BUILD (UK) Mini-ITX budget build spec

[dmitrios]

Hi, I have been reading the forums for quite a while and finally registered to post this. Most of the build advice here works great if one is in the US, in Europe/UK it is somewhat hard to get hold of Supermicro boards and Tyan boards are non-existent.

Please help me with the build spec choices.

It has to be Mini-ITX so I am going for the Node 304 (as our Ikea TV shelf will not fit the mATX Node 804 ... yes, i do not have a "hardware closet" and this all needs to meet wife approval;)

I will most likely go for 5x of 2TB WD Red in one vdev in RAID-Z1 (I will have an off-site backup target so can handle the 2nd drive failure, at least in theory, hence choosing more space over 2nd drive redundancy of RAID-Z2).

I will go for either 8 or 16 GB of ECC RAM, depending on the budget left.

Now the difficult choice: motherboard, and then CPU. I have put this list together mostly from previous recommendations on this forum, and yes I did look into the recommended hardware guide.

LGA1150:

ASRock E3C224D2I
ASRock E3C226D2I
Asus P9D-I
Intel DBS1200KP
Tyan S5533GM2NR-LE
MS-S0891

LGA1151:

ASRock C236 WSI
ASRock E3C236D2I
Asus P10S-I ~£160 6 SATA3, iKVM support with additional £30 purchase (ASMB8-iKVM), 4 of the SATA drives must be connected through a mini-SAS port.

Most of these boards are either old and not available (I have no time to wait for a used one to appear on eBay) or somewhat too expensive. All Supermicros seem to be very expensive, so I did not include them in this list.

MSI MS-S0891 is an exception here, can be bought for ~£80 new on eBay. However LGA1150 CPUs seem to be very expensive now... because they are old? I do not want to buy a used CPU from eBay as I am paranoid about someone mishandling it in its previous life.
Pentium G3470 is ~£91. Expensive! I'd much rather pay £40 for the LGA1151 G4400 :(
Core i3-4170 is ~£103. So it makes no sense not to pay the extra ~£10 for ~40% improvement.
Xeon E3-1220 v3 is ~£189 and is beyond budget (I do not need this much CPU power as will not be doing any transcoding or running VMs, I am doing storage only). In fact, I would prefer the cheapest CPU I could get away with. Maybe I will upgrade it one day...

So motherboard+CPU is already ~£180. With this in mind I am seriously considering the C3000 Denverton Atom as alternative:

A2SDi-2C-HLN4F - C3338 (2-Core) SoC ~£201 - not seen a comparable benchmark yet, will it be too slow?
A2SDi-4C-HLN4F - C3558 (4-Core) SoC ~£285 - seems to be on-par with a Celeron?
A2SDi-8C-HLN4F - C3758 (8-Core) SoC ~£432 - prohibitively expensive :(

The obvious benefit of these C3000 boards are:
+ support up to 8 SATA3 so I could choose to have the max 6 drives the Node 304 can take, vs. the max 5 SATA3 with MSI MS-S0891.
+ support at least 32GB of UDIMM, for any future expansion, however it is unlikely I will go over 16GB.
+ low power consumption (?)
~ recent tech vs. the LGA1150 which is few generations old.

The drawback would be: performance (?).

The choice then will be the ECC RAM (Crucial vs. the cheaper Kingston (not in the UK it seems)), and the PSU (Corsair or Seasonic, ~450W), which both should be easy.

Update: RAM choices
DDR3 ECC
8GB - Crucial 1x 8GB CT102472BD160B ~£88
16GB - Crucial 2x 8GB CT2KIT102472BD160B ~£175

DDR4 ECC
8 GB - Samsung 1x 8GB M391A1G43EB1-CRC ~£110
16 GB - Samsung 1x 16GB M391A2K43BB1-CRC00 ~166

Thanks!

 

[Inxsible]

I do not want to buy a used CPU from eBay as I am paranoid about someone mishandling it in its previous life.

Why is that? So long the pins on the CPU are not bent out of shape, what mishandling are you worried about? Getting used hardware is the best way to stay under budget and get good hardware.

 

[KrisBee]

Why is that? So long the pins on the CPU are not bent out of shape, what mishandling are you worried about? Getting used hardware is the best way to stay under budget and get good hardware.

It's the other way round for Intel CPUs. You need to be sure the pins on the motherboard socket are not damaged , while the CPU contacts need to be clean and free of any thermal paste.

Used hardware may make your budget go further, but in the UK the market for used server kit is very very small with few bargains. S/hand m/boards are scarce and ECC udimms relatively expensive. S/hand CPUs are not so hard to find, but the OP has ruled those out.

