I’m looking for recommendations for bulk storage. Here’s the catch, though, I’m using an X79 board from 2012 (purchased 2013/14-ish), which means PCIe-3.0 speeds, but plenty of SATA ports and PCIe lanes.
I have the CPU, RAM, boot drive and peripheral drive (for lack of a better term), PSU, GPU, and rackmount case and rack picked out already.
I want to use the server for Home Assistant, security camera monitoring (likely using Frigate), and for data storage/backups for my home computers.
I’d post the PCPP link, but I’m pretty sure my account is too new for that, so I’ll list the specs here that I’ve picked out so far:
Yea … data storage is probably going to be in short supply from the out set. How many other computers do you plan on backing up to this machine? Is it just the data / what kind of data (stuff that changes regularly or not?) or is it a full system image every month? Also your video surveillance system is recording video all the time or is it just recording when there is activity and depending on the resolution can add up fast. I cannot speak for home assistant.
not that kind of forum, nobody will “force you” to spend money - usually the opposite actually.
You mentioned Frigate - Frigate can do object detection using AI inference running on Google Coral (link) , and then if you have too many cameras … you can get another usb thingie.
For storage itself, I see the case has 7x 3.5" Bays.
My cameras are using about 5TB for 1 Month of video - I don’t know how much stuff you want to store, 7 bays should be enough to get a 100T of space comfortably.
For drives, https://diskprices.com/ has interesting offers , I’d avoid MDD / MaxDataDigital drives , and I’d avoid anything smaller than 16T per drive - everything else is fair game IMO.
Also, you might run into: https://serverpartdeals.com/ aka. SPD or https://www.goharddrive.com/ who sell refurbished or renewed or just used drives for cheap with various warranties … depending. SPD ships internationally and seems to have better warranty/support.
That board + CPU will draw 200W-300W of constant power, that would be somewhere between 1 750 kWh to 2 620 kWh per year.
Compare this with a more modern approach. A fully loaded 6 bay Asustor Flashstor NAS pulls 24W at full load and idles around 13W, so a realistic average number is around 17W but let’s make it 20W for ease of calculations. That is around 175 kWh a year!
In other words, you would be saving at least 1 600 kWh a year by going with the Asustor. If you pay 15 cents per kWh, that is $240 saved per year. The Flashstor pays for itself after two years of operations, compared to what you were planning from the start. And the savings will allow you to buy one extra 4TB SSD a year.
That said, the Flashstor does have a rather weak CPU and I am not confident it will be able to handle everything you ask of it. A modern AM5 system draws less than 100W on average, which still saves you at least $70 a year. Let me spec it out. Oh, and I have now chosen a $300 server board and non-ECC RAM, you can always upgrade to ECC later. The integrated APU of the 7600 makes the 1030 redundant, too, which is a nice bonus.
Piggyback off @thetazman, do not expect long life out of consumer grade ssd’s if you are doing constant writes aka video recording. Either go spinning rust or purpose built storage for video footage. I have 4 cams in blueiris with roughly 30 day retention 720p, 7x24 + ai tagged 2k clips recording on an intel server grade 4tb ssd from serverpartdeals.
I’d say get a Chieftec or IcyDock bay and slap however many drives you can in it (I was happy with my CMR-3141SAS - 3 dvd bays can hold 4 spinning rust drives).
At only this number of drives, go with stripped mirrors. Go for high-capacity drives. Particularly for surveillance footage, go spinning rust.
I also agree with wertigon’s sentiment. Using old servers will cost you a lot for keeping them powered on. Going with something smaller might be an option, but I’m pretty sure that constant video footage can’t be easily ingested by something less than a Ryzen 5 1600 these days.
You could still put your server in action if you do what I do and start it on-demand whenever you need it (kinda like a test lab), but run your “homeprod” on more efficient hardware (even if it’s consumer grade). That’s how I run my TR1950x (I love it, it’s very powerful, but it’s a power hog compared to the rest of my “desk rack”).
Since you already have an 8U rack (and half of if empty), you could get a 2U case and do an efficient build (make sure you get something with hdd bays this time, but then don’t go for the chieftec / icydock on the old server) and have 2U left for your network equipment.
Just be wary of goharddrive, they tend to advertise refubished drives as new… Ive run into that before. I bought 3 “new” (i even called and asked about it), drives. When they arrived they had a suspicious label on them ( as i recall it was some kind of warranty label that goharddrive slaps on the drive), which i peeled off to discover a “refurbished by” label under it…
With the goharddrive seller I think the quality varies by drive type. I have bought ten 8TB HGST ultrastar ale601 drives from him and they are all working great. Zero bad sectors and no smart problems… but I have also bought other drive types from them that have bad sectors/smart problems (and I always get the ones advertised as grade A). From what I am reading here my experience might be better than most. Use eBay and the buyer protection with all these used hard drive sellers.
