Quiet Server

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I’m in the dreaming stage of a server build.

I’ve considered many options including Raspberry Pis, mini PCs like those on ServeTheHome YouTube channel. I’ve considered the HP ProLiant. I’ve considered conventional PCs. Building even more exotic solutions from various soldered on Raspberry Pi equivalents.

Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing beats a conventional server with data centre grade components. My needs aren’t very performance demanding, a few low resource utilization services, software building (Compared to the linux Kernel, the software is tiny) and data storage. So I’m basically looking for some low tier Xeon, 16-64GB ECC RAM haven’t decided on the number yet, x6 16-20TB Exos SAS drives for Raid-z 2 and 10Gb networking. Some kind of NVMe boot configuration in RAID 1. Anyway, nothing too crazy.

What I’m wondering however, is how would I go about creating this thing to be as quiet as possible? I don’t know enough about server space offerings. I suspect 1U and 2U are probably out? Those small fans probably will run too loud? But I suspect bigger cases with roomier configurations are probably vastly more expensive? I don’t plan upgrading the storage any time soon, but if and when I do, I’ll probably go JBOD. The server will sit in my office because I have no other place to put it. So it needs to be reasonable.

If you search YouTube for “Shouting in the Datacenter” you will see what I’m trying to avoid. But again, I don’t spend enough time around server grade bare metal to know how to avoid a situation such as that.

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When talking performance, nothing beats state of the art server gear (with some exceptions). But old server gear is easily outperformed by modern consumer chips. That’s why you see 13th gen E-cores running circles around old Xeons at a fraction of the power consumption.

low-midrange Ryzen or Intel Core is used in many homeserver builds here. Some run with ECC, some don’t. And 128GB memory max is plenty for most. And power and thus noise is substantialy lower on those machines.
I only hear the drives on my server which is the best you can hope for on a server with HDDs.

Little room to get quiet fans working. 3U and 4U are great because you can use 120mm case fans and have a lot of products for CPU cooling. 60mm high rpm fans in a 2U is only quiet on very low TDP stuff.

And you won’t get anymore than 4-8 HDD bays out of a 1U or 2U chassis. 4U is up to 24 bays so no need for a JBOD and 8e/16e HBAs. There are good small form factor NAS cases with up to 8 bays out there if you don’t want 19" rack in your office.

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I think quietness mainly depend on the size of the case which in turn dictates the size of the cooling fans.

Its ok to use enterprise grade gear but if you could swap the parts for 120mm Noctua fans, it would be better.

Ive even heard of modded 80mm fans in UPSes swapped with Noctua fans and that also seems to operate reasonably quietly. Maybe you could get away with 2U and below, just swap out the fans with Noctua ones. Just make sure it is the right type of fan because a non-PWM fan will likely spit out errors.

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The biggest problem with rackmounted is the noise. Racks are built for efficient cooling in a reasonably well ventilated room to cool server hardware that, in this day and age, is pretty obsolete compared to what you can get for a consumer platform, at least on the home front.

Racks still have their place, but I don’t think we should rely on them much for home labbing any more. At most, I’d buy a 10u rack and place it below my desk, and then have a 1u blade server, 4u NAS and a 4u desktop computer with the last u holding a switch. Even better, I’d get a 2x2 or 1x4 IKEA Kallax Shelf and make that into a rack with cases that can fit the 320x320x340 mm enclosure and takes in air from the front to the back.

But why do I think a consumer grade hardware is good enough these days? Because, at home:

  1. You will most probably not handle critical data that needs to be up 24/7
  2. You will not be running a server that can serve millions of clients each second
  3. You will not have access to a connection capable of serving millions of clients
  4. You will not be running heavy and taxing virtual machines
  5. You will not run large render farms 24/7

The home needs, generally speaking, consists of a home lab, a NAS and maybe, possibly, a low-traffic dedicated server for a few services and game(s) you or the kids utilize, such as MineCraft, Mastodon, web, IoT or whatever else is popular in your circle at the moment.

Do I still think there is a need for home servers, yes, absolutely. Do I still think there are exceptions to the above, yes, there will ALWAYS be that redneck deep in the woods with special needs for his Evil Lair of DOOM™ (yes the computer game). But the above is what 70-90% of people with home servers need.

