First build for home server - Advice before buying

[roki]

Hello everyone and thanks in advance for reading this and/or giving advice!

General info

I wanted to build a home server for some time and finally have the funds to do so (my budget is ~1500€ but having to spend less is better).

I want to use the server mainly for storing media files, so the data is not extremely important but I still want to make sure it's reasonably safe. I am also aware, that RAID is not a backup.

So the uses will be mostly

• Network storage (the main purpose)
• GitHub/GitLab runner
• Streaming stored media (to my phone, PC and Chromecast)

I might have missed one or two uses but those are the main ones.

Hardware

I wrote down most of what came to my mind in a GitHub gist. It contains a parts list with a link to the geizhals.de page for hopefully all of the parts I mention here. Although the site is in German, they do list a decent amount of details for each part. You can ignore the questions that I listed in the gist, they are mostly a reminder for myself.

• gist at the time of writing
• always up to date gist

I'll list the parts again here and include some reasoning to why I picked each part

• Mainboard: ASRock Rack X470D4U2
  • Supports ECC (I heard in a YouTube video that there is OS support but the errors don't get forwarded to the IPMI, I'll edit in a link when I find the video)
  • Intel I210-AT NIC
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G
  • Supports ECC
  • Relatively recent architecture
  • AES and SHA instruction support
  • Integrated GPU for transcoding
• RAM: KSM26ED8/16MR
  • ECC
  • Micron dies (seems to be recommended)
  • Max. frequency the mainboard supports
• Storage-Controller/HBA: Broadcom SAS 9207-8i (LSI00301)
  • Broadcom SAS2308 chipset (recommended in the hardware guide)
  • I can buy it used and flashed to IT-Mode for 100€
• Case: Fractal Design Define R5
  • Soundproofed
  • Two 140mm fans pointed at the HDDs
  • Relatively cheap (120€)
  • Seems to have decent build quality for the price
  • I don't need hot-swap trays
• PSU: Fractal Design Ion+ 560P
  • ETA-Platinum (230V) and LAMBDA-A++ (230V)
  • ATX 2.4 (nice to have I guess)
  • Single +12V rail with 46.6A
  • Fully modular
  • I can buy another SATA power cable from the same manufacturer that plugs directly into the PSU so I don't have to use some sketchy ones
• Main HDD storage: Seagate Exos E - 7E8 6TB (x6)
  • Sadly pretty power hungry (12W active, 8W idle)
  • I can buy them used for 50€ per drive with 1 year of warranty
  • I'll probably have to update the firmware but it's just 6 drives so not much of a hassle

I'm kind of confident with the parts above but I'm open to suggestions/criticism all the way.

Software

I want to run Proxmox as the hypervisor and have one VM for TrueNAS and another one for Debian. The TrueNAS VM will have the whole HBA passed through and I'll let it be just a NAS and manage share permissions. I'll then mount shares in the Debian VM and manage the rest with Docker/Portainer as I am already familiar with that.

TrueNAS and storage

I plan to run the 6x 6TB HDDs in a RaidZ2 configuration, because I am scared of losing another drive while resilvering. This should give me ~21TB of usable storage.

I'd also like to run another vdev with SSDs for metadata. While I think I could also live without that, I really like the idea.
For that, I was thinking of getting two or three TS512GMTE220S and run them in a two- or three-way mirror. They have 1PB TBW which is not infinite but should last quite a while. They also cost only ~35€ which is insanely cheap.
But since they don't have power-loss-protection I was thinking of using two MTFDDAK480TGA-1BC1ZABYY in a two-way mirror instead.

I also have a HFS256G39TNF-N2A0A BB and a MZ-75E250B lying around.
I was thinking of using both in a two-way mirror as a boot drive for Proxmox and the VMs.

I don't think I need L2ARC.

Questions

1. Is having the metadata only in a two-way mirror too unsafe (risk-wise) if I'm already giving up useable space for the redundancy of RaidZ2? (Since the whole pool is gone if I lose the metadata)
2. I didn't really find an answer to whether I should use an UPS or not.
   1. If the metadata SSDs have power-loss-protection, would that be sufficient to survive a power-outage?
   2. I didn't find a single brown-out (yet) on any electronics I own, so that is not really a concern for me.
   3. If I were to get an UPS, how large does it have to be so I can instantly start a graceful shutdown as soon as a power outage is detected? (I guess the answer to this one is that I'll just have to test it with a power meter)
   4. If I just lose the last 5 seconds of asynchronous writes in case of a power outage and a metadata SSD with power-loss-protection protects me from losing the whole pool, that'd be perfectly fine.

