Noob to end all Noobs: MB and CPU Help

[BankArsonist]

So as the title states I am a total noob so be gentle.

Want to build a home NAS. Really I want it to back up photos and videos (mostly of my son, unloseable), archive a bunch of CDs and DVD I have (and hopefully play them in the house), and ideally back up the two PCs. I only have only TV in my house (probably buy another one in the next couple of years) so transcoding would be 2 streams at most.

I saw this on another thread and I thought it was good to sumarize my thoughts:

1. Must have
   Other than storage, can't think of anything
2. Should have
   Plex jail (is there something else I should be looking at?)
   Ability to transcode (I have a kodi box with libreelec, will I need transcoding on the NAS? Not sure how that works)
3. Nice to have
   Quiet (Will probably be out in the open)
   Hot swappable
4. Don't care to have
   Lots of drives/expandability. I'm probably going to do 6x6TB (Z2) + 2 SSDs for boot (mirrored) and I don't think I will need to upgrade for years to come.
   10GB LAN
   VMs

So I am looking at these 4 mother boards:
X11SSM: https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813183013&ignorebbr=1
X11SSL: https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182980
P11C-L: https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813119184&ignorebbr=1
X11SCL: https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813183671&ignorebbr=1

I'm leaning towards the P11C-L or the X11SCL because of the C242 chipset. Is there a reason the Asus boards aren't recomended? The prices are about the same for all of these. The X11SCL is actually 100 cheaper than the X11SSM (which is also out of stock). I'm in canada and would prefer to buy new, as opposed to digging on EBAY.

For CPU I'm leaning towards the Pentium Gold G5500. With a passmark of around 5000 it should handle two 1080p transcoded streams. Maybe an i3-8100 but its almost twice the price. And the G5500 is pretty highly rated. If i went with the X11SSM or L I would need recomendations on what CPU fits with my use case.

Or I've seen deals for the Dell T30 Lately for 599CAD. If I buy that I still have to buy ECC RAM, and drives which would negate the convience of buying it, would it not? Or is this something I should seriously pursue?

So what do you think? Any thoughts?

Other Questions I have:
- Will I be able to save pictures and videos directly from my phone to the NAS (main instrument in documenting the little one)?
- I assume with all the boards other than the X11SSM I'll have to use an HBA? I've been trying to read up on it, but I still don't understand how that works or what it is. Would one work with the other board choices?
- Following the 321 method, if I bought a NAS appliance as the back up to this server, just for convienece, would that work? For my use case, would it be better/easier for me to just buy two NAS appliances?
- I know the answer but can I conect my nas to my home network via Wifi? My router is in a high traffic area and prefer to have it out of the way. Or should I just pay to get my ISP to move it?

I figure that once I lock down the MB and CPU, the rest will easily fall into place. As you can see I'm really fresh and have a million questions after all of the confusing resources. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[jgreco]

Is there a reason the Asus boards aren't recomended?

Probably because it isn't true. I actually list ASUS before Supermicro in the original hardware guide.

But the problem with ASUS is that they manufacture server stuff on the side, so they have a small number of offerings that only fit a few needs, and then they don't really have the breadth of accessories such as the selection of chassis, etc., that Supermicro has.

Supermicro never expected anyone to put an X10SDV-TP8F into a SC216A-R920LPB along with a RAID card to make a fantastic 2U low power converged hypervisor and storage platform. But you can do it, easily, and some of us have.

If you have a technical problem with ESXi and contact ASUS support, they may well be going "E"... "S"... "wha...!?" whereas Supermicro knows what that is.

So anyways I leave the rest of this to someone else with more time. I just popped in for that one little bit.

 

[BankArsonist]

Anyone else?

 

[jgreco]

I did actually re-read this later but didn't have much information to offer on your board choice issues.

An HBA is basically just SAS ports. We have a preferred method for attaching drives because your average PC hardware tends to be a little trash and getting a SATA add-on card from China Shenzhen Back Alley Co can be rather more miss than hit, just like using a board with Realtek ethernets can create headaches. The LSI 9211-8i has proven itself with BILLIONS of trouble-free hours of runtime under FreeNAS, at least when you do it the right way.

