Certified 1U from ix?

[marcevan]

Just asked for a quote for certified 1U but I'd be bringing my own 6 3.5 HDDs and USB stick to the party. Not sure if they'll go for that as they want to typically do their own full build.

Hoping I can just get this going on a 1U as my existing rig is starting to shut down 1x a day with nothing to show in /data/crash.

Rather than trying to figure out if issue is HDDs, mobo, power, RAM on an aging system, figured ask the team for a 1U build. I believe if they do and it's in my price range, I can pop in my 6 disks, my USB and then only have to re-static the IP of it.

 

[Chris Moore]

Just asked for a quote for certified 1U but I'd be bringing my own 6 3.5 HDDs and USB stick to the party. Not sure if they'll go for that as they want to typically do their own full build.

How are you going to connect six hard drives to a 1U server chassis? It only has four hard drive bays. I would never suggest a 1U chassis. No room for expansion. The 2U chassis has 12 bays, but I prefer a 4U chassis because they are usually much quieter.
They don't have a problem selling a system without drives. I got a quote on one from them earlier this year.
It is the TrueNAS systems where they want to include the drives, but that is because they want to pre-configure it as much as possible to give you the best service.

 

[marcevan]

Umm..on the website, 1U has:

4 Bay 2.5”/3.5” or 8 Bay 2.5” SATA/HDD optional Hybrid

 

[Chris Moore]

I'd be bringing my own 6 3.5 HDDs

You said that you had six drives that you wanted to use.

Umm..on the website, 1U has:

4 Bay 2.5”/3.5” or 8 Bay 2.5” SATA/HDD optional Hybrid

The 1U chassis only has 8 bays IF they are 2.5" bays.

Am I missing something? A 3.5" drive does not fit in a 2.5" bay. It isn't my first rodeo.

 

[marcevan]

That wasn't shown...ok, off to 2U land!

 

[Chris Moore]

That wasn't shown...ok, off to 2U land!

Unless you want a tower system like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CKN76OW/ref=psdc_13436301_t2_B00EQJ1BTU

 

[marcevan]

I'm specifically looking for rack-mountable solution as my current chassis pre-dated my rack ownership and given the daily issues I'm having (server turns off; no log msgs; no /data/crashes entries) it's time to swap out everything but the drives and USB stick.

 

[Chris Moore]

and USB stick.

You might want to move the boot drive to SSD. I recently found out how much more responsive that makes the system and was shocked. I am working toward that myself.

This is a buy list I put together for someone else recently. You might want to take a look at it and see if it is interesting to you:

Some assembly required...

CASE: Supermicro 24 Bay Chassis SAS846TQ Server 4U - - US $429.99 + $99.99 Standard Shipping
https://www.ebay.com/itm/202415880869

POWER: Corsair-Certified-CS-M-Series-CS650M-650W-80-Plus-Gold-Active-PFC-Modular-Power - - US $64.99
https://www.ebay.com/itm/382130407495

These are older components, but still very powerful.
I use similar components in both my 48 bay primary NAS and in my 24 bay backup NAS that runs ESXi with FreeNAS in a VM.

This one comes with a CPU and fan, but it is really slow, so probably want to replace it:

System Board: Supermicro X9SRL-F Motherboard LGA2011 System Board w/Intel E5-2650L 0 @ 1.80GHz - - US $174.99
https://www.ebay.com/itm/132762499937

Nothing included with this one, so the price is lower, but an option:

Supermicro X9SRL-F Motherboard Socket LGA2011 System Board w/ I/O Shield - - US $161.49
https://www.ebay.com/itm/401593992194

Memory: SAMSUNG 16GB PC3L-12800R DDR3-1600 ECC Registered 1.35V RDIMM - - US $44.95
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302606459277

Note: You could go for the 32GB memory modules, but they are more than twice the price.

If the board above doesn't come with a cooler, or you want a better one, I use this model on two of my systems.
It is only slightly louder than the Noctua cooler I have on my wife's desktop PC.

CPU Fan: Dynatron R27 Side Fan CPU Cooler 3U for Intel Socket LGA2011 (Narrow ILM) - - US $39.59
https://www.ebay.com/itm/401284811045

The CPU that comes in the board above is pretty low speed, so you might find that you need a better one.
You have a lot of options for CPUs to go in this board, but I recently bought one of these for myself:

PassMark score of 13073... If you are wondering... This is the model I use for the NAS I run Plex in.

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 2.6GHz 8 Core 20MB 8GT/s SR1A8 LGA2011 ( Ivy Bridge ) Processor - - US $89.97
https://www.ebay.com/itm/142937685210

Only it was $30 more when I bought it... It works great. Plenty of resources for all the things I am doing.

If you want more, you can get a 10 core model like this:

Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 Ten Core 2.8GHz 25MB CPU PROCESSOR LGA2011 SR1A6 - - Price: US $189.99
PassMark score of 15796... If you are wondering...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/192637399687

For the drive controller, I would suggest a SAS controller, just to get all the drives on a single controller. It works better that way. One SAS controller like this can run up to 256 drives by use of expander controllers. We can talk more about that when you need more drives but this will get you to eight drives to start.