Again, thank you so much for reading this and/or giving advice! If I forgot to mention anything or something is wrong, please tell me.

PS: I blatantly stole the thread title from this thread as it fits perfectly.

 

[roki]

I though I could edit the post, but since I can't, I'll add this reply.

This is the video (incl. timestamp), where they mention, that ECC errors get reported to the OS but not to the IMPI
youtu.be/Jqg1G78cH2A?t=385

I mentioned my budget but I forgot to add prices for each component

Main server components

ASRock Rack X470D4U2	290€	new
AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G	110€	new
KSM26ED8/16MR (2x)	52€ (104€)	new, per stick
Broadcom SAS 9207-8i	100€	used, flashed to IT-mode
Fractal Design Define R5	115€	new
Fractal Design Ion+ 560P	110€	new
Alpenföhn Ben Nevis Rev. B	25€	new

Storage media

Seagate Exos E - 7E8 6TB (6x)	50€ (300€)	used, per disk, with 1 year of warranty
Micron 5400 PRO 480GB SATA (2x)	70€ (140€)	new, per disk

Accesories

Case fans (3x)	8€ (24€)	new, per fan
Additional SATA power cable	7€	new

Which comes out at 1325€ (or 885€ without SSDs/HDDs) without shipping.

 

[NugentS]

If you are planning on using the iGPU for transcoding in plex. Be aware that, unless something has changed, plex doesn't support AMD GPU's
Its certainly worth checking on.

 

[Ericloewe]

ECC errors get reported to the OS but not to the IMPI

Fascinating

 

[roki]

If you are planning on using the iGPU for transcoding in plex. Be aware that, unless something has changed, plex doesn't support AMD GPU's
Its certainly worth checking on.

It looks like that still isn't supported on Plex but I also didn't know that you need a Plex Pass to enable hardware acceleration. I guess I'll use Jellyfin for sure then.
According to the Jellyfin docs, the iGPU should have decent support encoding and decoding. But the passthrough seems to be problematic at best...

Alternatively, I could postpone buying the main storage HDDs and go for a 13th gen. Intel processor with integrated graphics. This wouldn't be a problem since I planned to play around with the server for a month or so before committing to a setup and start moving my data.
The CPU listed below has support for ECC RAM and the iGPU supports AV1 decoding, which would be nice for transcoding AV1 for devices that don't support that yet (Jellyfin already supports transcoding AV1 streams). Also having a fast runner for GitHub/GitLab jobs would be nice.

Intel Core i5-13500	245€ (+135€)
Supermicro X13SAE bulk	440€ (+150€)	Intel I225-LM + Intel I219-LM
MTC10F1084S1RC48BA1R (2x)	85€ (170€) (+66€)

The X13SAE-F mainboard would cost 500€ and have IPMI support, which could be useful if I break something and would have to connect a physical monitor (iGPU split passthrough is not supported past the 10th gen. of Intel processors). There is a small discussion in the Proxmox subreddit about this but I don't think I need IPMI.
I guess this Proxmox stuff is also kind of off-topic but I want to make my thought process transparent so there is some base for giving advice on.

The 13th gen. Intel build (without IPMI support) would cost 351€ more (+40%) than the initial build.

Reason for the 13th gen. Intel would be DDR5 RAM with ECC support and AV1-decode support for the iGPU.
The 11th gen. also has AV1 decode support for the iGPU but they don't support ECC RAM. I also don't see a big price difference between gen. 12 and 13.

I'll think and read about this some more for a few days, look at alternatives and read some past forum threads about using 12th and 13th gen. Intel processors with TrueNAS.

 

[jgreco]

I'll think and read about this some more for a few days, look at alternatives and read some past forum threads about using 12th and 13th gen. Intel processors with TrueNAS.

I'd really like to know where you folks keep coming up with this stuff. For the umpteenth time, 12th and 13th gen. Intel CPU's typically have P-cores and E-cores, which are not supported by the schedulers in FreeBSD and Linux. It will still be some time before this is supported and makes it into TrueNAS.