So, for modern tech, you need three devices for a home server setup; the home server, the NAS, and the router. What do you need for each? First a few general points:

  • The router is probably best to just get whatever is available from brands such as Netgear, D-Link and Asus. In fact, whatever crap your ISP provided you with is probably enough for your needs. If not, DiY or get a used Cisco router.
  • The NAS can easily perform all functions required from it on a low end consumer CPU these days, save one - hardware encoding / decoding. You need to decide if this is an important feature for you, or not. Everything else, the cores available are more than enough.
  • Now, as for storage… 20 disks? You are aware that would fit around 320-460 TB of raw storage, yes? How much data do you really require, here? If the answer is less than 60 TB, then a 6 disk case is enough. If the answer is less than 100 TB, then you might need 8 disks, if it is above that, consider a proper disk shelf. I am going to operate on the assumption that your home lab require, at most, 80 GB of storage the next five years and that you will use 16 TB drives or bigger.
  • As for the server itself… You can combine it with your NAS, but you might want to bring your NAS offline periodically to swap disks and do other types of maintenance on it, so it’s better service to keep the two separate.
  • The server needs a bit more, like a 6 core or 8 core would do the trick.

With all this in mind I think the following two builds are worth considering:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Core i3-13100 $144.65
Motherboard ASRock Z790M-ITX WIFI $209.99
Memory G.Skill Ripjaws S5 2x16 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 $114.99
Storage Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 $27.99
Case Fractal Design Node 304 $126.06
Power Supply EVGA 600 GD 600W $74.98
Raid Controller ORICO PM2TS6 M.2 to 6 x SATA $49.99
Subtotal 748,65
Storage Western Digital Red Pro 16 TB 7200 RPM HDD $249.99
Storage Western Digital Red Pro 16 TB 7200 RPM HDD $249.99
Storage Western Digital Red Pro 16 TB 7200 RPM HDD $249.99
Storage Western Digital Red Pro 16 TB 7200 RPM HDD $249.99
Storage Western Digital Red Pro 16 TB 7200 RPM HDD $249.99
Storage Western Digital Red Pro 16 TB 7200 RPM HDD $249.99
Total $2248.59

Rationale: The 13100 is more than capable to act as a NAS. Other than that it is a pretty typical build. If you have the space you might want to consider a different case, though unless your storage requirements are extreme a 100 TB server will not be required for a long time. Placing the RAID controller in an m.2 slot frees the PCIe slot for other uses such as a GPU card for HW encoding, or a 10 Gb NiC. The 970 Evo is tried and true, and is a great Linux / UNIX system drive.

Now for the actual server build:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7900 $419.99
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-L9A-AM5 $44.95
Motherboard Gigabyte B650I AORUS ULTRA $259.99
Memory G.Skill Ripjaws S5 2x32 GB DDR5-5200 CL36 $179.99
Storage Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 $27.99
Case In Win Chopin Pro $149.56
Power Supply InWin 200W FlexATX (included in case) -
Total $1082.47

Rationale: Small, powerful, silent. If you’re going to be doing a ton of virtual machines, this is all you need. The 7900 has 24 threads available to be utilized in whatever way you prefer, and with the 64 GB of memory you have all the RAM you would need. I am going with the 7900 over the 13700 or 7900X due to it’s very low power draw, this system should idle at around 20W and go up to 170W, well within spec for the PSU.

So, that’s pretty much my idea what a 2023 home server setup should look like, using modern hardware. YMMV of course, but here is a good baseline at least! :slight_smile:

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My system looks like this

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3.4 GHz 16-Core Processor Purchased For $457.00
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-D15S chromax.black 82.51 CFM CPU Cooler Purchased For $100.00
Motherboard Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero ATX AM4 Motherboard Purchased For $410.00
Memory Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 128 GB (4 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory Purchased For $370.00
Storage Crucial P3 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Purchased For $53.00
Storage Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Purchased For $180.00
Storage Crucial MX500 4 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive Purchased For $240.00
Video Card EVGA XC3 GAMING GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB Video Card Purchased For $760.00
Video Card EVGA XC3 GAMING GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB Video Card Purchased For $760.00
Case Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case Purchased For $100.00
Power Supply MSI MEG Ai1300P PCIE5 1300 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply Purchased For $360.00
Custom PNY Nvidia NVLink Bridge 3-slot Purchased For $200.00
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total $3990.00
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-05-20 14:39 EDT-0400

I have 140mm intake fans, 120mm and 140mm exhaust fans, and power limits on the RTX 3090’s to reduce heat output.

It stays pretty quiet as long as I keep a limit on the GPU activity. Without the GPU’s, it is dead silent even at max CPU loads.

I do not keep my HDD storage in the same system, I keep it separate in another network attached system and just SMB / rsync data I need access to over to the workstation’s local SSD as needed.

So if you are wanting to build something, and care about it being quiet, my experience with builds like this has been pretty good. You can even get a larger case such as the full size Meshify 2 or the XL version for larger builds if needed, those have extra space for lots of HDD’s too if you want.

Worth noting that at idle, this system as shown pulls about 150W at the wall (~40W of that being the two 3090’s) with Eco Mode enabled on the 5950X. At full load on CPU (Eco Mode) + GPUs (no power limit), the most I have seen it pull is about 980W at the wall. With GPU power restrictions, it ends up running about 500W full load 24/7 for days at a time. So keep this in mind when comparing to the power draws of other systems you are considering. I have found that Eco Mode on the consumer Ryzen CPU’s is incredibly good, full package CPU power dropping down as low as ~20W or less on full idle, and I typically keep Eco Mode on which usually limits total power draw on the CPU to about 85W.