Drive Controller: SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9207-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID - - US $69.55
https://www.ebay.com/itm/162862201664

Drive Cables: Mini SAS to 4-SATA SFF-8087 Multi-Lane Forward Breakout Internal Cable - - US $12.99
https://www.ebay.com/itm/371681252206

I would suggest one of these SSDs for the boot drive.
These are used data-center drives, but as a boot drive in FreeNAS, it should last as long as the server, if not longer:

Boot drive: Intel SSD DC S3500 Series 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s, 20nm, MLC 80GB - - US $29.99
https://www.ebay.com/itm/273102509397

Thermal Compound: Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste Grease Conductive Compound for CPU/GPU - US $6.95
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302624513215

Just rough math in my head, I think that is all around $1100.... Still, you might need some odd bits, and hard drives, but it should be simple to get there from here and this should save you a buck or two vs buying new and still do the job for years to come.

PS. If you want to buy the expanders cards now, this is the product I am using:

SAS Expander: IBM (46m0997) ServeRAID Expansion Adapter 16-port SAS Expander - - US $15.88
https://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-46m0997-ServeRAID-Expansion-Adapter-16-port-SAS-Expander/192326557905

I have two of those and run 12 drives from each. The cable to connect between the SAS expander and the SAS controller is this type:

SAS interconnect: Mini SAS SFF-8087 to Mini SAS SFF-8087 - - US $3.49
https://www.ebay.com/itm/183129085895

This gives you room to grow for the next three to six years.

 

[marcevan]

Great list and thanks for being a great resource.

Oddly, I have an Intel SSD 530 series (240GB) 6GB/s so that will become my boot but not until I switch over to new hardware (current mobo has exactly 6 SATA ports for my 6 HDs).

There's a ton of new and used Supermicro product on ebay so I'll be looking there over the next couple weeks.

 

[Chris Moore]

There's a ton of new and used Supermicro product on ebay so I'll be looking there over the next couple weeks.

I just put that list together yesterday and it was all available then and the best price that I could find at the time.

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. I have the same model chassis for one of my servers at home. The fans run fast, but you can slow them down and still get cool enough and have them not be as loud by using these inline speed reducers:

Computer PC Fan Speed Reduce 4 Pin Power Resistor Male to Female Cord Adapter - - US $3.13
https://www.ebay.com/itm/232107503676

 

[marcevan]

Thanks... I really don't use eBay much due to issues in the past, but it's a good sounding board. Again, I have to be patient as budgets are low right now.

I may have stabilized the issue with server shut downs as iocage makes jails autostart. So if you roll back to 11.1 from 11.2 and you turn off the iocage jails and turn back on the wardens, you get IP conflicts galore (the more jails, the more conflicts). So I just saw a command to make iocage not start the jails on reboot; pending a reboot I may be in luck.

 

[Chris Moore]

I really don't use eBay much due to issues in the past,

I use them frequently. They have a very strong buyer protection policy. I bought some RAM that did not work in my system and the seller wanted me to pay shipping to send it back and a restocking fee of 15%. I submitted the claim to eBay and got all my money back and the seller even had to pay the return shipping. I don't hesitate to buy through them. It can be rough as a seller though. I sold one of my used hard drives and the buyer claimed it was bad and wanted a refund. They (eBay) made me take it back, but what I got back wasn't the drive I sold. I contacted eBay about that and eBay gave me (as the seller) the money back, so I wasn't out anything from the transaction in either case, as a buyer or as a seller.

 

[marcevan]

Well, I went the way of cheap and got a Rosewill 4U for free for "evaluation" purposes which I can't complain about. I'l re install my motherboard with a new Gold 10yr power 550W from SeaSonic, same RAM, same CPU, new Noctua CPU cooler, new Noctua 2x120mm, 2x80mm fans, same Intel gigabit NIC, one fan controller and an LSI 9211_8i for my disks.

This way, I'll get good cooling from front to back, the LSI is a great card I can reuse down the line, even if the Mobo isn't wonderful, a new PSU will help, and moving to the LSI from mobo SATA will be a boost.

 

[Chris Moore]

I went the way of cheap and got a Rosewill 4U for free for "evaluation" purposes which I can't complain about.

Nice trick i you can get it. Not everyone has the pull to get gear for free.

 

[marcevan]

Well now I'm not sure what to do.

Power supply came early (before the chassis, etc).

Server won't stay on for more than 6 minutes before powering down.
1. New power supply and it boots and I get 6 minutes of life on the URL or the plugins URLs. So doubt it's power
2. FreeNAS - nothing ever shows in crash directory so not sure where else to look.
3. Disks - when I can get into the URL for freeNAS the disks are all fine, pool is fine.
4. Motherboard - I looked at it and cleaned it. No puffy caps and no smell of burnt anything or scorch marks anywhere.
5. RAM - not sure but doubt they just go bad. Any way to quick verify in my 6 minutes of life I get?
6. CPU? Can it overheat in 6 minutes? I'd like to think not...as I don't want to put on the new Noctua cooler until I move the board to new chassis, or verify I need a new board.

This is just weird.

 

[Chris Moore]

CPU? Can it overheat in 6 minutes? I'd like to think not...as I don't want to put on the new Noctua cooler until I move the board to new chassis, or verify I need a new board.

To clarify, do you have a cooler on the CPU?
You might want to check the system BIOS settings to see if the "watchdog" function is enabled. If it is, disable it. I have seen many cases where this was not working as it should and the watchdog would shutdown the system.

 

[marcevan]

Went into BIOS.

Holy hell!

CPU: 90 C

it kept rising to 95 C while I was looking for "watchdog" and now I just turned it off. 95 C for a CPU is way too hot, so the fan (stock) might either be doing nothing, failed, or got unplugged.

So now with the rig open, I took off the stock fan and well, let's just say removing the existing thermal paste shouldn't be an issue.

Problem will be remove the motherboard to attach the SecuFirm2 Mounting system by Noctua. I see a long night here.