12-bay Rackmount Build Suggestions

[Crusher21]

Hi all,

I'm planning a 12-bay TrueNAS build, my first build. I'd prefer rackmount, but I really would rather not buy used enterprise equipment. Yes, I understand that it is more reliable, but it will always be at least 5 years old and very power hungry. Even though I'll end up spending more on consumer-grade hardware, the cost difference should be made up by electricity savings after a few years of use. That's my thinking at least.

Looking at the SilverStone Technology 2U 12-Bay chassis for the case ($463), planning to use a Z490 motherboard and a 10700k.

Before I go too far, I'd like to get feedback on my design choices. Am I being foolish?

I'm not necessarily opposed to a prebuilt tower either, assuming it can fit 12 drives, if it would yield decent savings. However, I haven't seen any options going this route.

 

[jgreco]

I'm planning a 12-bay TrueNAS build, my first build. I'd prefer rackmount, but I really would rather not buy used enterprise equipment. Yes, I understand that it is more reliable, but it will always be at least 5 years old and very power hungry. Even though I'll end up spending more on consumer-grade hardware, the cost difference should be made up by electricity savings after a few years of use. That's my thinking at least.

That's a really frickin' weird thing to think. Supermicro makes some of the best PSU's around, Platinum and Titanium rated. But whatever.

"Power hungry" is an option if you buy power hungry devices like massive CPU's, 7200 RPM HDD's, unnecessary SAS expanders, etc. When you buy those low-cost specials on eBay, usually those are gear that someone rotated out of a data center because the power efficiency per watt was no longer justifiable, so I know where your errant thinking comes from, but that's really just a matter of "you get what you pay for."

You can totally do a high quality Supermicro chassis with a bunch of low power components. It's just that you have to be a lot pickier about the parts.

 

[Crusher21]

That's a really frickin' weird thing to think. Supermicro makes some of the best PSU's around, Platinum and Titanium rated. But whatever.

"Power hungry" is an option if you buy power hungry devices like massive CPU's, 7200 RPM HDD's, unnecessary SAS expanders, etc. When you buy those low-cost specials on eBay, usually those are gear that someone rotated out of a data center because the power efficiency per watt was no longer justifiable, so I know where your errant thinking comes from, but that's really just a matter of "you get what you pay for."

You can totally do a high quality Supermicro chassis with a bunch of low power components. It's just that you have to be a lot pickier about the parts.

I appreciate the honesty, I had a feeling I was going wrong somewhere in my thinking.

To be clear, I can purchase enterprise-grade components, like a Xeon processor, brand new (or slightly used) that are only a year or two old for my build? Is this what you are recommending?

I don't have any experience with this kind of hardware, any specific recommendations would be appreciated. I don't necessarily have a budget, but I'd prefer no more than $800 (I already have the drives).

 

[jgreco]

Historically, Xeon parts had comparable parts in the consumer lineup, with the Xeon part mainly differing by small things like ECC support.

So if you purchased something like a Supermicro X9SCL with Xeon E3-1230v2, there was a consumer part that lined up closely, and there were similar consumer/gamer boards, except that the Xeon would have things like ECC and the Supermicro server board would have stuff like true Intel dual ethernet chipsets rather than a single gimpy Realtek ethernet. Prices, performance, power, all those things would be within a stone's throw for sake of comparison.

Much server gear that gets rotated out of data center use tends to be built on dual CPU mainboards, which by their very nature do eat more power.

A dual platinum PSU takes more power than a single, so if you are really focused on power utilization, you can always pull one module and reduce usage, which gives you a spare PSU readily available.

Fans are a big power suck. As frequently explained, a 2U 12 bay chassis leaves almost no room for airflow; it needs to be pulled through the millimeter-wide spaces between the drives, trays, and chassis. Many cheap "consumer" chassis like the Norcos do not do a good job of this. The enterprise stuff like Supermicro/HP/Dell use big mongo beefy industrial fans and manage the trick through pure brute force. Changing the fans out for "quiet ones" or "low power ones" in a fully populated chassis is a bad idea, because you change your chassis into an EZ-Bake oven. However, there are tricks you can use to make this work out if needed. The best of these is to buy a 4U 24 bay chassis and only fill every other row. Then you can definitely put "quiet" fans in.