I run this thing at the described 500W power settings for days on end under my desk while working at home, and the noise is so low that its not an issue.

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1U servers will scream. 2U servers with proper settings will seem loud in a bedroom, but are quiet enough for an office environment… except when you’ve got several CPU cores maxed-out for an extended time.

A 4U or 5U server is basically a tower PCs laying sideways, but they still use noisy components, like tiny little hot-swap power supplies that would fit in a 1U server, because they’re not trying to keep things quiet.

If you really want quiet, best to build your own low-power system in a normal case with several large slow fans. You could go for entirely fanless systems, but that noise savings will be wasted if you need spinning hard drives for storage, and worse than a standard system if you have to improvise a small enclosure for them.

5400RPM drives will be a lot quieter than 7200RPM drives. But be sure your case is well designed, with fan blowing air directly over the drives.

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My 5900x based system is virtually silent.

You’re far less likely to get that with datacenter gear as they fit more, smaller fans both for resiliency against failure and to fit in smaller RU space. Having big empty space for big slow fans and radiators etc just isn’t a thing in server chassis. They’re designed to be packed tight into air conditioned racks in a room away from people.

Old servers belong in server racks far away. Buying them cheap secondhand you’re going to get lower clocked performance with older instruction set than buying something consumer but new and thinking about your build. You’re also going to get a bunch of proprietary cooling with many small high rpm noisy fans.

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Yes, I’m definitely going for the latest generation CPUs for this very reason. Nothing beats latest architectures.

I’ve researched consumer Ryzen. I’ve decided they are a no go. Their ECC support isn’t “full featured” with very patchy support. I just decided to go full Xeon.

I think my server will get away with as little as 8GB, although ZFS likes RAM and that’s the only thing that is pushing me to wanting up to 64GB. According to a website I read (search for " Things Nobody Told You About ZFS" and go to Nex7’s Blog) high RAM for ZFS can be have its own problems, so I thought 64GB might be good enough for me.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll expand my search for cases to things other than server grade. I think this is the biggest unknown for me at this point. I’ve got other servers planned for the future, so not sure whether I can avoid that server form factor. Not sure.

But Noctua has to obey the laws of physics. I find it hard to believe their offerings are noticeably quieter than cheaper fans? I’ll do some digging, maybe there’s a noticeable difference. I’m just surprised to hear that this might actually be real. I just imagine this kind of thing to be a marginal gain type thing.

My problem is future servers. I could probably use a consumer case for this build, but how is it going to work with future cases? I have 2 other servers planned for the near future and I just can’t imagine it being neat unless you go for server grade. Unless I find some nice modularish cases.

I’m building this thing principally for a business, hence I can’t live without ECC. I probably can live with cheaper drives than the top tier Exos such as your suggested Red Pro however!

Yer I’m tempted to get a smaller capacity server and put all my storage when the need arises in to a JOBOD. For the short term, I can live with a lower capacity reality.

Got it thanks!

Ironically the air conditioning part isn’t a problem, it’s just the noise of the fans that is a no go for me.

Definitely not going old. Just consume too much power.

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If you’re in NA you might want to consider the W680 platform but steer clear from the Gigabyte board which is a trainwreck. Asus WS W680-Ace non IPMI or IPMI version might be of interest instead and is very reasonably priced, ~380$ for the IPMI version and about 50$ less for non IPMI.

You might want to consider Toshiba Enterprise SATA series instead which makes it possible to utilize the built-in controller including the SlimSAS port without external hardware.

The only thing left of your list would be 10Gbit NICs but that shouldn’t be hard, just grab an Intel or Broadcom based NIC and you’re done.

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No, that’s the thing. You do NOT need two other servers, since it’s all being virtualised. With a 7900 you can just split your 24 thread server into, say, x8 / x4 / x4 / x4 / x4 and have four servers + one base OS. If your anticipated network traffic is high, then you do not host this at home.

If you have needs for more than 24 threads, then you should look at renting a rack space in a server hall somewhere. You do NOT want these on-premise unless you are building a self-sustaining doomsday bunker complex or something. But then that is a completely different story with different needs.

ECC is great for ensuring no data corruption what so ever. I’d say a RAM error where ECC can help occurs on more or less once for every 1000th Terabyte written. What would be the cost to deal with this vs the cost to invest in an ECC supporting server platform? Remember that we’re talking about a single byte changing every 1000th Terabyte.

