My server dun blew up. It started having strange freezes around a week ago and went downhill from there. I’ve since found three separate hardware issues (only one of which I knew about in advance) in my troubleshooting.
I’m done with this hardware, it is time for a hardware refresh.
Region: Denmark. My pricing on PCP will be in kroner, but I’ll probably reference things in dollars because I’m American and still think in dollars.
Budget: Sub-1000 USD / 6500kr, but ideally much lower than that. Used parts are perfectly fine with me.
Parts being reused: case, storage (known-good), PSU (brand new), potentially RAM (passed testing).
Use cases: Home server, home NAS, home lab. The NAS part is generally just for bulk storage. I run a handful of VMs and LXC containers.
In short, I haven’t built an Intel-based system in a long while and I’m a bit iffy on exact part selection. Going Intel over AMD makes sense here given the Jellyfin situation, just like going with AMD before made sense given that I was building the server from old cast-off hardware from my gaming box.
My current non-storage home server needs fits on my backup host, a R5 2400GE-based miniPC. When my lab stuff is running it comes close to maxing it out, but that’s not exactly hard.
I have a few questions:
Does LGA1700 make sense as a platform to aim at in 2025? I had looked at older stuff, but since I’m trying to fill an existing niche (mATX case, 8 SATA bays) it ended up more expensive than my PCPartPicker build when I looked. As for newer, an Ultra 245K build looked to be nearly maxing out my budget (partially because I can’t reuse my RAM). I don’t know if there is enough of a benefit there to justify spending almost three times as much money; what do you all think?
Which LGA1700 CPU? I basically just searched for the cheapest CPU that actually had an iGPU and wasn’t an i3 or Pentium on eBay. I do know that the xx500 and up CPUs have better iGPUs, but does that really matter for low usage Jellyfin? Is the jump up to an i7 actually worth it? What about the issues Intel was having with the i7s and i9s - are those mostly resolved at this point?
Does it make more sense to go with a motherboard that already has enough SATA ports or just get another SATA/SAS controller? The motherboard in my build has eight SATA ports, which makes it pretty ideal for my 8-bay NAS, but I don’t really know much about it beyond just reading its specs. At the same time, I really don’t want to go with some LSI HBA again like what I had before. SATA ports are a dying breed on consumer motherboards, so outside of some AliExpress special there are slim pickings; would it be better (more power efficient / more stable) to go with some SATA controller over a specialized motherboard?
Speaking of AliExpress, Would it make more sense to go with one of those mobile CPU based motherboards? Something like this one from Erying? Admittedly, I’d be looking at needing DDR5 RAM again for this specific one, but I’m sure I could find a similar DDR4 board if I looked hard enough. Also, I’m eating a tariff by buying outside of the EU, so the pricing might be a bit prohibitive.
Finally, Am I a fool for trying to keep my NAS and home server together? Originally, I kept my storage separate from my VM host, only merging them together when I tried to save on power by only having one motherboard taking up all of my power overhead. It definitely uses less power overall, but maybe I’m just over-complicating things by needing both a reasonable performing server and something that’ll take my spinning rust as well. Any thoughts on the one vs. two box situation?
This would be venturing unrealistic, wrt to the form factor [8x SATA]
Basically all 660/760s, comprise of 4x SATA [whether 2x stacks or all individuals]
Only means, to break past 4x SATA, is going for an 690/790 board, which is double+ RRP
IF the 8x SATA is necessary- you may wanna look at some PCIe adapter / HUB
Skip all the lesser skus [less power sure, but with less processing power]
i3 12100, will have 24EU iGPU
i5 12500(+), will have 32EU iGPU [each successive tier, having a mild Hz boost bump]
i7+, main hype piece, would be the addition of e-cores… Abit higher power draws
The one in my PCPartPicker link is a B760 board that has eight SATA ports. It costs 755kr / 120 USD, which doesn’t seem too far above the other options on motherboards given the SATA ports?
Not really in my opinion, but not because it’s a bad platform but it’s because seems excessive for your needs.
I’m also of the opinion that computing and storage should be decoupled for better efficiency and because it allows you to not run a virtualized NAS (I wouldn’t suggest using TrueNAS as a base for an home lab. It’s either Proxmox or Unraid for that use case).
A NAS doesn’t need too much computing power most of the time, especially if you’re not exceeding 10Gbit LAN speeds.
As GoldenAngel suggested the i3 12100 and the i5 12500 are great choices for your use case.