The best deals to be had on eBay are from the guys who rip apart data center stuff and parts it up. This gear is typically no less than 3 years old, often five to ten. This may not go well because a lot of the time, those who bought the gear were just buying the biggest things practical to solve a problem. You will tend to find a lot of it being big hot heavy gear. So it sells for cheap, because it isn't that practical to run it anymore.

However, you can often find good deals on bare chassis, or even a chassis plus mainboard where you treat the mainboard as disposable.

All that having been said, Silverstone makes some reasonably nice stuff. Don't let me stop you from building a nice pick-yer-own just because I decided to defend Supermicro; I am not a fanboi of any particular manufacturer. I've been using their SDP11 in a stacked configuration inside of some of our 2U servers in order to provide 8x SATA M.2 in the back of the PCIe card area. We had earlier been using a different module for the same trick, but the M.2 slots were not evenly placed and made heatsinking difficult. The Silverstone stuff looked like it was designed by someone who actually used the stuff.

 

[Crusher21]

Historically, Xeon parts had comparable parts in the consumer lineup, with the Xeon part mainly differing by small things like ECC support.

So if you purchased something like a Supermicro X9SCL with Xeon E3-1230v2, there was a consumer part that lined up closely, and there were similar consumer/gamer boards, except that the Xeon would have things like ECC and the Supermicro server board would have stuff like true Intel dual ethernet chipsets rather than a single gimpy Realtek ethernet. Prices, performance, power, all those things would be within a stone's throw for sake of comparison.

Much server gear that gets rotated out of data center use tends to be built on dual CPU mainboards, which by their very nature do eat more power.

A dual platinum PSU takes more power than a single, so if you are really focused on power utilization, you can always pull one module and reduce usage, which gives you a spare PSU readily available.

Fans are a big power suck. As frequently explained, a 2U 12 bay chassis leaves almost no room for airflow; it needs to be pulled through the millimeter-wide spaces between the drives, trays, and chassis. Many cheap "consumer" chassis like the Norcos do not do a good job of this. The enterprise stuff like Supermicro/HP/Dell use big mongo beefy industrial fans and manage the trick through pure brute force. Changing the fans out for "quiet ones" or "low power ones" in a fully populated chassis is a bad idea, because you change your chassis into an EZ-Bake oven. However, there are tricks you can use to make this work out if needed. The best of these is to buy a 4U 24 bay chassis and only fill every other row. Then you can definitely put "quiet" fans in.

The best deals to be had on eBay are from the guys who rip apart data center stuff and parts it up. This gear is typically no less than 3 years old, often five to ten. This may not go well because a lot of the time, those who bought the gear were just buying the biggest things practical to solve a problem. You will tend to find a lot of it being big hot heavy gear. So it sells for cheap, because it isn't that practical to run it anymore.

However, you can often find good deals on bare chassis, or even a chassis plus mainboard where you treat the mainboard as disposable.

All that having been said, Silverstone makes some reasonably nice stuff. Don't let me stop you from building a nice pick-yer-own just because I decided to defend Supermicro; I am not a fanboi of any particular manufacturer. I've been using their SDP11 in a stacked configuration inside of some of our 2U servers in order to provide 8x SATA M.2 in the back of the PCIe card area. We had earlier been using a different module for the same trick, but the M.2 slots were not evenly placed and made heatsinking difficult. The Silverstone stuff looked like it was designed by someone who actually used the stuff.

I see what you're saying. 4U 24 bay sounds like the way to go. I can't have my fans being too noisy, at the moment my rack is in the same room as my home theater system.

Great explanation on the ebay stuff. Would you recommend even looking for a prebuilt used setup, or is DIY really the best route?

Is $800 reasonable for a system that I expect to run stable for 8 years?

Exactly how important is ECC memory for a TrueNAS build?