Personally, I have a xeon E3-1220L , i5-3470 and a i3-3220T in use which were all bought s/hand.

@dmitrios Just in case you hadn't realised, those MSI MS-S0891 m/boards are being sold without an i/o shield and don't have IPMI. Sticking with the ITX format really does restrict choice and push the hardware price up. The generation of Atom m/boards before denverton were popular & used in the FreeNAS mini. But a nasty firmware/hardware bug has caused these Atom C2000 m/boards to fail. Whether that has dented confidence in denverton I don't know, but I've not seem many users of these new Atom c3000 boards on this forum as ITX is not a preferred format.

The FreeNAS mini used the higher core count Atom C2000, so I'd think the A2SDi-4C-HLN4F looks a better choice than the cut down A2SDi-2C-HLN4F.

One alternative is the HP GEN8 Microserver, which is limited to four drives, plus one possible ssd. Maximum amount of RAM is 16GB ECC. Unfortunately, it's no longer in production, but both new and s/hand are still available. It's true server hardware in that is has HP's ilo, a form of IPMI.

As you are prepared to use raidz1, which most would argue against, you could throw caution to the wind and not use EEC ram. Even then, just how many consumer grade ITX boards have more than 4 sata ports and/or properly support a HBA in a pci-e slot. You won't find any internal USB sockets and will be saddle with all the typical extras like wifi, sound etc.

The bottom line is that building your own FreeNAS mini style server is not cheap.

 

[dmitrios]

S/hand CPUs are not so hard to find, but the OP has ruled those out.
Personally, I have a xeon E3-1220L , i5-3470 and a i3-3220T in use which were all bought s/hand.

Thanks @KrisBee. This is reassuring and I might go down the route of getting a used CPU from eBay to fit in to a sensible budget. I which case I would most likely be tempted to get an E3 Xeon. Would that pull an extra ~30W just sitting idle?

those MSI MS-S0891 m/boards are being sold without an i/o shield and don't have IPMI.

I saw in the spec: Aspeed AST2300 IPMI 2.0(ATX IPMI SKU) which made me think I would have IMPI with it (?). You're right about no I/O shield - did some quick searching now and could be a pain to find!

a nasty firmware/hardware bug has caused these Atom C2000 m/boards to fail.

Precisely why I am not buying any of those boards s/hand from eBay! They would be just about "old enough" to fail, based on the average time to die many people posted on this forum. Most recent example.

The FreeNAS mini used the higher core count Atom C2000, so I'd think the A2SDi-4C-HLN4F looks a better choice than the cut down A2SDi-2C-HLN4F.

I would certainly agree. I can see ReadyNAS 42x units use the cut down 2-core C3338, but they're running presumably less resource intensive btrfs fitted with only 2GB of RAM so not really useful for comparison.

One alternative is the HP GEN8 Microserver

I was late to the party. They all sold down by the time I started looking. Great bargains (especially after hundred of pounds of cashback) were to be had. This would be a no-brainer. I have been watching s/hand listing on eBay for some time and I am annoyed of the really high prices they re-sell for. They are selling used now for twice what I could have had them new a year ago. This makes me want to build own spec.

As you are prepared to use raidz1, which most would argue against, you could throw caution to the wind and not use EEC ram.

I respectfully disagree with you here. ECC serves a different purpose, and I am in the ECC camp. I do not like bitflips in my photos. I still have old photos from the beginning of 2000s with visible bitflips, some managed to make the JPEGs almost unreadable, some are just innocent green pixels etc.
RAIDZ2 is not a panacea. Should a true disaster happen (obvious and realistic one: the hardware is gone) it will not matter. I consider losing 2 disks from different batches an unlikely event, even losing the 2nd one during resilvering after the 1st failed - unlikely enough for me so I choose to rely on restoration from an off-site backup, as I will have sync/replication set-up (rsync or something else, undecided at this stage).

So I am not really going to alter the course. I am just trying to decide between LGA1150/LGA1151 or C3000.

And in this process I am grateful for your input, and for everyone else's.

 

[Ericloewe]

There might also be some used Xeon-D boards. You'd get better performance than C2000/C3000 at hopefully similar prices.

 

[dmitrios]

Thanks @Ericloewe, I just looked at eBay sold Xeon-D boards and I can see I missed a couple of insanely good bargains to be had! Maybe I should build a system now and then sell the mobo+CPU once I grab such next Xeon-D bargain from eBay:)

 

[Inxsible]

I saw in the spec: Aspeed AST2300 IPMI 2.0(ATX IPMI SKU) which made me think I would have IMPI with it (?).