Why would you want to skimp on those? Can you get 16 GB drives cheaper than $250 a piece? If so, go for it, but $250 is a pretty great deal for those drives. That was precisely the reason why I listed drives and system price separately, though. :slight_smile:

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You don’t really work with servers now do you? If you want shit to work, you’d want ECC period.
WD Red Pro disks are overrated and both Seagate Exos and Toshiba Enterprise are considered higher grade in general.

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Says who? What is the error rate? What is the risk? What is the reward? Or is it just another cargo cult saying? All I ever hear are circular reasoning. “Well, we required it twenty years ago so we must surely require it now!” and that’s just not good enough for me. That said, no, I do not do this professionally, I am more a home server kind of guy and for that, ECC is a nice to have but not essential in my experience. Certainly not worth splurging another $1500 on to get an EPYC motherboard and CPU that fits the bill.

Feel free to recommend whatever fits your price/perf, I just took the cheapest 16 GB Pro drives from a respectable brand I could find on PCPartPicker. :slight_smile:

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EU is fine with W680 supply. I checked on AsRock Rack, Supermicro and ASUS variants lately. I didn’t know of any Gigabyte W680 yet, but sounds like it isn’t worth the trouble.
If 10G copper is fine, W680 has on-board X710 NIC options. Can save a slot.

Yeah, you buy Ironwolf Pro NAS so can run multiple disks in one machine at the same time :wink:

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No, but W680 barely makes any sense in EU because of very high pricing. You might as well go for “enterprise” grade hardware. The Asus board alone is about twice as much in EU for example.

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Supermicro X13SAE-F random board and took first two offers.

Germany 439€ incl. tax = 439 * exchange rate / VAT = 439*1.08/1.19= $398
US Newegg = $519

Non-US countries include VAT in their retail price. So there always is a ~20% difference depending on what your countrys VAT is.

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It retails for ~500 EUR and above in .de (and rest of Europe)?
https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/202040697_-x13sae-f-supermicro.html
That’s very close to “not worth it” compared to Xeon/Threadripper boards

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Which is still less than US. Certainly not favoring any market. edit: I did miss out on the last letter of the SKU, 500 is correct, not 439. Damn 20-digit SKUs.

I check on French and Italian sites occasionally (to keep a comparison), but it’s mostly identical. Availability is more limited in smaller countries, but EU makes import/export much easier.

But you don’t just buy a board. If a 13600 does the job (for a 8GB + ZFS or general homeserver, it does) and you want to maintain a low power profile, you save a ton compared to similar Xeons. 12 core Sapphire Rapids isn’t cheap.
If you could use Core/Ryzen on Xeon/Threadripper boards, the argument is true. But market segmentation doesn’t allow this, so you can’t compare boards directly.

If 2-bit error reporting to the OS/IPMI is worth a $1000 upgrade, then that’s fine. If you need the lanes, memory channels and maybe AMX or QAT, things become way more obvious in favor of Xeons.

W680/B650 “Consumer-level server boards” have their important niche. Not everyone fits in there, but they’re popular in this community for good reasons. And a $500 non-Xeon/EPYC board isn’t anything overly expensive these days if I draw an arithmetic mean across consumer land.

I hate buying a $500 board, seeing a much better $600 server board I can’t afford the CPU for, as much as everyone else.

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for equal money and far less noise, consumer does. new server chassis are still noisy as fuck.

if you’re still set on server and silence build your own epyc.

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If you want high uptime, you want ECC memory. If you don’t have a problem with the occasion crash, and powering-down your server on occasion to run memtest-x86 is fine with you, then you can do without ECC. With ECC you don’t need any downtime, you can just check the log and see that nope, there’s no memory errors.

With high densities for DDR4 and DDR5, there is a higher risk of rowhammer causing memory errors, so it’s MORE important these days than “twenty years ago” not less.

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Ok, fair enough. How bad is it, then? Are we talking once a month, once a year, once every fifth year… With a DDR5 ECC system, how many errors does the ECC detect, and how likely is it that the flip switches something in the small 1 MB reserved kernel space to trigger a system reboot?

Again, is ECC a thing? Yes. Does it solve a problem, yes. Does it have value in a data hall, yes, definitely, for big companies ECC saves a lot of uptime.

With all this in mind, should you therefore spend $1000-$1500 more to make sure your home server, which is mostly for your family photos, lab network and a few game services, should have ECC so that the system doesn’t go down once every third month?

It’s all about the use case and cost / risk factor. Don’t just blindly assume you will require ECC for the home, just because that is what is in the IBM supercomputers. All else equal, ECC is better, but if it comes with a $1000 tax for an EPYC or Xeon CPU + board, then no thank you.

At the end of the day though, you decide what is worth it for you. If you want to make every server at home $1000 more expensive, it is your money, your time, and your setup. I can only advice and help you take things into consideration, in the end you do you. As it should be. :slight_smile:

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