For "everything" you need to know about HBA's and SAS expansion, see

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/dont-be-afraid-to-be-sas-sy.48/

 

[BankArsonist]

I did actually re-read this later but didn't have much information to offer on your board choice issues.

An HBA is basically just SAS ports. We have a preferred method for attaching drives because your average PC hardware tends to be a little trash and getting a SATA add-on card from China Shenzhen Back Alley Co can be rather more miss than hit, just like using a board with Realtek ethernets can create headaches. The LSI 9211-8i has proven itself with BILLIONS of trouble-free hours of runtime under FreeNAS, at least when you do it the right way.

For "everything" you need to know about HBA's and SAS expansion, see

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/don't-be-afraid-to-be-sas-sy.48/

That makes sense. I will read up on that.

Any one want to give an opinion on the Motherboards and CPUs?

 

[Yorick]

> I'm leaning towards the P11C-L or the X11SCL because of the C242 chipset.

For Coffee Lake. Sure, nothing wrong with that. There are a lot of C236 / Kaby Lake|Skylake builds out there, I think mostly because of what is available in the market place. If you can get your components at a decent price, go for it.

> For CPU I'm leaning towards the Pentium Gold G5500. With a passmark of around 5000 it should handle two 1080p transcoded streams.

Yup, I too expect it will.

> Maybe an i3-8100 but its almost twice the price.

Interesting. Hereabouts the i3-8100 is a little lower-priced than the G5500. That'll depend on availability.

Both have GPUs, which may help with transcode down the line as the FreeNAS / Plex combo learns how to use hw acceleration for transcode.

> Or I've seen deals for the Dell T30 Lately for 599CAD.

It's hard to beat those deals for economy. It's a larger case, and you lose some flexibility - room for 4 drives, not 8 - but if money is at a premium, that's a great choice. Going with 4 drives means some tradeoffs of redundancy vs available storage. Personally, I'd still choose to spend more and build inside a case that can hold 8 drives, but that may not fit you.

You may not need an HBA. That X11SCL has 6 SATA ports on-board, and one M.2. You can boot off the M.2 (keep a config backup off-unit), and if you desire, mirror your boot to a USB 2 (not 3!) Sandisk stick for good measure. That M.2 is PCIe, judging by the SM site, so something like this would work well: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820236394 . M.2 SATA wouldn't work. UEFI boot becomes a must. I have that setup going in an X11SSH and it works great.

 

[Chris Moore]

Is new hardware a requirement or are you willing to consider used gear?

 

[BankArsonist]

> Or I've seen deals for the Dell T30 Lately for 599CAD.

It's hard to beat those deals for economy. It's a larger case, and you lose some flexibility - room for 4 drives, not 8 - but if money is at a premium, that's a great choice. Going with 4 drives means some tradeoffs of redundancy vs available storage. Personally, I'd still choose to spend more and build inside a case that can hold 8 drives, but that may not fit you.

You may not need an HBA. That X11SCL has 6 SATA ports on-board, and one M.2. You can boot off the M.2 (keep a config backup off-unit), and if you desire, mirror your boot to a USB 2 (not 3!) Sandisk stick for good measure. That M.2 is PCIe, judging by the SM site, so something like this would work well: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820236394 . M.2 SATA wouldn't work. UEFI boot becomes a must. I have that setup going in an X11SSH and it works great.

With respect to the T30. Wouldn't I need to buy new Ram (ECC) and the drives, and I'm assuming it doesn't have IPMI. So doesn't that defeat the price savings?

 

[BankArsonist]

Is new hardware a requirement or are you willing to consider used gear?

Its not a requirement. However I live in Canada so availability is a problem. It would be better if I could find it at Newegg or another place I know will ship to me.
I'll take any and all suggestions, as long as they come in under the price of the current components which is ~$325-350USD

 

[Chris Moore]

I'll take any and all suggestions, as long as they come in under the price of the current components which is ~$325-350USD

What components are you counting in that total?

You might want to look at these:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/

 

[BankArsonist]

What components are you counting in that total?

You might want to look at these:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community...anges-to-upgrade-as-high-as-512gb-of-ram.110/

Thats just Motherboard and CPU (X11SCL or P11C-L + G5500/5600 or i3-8100)