I thought there were 2 versions of the MSI MS-S0891 -- one with IPMI and one without. You have to be sure which one you are buying. IPMI is worth the extra $20 that it might cost.

EDIT : from the MSI website

Server Management Aspeed AST1300 HW monitor(ATX/DC SKU)
Aspeed AST2300 IPMI 2.0(ATX IPMI SKU)

So the board can have either the AST1300 -- which is non-IPMI or the AST2300 which is IPMI enabled.

You're right about no I/O shield - did some quick searching now and could be a pain to find!

Just 3D print it at a local print shop.

 

[dmitrios]

So the board can have either the AST1300 -- which is non-IPMI or the AST2300 which is IPMI enabled.

Thanks @Inxsible - my brain did not parse this somehow when I was checking the MSI site. Their AVL list also appears incomplete. If the CPU of same series is not listed there, presumably that does not mean it will not work?

 

[Inxsible]

Oh, btw, I use a Tyan S5533 board and I have nothing but good things to say about that. It's hard to find these days though.

 

[dmitrios]

Tyan boards are non-existent.

Oh, btw, I use a Tyan S5533 board and I have nothing but good things to say about that. It's hard to find these days though.

Unfortunately not an option for me. None new or used anywhere! eBay has 0, even if I was to buy from the US eBay and pay the import duties etc.

Does it have nice IPMI interface? I understand Supermicro's are the better ones out there.

 

[Inxsible]

Unfortunately not an option for me. None new or used anywhere! eBay has 0, even if I was to buy from the US eBay and pay the import duties etc.

Does it have nice IPMI interface? I understand Supermicro's are the better ones out there.

That's too bad.

IPMI is IPMI -- There are a few differences in terms of the stats that are shown and some capabilities as well. Nothing that bothers me though. The good thing about the Tyan IPMI is that you get the ability to flash your BIOS from IPMI included -- whereas with SuperMicro, you have to pay for that functionality.

 

[dmitrios]

That is interesting! Can you compare this to Asrock IPMI? say like the one on E3C226D2I. In case I find a good deal on an Asrock Rack board.

Update: from the specs it appears it would be the same one as on the MSI board: ASPEED AST2300 : IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) 2.0 with iKVM support

 

[Inxsible]

That is interesting! Can you compare this to Asrock IPMI? say like the one on E3C226D2I. In case I find a good deal on an Asrock Rack board.

Unfortunately, I don't have experience with AsRock server boards. The only AsRock board I have bought is the J3355B -- which I use for my pfSense router.

 

[KrisBee]

@dmitrios I wasn't actually advocating a non-ECC RAM build, just musing that it doesn't get you what you want. Fine if you want to build a non zfs based home based linux file server controlled from the CLI or a web panel.

I agree HP gen8 microserver prices are now high, but they are often those being sold with 16gb of RAM, upgraded CPUs and other tweaks. Maybe I should have bought two when the cashback made them dirt cheap.

If there were any Xeon D-1520 bargains, I must have blinked. Asrock 1150/1151 m/boards have been fairly popular choices for FreeNAS. But BIOS/BMC upgrades have been lacking and/or slow to appear. This kind of thing:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...rocks-ipmi-virtual-console.53911/#post-373238

and no kaby lake support on 1151 boards and until end of 2017.

But Asrock prices have been on an upward trend for the last 12 months.

 

[dmitrios]

@dmitriosThis kind of thing:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...rocks-ipmi-virtual-console.53911/#post-373238

Wow... Pardon my ignorance, do I need to run Java for all IPMI? I thought at least some Supermicro had it as HTML5 or am I dreaming.

Edit: not that it matters that much, I can always run Java from a VM... as long as it (Java) works. Had so much trouble with Java 8 recently that is required for remote access at work.

 

[Inxsible]

Wow... Pardon my ignorance, do I need to run Java for all IPMI? I thought at least some Supermicro had it as HTML5 or am I dreaming.

Supermicro is moving towards HTML5 for its IPMI implementation. Having said that, some older boards might still use Java. I doubt they are going to release a firmware update for the older boards.

I had trouble accessing IPMI with Java 8 too. I just downgraded to Java 7 and all was ok.

 

[dmitrios]

So anyone here thinking I will be ok with the dual-core C3338 Denverton (A2SDi-2C-HLN4F), or should I definitely spend more / pay same money for eBay used mb+cpu?

 

[Inxsible]

pay same money for eBay used mb+cpu?

I would.