not go the whole mile… But yeah, if HDDs are still sufficient, something like this could work (note that RAM is placeholder for ECC, this is an example build to deck out costs mainly - the platform does support ECC UDIMM):
I still recommend the Flashstor over this build, but you could DIY if you wanted to. OOOOOooor… You could go Flashstor and enter the wonderful world of all-SSD storage
I see no benefit from going all flash for my setup. It’s much more expensive for no real world performance gain (in my usecase). My 2x8TB drives already saturate my gigabit connection.
Thanks everyone for the insights this was very helpful!
But yeah, if HDDs are still sufficient, something like this could work (note that RAM is placeholder for ECC, this is an example build to deck out costs mainly - the platform does support ECC UDIMM):