Rebuilding my Unraid Server

Over the past several months I have come to realize that my Unraid server I have been running in some form or another since 2017 is becoming very unstable. Since it hosts the majority of my services currently (learning docker swarm/kubernetes and moving things to Proxmox server/s) I want to do a bit of a hardware rebuild.

Current Hardware/specs:

  • Chassis: SuperMicro CSE846 with all 24 bays populated BPN-SAS846A Backplane
  • 240TB Usable with dual parity and 4x Samsung 870 EVO 2TB drives for cache.
  • Ryzen 7 1800x
  • 64GB DDR4
  • HP 487738-001 SAS Expander
  • LSI SAS2308
  • Nvidia Quadro P2000
  • Dual SFP+ 10GB Intel NIC

My requirements are relatively simple.

  • Budget: ~$1000 US
  • Server grade motherboard with IPMI
  • ECC RAM
  • An HBA I don’t need an expander for
  • Enough PCIe slots & lanes for the cards listed above (minus the expander)
  • A nice to have but not a requirement would be slots/lanes for a PCIe card I can add up to 4 M.2 NVME drives for the cache. I know that most of these cards require bifurcation and I am not sure what motherboards support that in the server space.

As you can tell, I am in the early stages of planning but am looking for recommendations from you fine folks on boards, processors, and HBA’s.

Thanks in advance!

I think it will be difficult or impossible to source materials within that price point new on a DDR5 platform, so you’re likely going to have to source used for some/all components. 64GB of ECC DDR5 alone can be over $350.

If you really need ECC, economy of value lies with DDR4. Specifically I chose Registered ECC DDR4 because the used market actually exists for it. I got 256GB of RDIMM DDR4 3200 for $381 shipped. If you’re curious about what my specs are, my post on that is here: FrenziedManbeast's HomeLab

If you’re a little flexible on price but insist on new, check out this platform and see if it has enough Lanes and I/O for your needs: https://www.newegg.com/asrock-rack-b650d4u-supports-amd-ryzen-7000-series-processors/p/N82E16813140100

Definitely don’t need new components. I was thinking DDR4 with a 10 core xeon silver and an eBay supermicro board but was also looking at some of the older EPYC CPU’s as well.