Not really. I don’t think there are many name brand motherboard that max out the 8 SATA ports the LGA1700 platforms allows. Getting an additional controller is the way to go to get more flexibility.
They can be hit or miss. Even if lots of people use them I won’t trust them. A friend bought an N100 based one and has no fan control whatsoever on it and used a shitty JMB585 SATA controller without ASPM to get more SATA ports. Go for a name brand like Asus, AsRock, MSI or Gigabyte.
A fool, no. It’s just a matter of personal experience with these setups. As I said I think there’s more reliabilty in a split setup rather than a combined one. A NAS requires not too much power to run and manufacturers like Synology have proven it time and time again with their machines.
My experience with an N100 SSD based NAS has been great. Idles at really low power and it’s fast for anything I could ever need to do with it.
At the same time lots of people run TrueNAS virtualized on Proxmox and have never had issues.
Considering your priorities:
I’d go with two machines that you can scale indipendently from one another.
Oh, I’m not virtualizing the NAS anymore. I used to run TrueNAS Core in a VM because I was using a form of encryption that was only supported on that version of TrueNAS. Once I was able to back up and restore from my backup NAS (which is just running an N100) I just created the zpool manually on the Proxmox box to simplify things; I don’t really make configuration changes to my NAS often, so I just do it manually.
Oh absolutely. My backup NAS is using an N100. My previous NAS was running a C2750 (and I replaced it for reasons other than performance ones); I’m not exactly needing much power on the NAS side of things.
The host side of things is what needs the CPU (and iGPU, I suppose) power.
Biostar and ASRock do, but ASRock motherboards seem to just not exist here in Denmark for some reason. That’s the reason for the Biostar motherboard in my pcpartpicker selection (which I just now noticed unlinked the motherboard from the shopping site)
My only issues when I was doing that were the fact that hard drive spindown seemed to not be all that reliable and it was significantly slower (slower than my old C2750 setup, weirdly enough). Not that the speed mattered too much, so it was really just spindown to save on power.
But… yeah, I’m starting to think my best plan might be to split my setups back up again, even though that means buying more RAM. Bleh. At least I can keep using the miniPC for the compute power for the time being and see if I can find something on the Intel side of the fence later on.
My nas runs on a 12400 and it uses the gpu for plex and NVR recording. My board is the asrock steel legend which has 6 ports, I would avoid it! because asrock did not properly configure power saving modes so i had to turn off aspm for my harddrives, the difference isn’t big (only 1/2W) but it’s just so lazy. It runs at about 35W idle with 3 harddrives and 2 ssd’s with no spindown.
I also have a seperate server for running applications that has a 13400 cpu and a small form factor.
If i had to do it again i would just run a single server, Something like proxmox with zfs so that all the applications also run securely on it. and virtualize something that can do the nas filesharing. More memory is cheaper than a whole extra system that uses power. The extra advantage is that transfers between the nas and any application are quick. (right now i have issues with file transfers )
The new intel platform is not as efficient (especially idle) as the lga1700 i5 non-k’s (and i3’s) so i would stick to that.
Sure, maintaining a NAS manually instead of relying on a full operating system to work for you is also a great way to, on some aspects, simplify the whole setup. I didn’t suggest that because I don’t have experience in it and I treated my NAS more as an appliace rather than a full on piece of tech (mostly because I tend to screw around with stuff a lot and data it’s irreplaceable).
From what I saw online Biostar sists in the middle between badly engineered chinese parts and major manufacturers. Since you’d be locked in a single vendor I think a SATA controller will allow you to more freely choose what board to get based on other requirements.
If you’re running mechanical HDDs and below 10Gbit LAN an ASM1166 based controller will be a cheap, reliable and power efficient way to get more SATA ports (proper ASPM support through firmware updates and supports 6 SATA ports with no port multiplier on board).
There are commands to figure out what processes are accessing the drives and preventing them from spinning down, if you’re still having issues with that. I think that spinning down mechanical drives is key to make them last longer, on top of saving power.
If you get DDR4 it’s super cheap and maybe you can find someone on the forum that’s selling kits for a really good price. Even basic DDR5 kits (4800MHz to 5600MHz, no XMP, no ECC) are pretty affordable and would be my choice since stability is key and ECC can be skipped for substantial savings without excessively increasing your risk of losing data, in my opinion.
One point for Intel is power management: they have better support for lower C-states and it’s easier to get those processors to idle low. Just using powertop --auto-tune usually gets you there immediately. If that’s not enough it’s usually an ASPM problem with other devices. With AMD can be hit or miss and it could lead you to chase “issues” down rabbit holes.
