Hi all,
I would like some help/feedback on an upcoming build I’m trying to piece together. A similar build here but not quite the same components nor usage.
Usage :
plex for movies, tv shows and store all my data in general + regular backups ofmy PC & smartphone
Goals :
small form factor in a good case => Node 304
data integrity for as long as possible => RaidZ2 + ECC memory
With these two criteria, the choice of motherboards got very small. In my country (France), it seems that the only board I could buy online is an ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T. I don’t mind the price, especially for such incredible specs (IPMI, 10GB Ethernet, etc.)
Memory : is 16GB enough or should I go 32 ? I know that ZFS eats a lot of RAM and I want my NAS to be future-proof if I ever need a VM someday or something alike. Also, I suppose that the more RAM, the more writing cache.
HBA : in a video from Gamers Nexus, Wendell said that he had a bad experience with on-board sata ports on an ASRock Rack X470D4U2-2T and thus he recommended to add a HBA card in PCI-e. On the contrary, I read here that integrated Intel and AMD HBA’s are fine. Should I go for a dedicated HBA card like a LSI SAS9211-8I or plug all 6 drives to the two OCulink ports ?
Caching : since there might be a NVME port on the motherboard, should I use it for caching or rely more on RAM ? What other use of the NVME drive could I have ?
CPU Cooler : is apparently a pain in the butt because of the pre-installed backplate with Intel 1156-style mounting holes on a AM4 socket. Workarounds are proposed here, but I’m kinda scared of force-threading M3 screws or tearing off the plate on a 445€ mobo.
I would appreciate any feedback about anything stated above, especially the doubts. Thank you !
PS: you might also see the same post in a couple other forums. Please understand I’m not spamming, but just trying to get a maximum of feedback ^^’
For basic server use 16 GB is fine. For running VMs more is always better. But only you can decide.
I have never had problems with on-board SATA controllers. So I would start with that and add an HBA if you need one.
On my latest NAS build I used the M.2 NVMe slot for my Fedora OS boot drive. The configuration is backed up on the RAID drives so I don’t think it needs redundancy. A separate boot drive makes array maintenance so much easier.
You could also use it for caching. I have not felt the need for caching but I put my database type things on a RAID-1 SSD separate from my HDDs because the HDDs are rather slow at sync-write (full flush, fsync, DB commit).
Ok for the memory, I may go for 32GB just to be future-proof.
For the NVME, as I may choose ZFS (with freenas), I don’t think caching will be required. If I ended up using unraid, then I would use nvme caching.
Not really, but I’m kinda married to its form factor… I looked for another case of similar size and couldn’t find one beside the Silverstone DS380 but it has horrible airflow
Case - For a different case recommendation, may I propose the U-NAS NSC-810 with 8 hot-swappable 3.5" drives?
Memory - A good rule of thumb is 1GB per TB of storage. With 8x4TB that would mean 32GB is the way to go. If you can 3000 MHz is recommended, but anything down to 2133MHz should work in your use case.
NVMe - just buy a cheap 64 GB boot drive. Heck, even a 16 GB Intel Optane would do the job here. It makes the job so much easier when it comes to drive management.
Cooling - I think Noctua NH-l9i should be compatible out of the box, could be wrong. Otherwise, I’m pretty confident LGA 115x coolers use M3 screws, but I have not found any confirmation of this.
HBA - I would get one if it turns out you need one. Odds are pretty big you’ll be fine with stock ports, but nothing prevents you from buying a proper PCIe add-in card after you’ve built everything.
Case: Oh yeah good find for the U-NAS NSC-810, it’s even smaller than the Node 304 and accommodates for two more drives. However, I’m bit worried about the noise level of a flex PSU…
NVMe: 16GB optane to store the OS ? Isn’t that overkill compared to a regular SSD ?
Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of the 810 layout. No surprise they changed it for the 810A – makes way more sense to me.
I ordered the Node 304, which was a lot cheaper too.
