MGone
Dabbler
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2022
- Messages
- 20
So, despite still not having found any available memory this is where I'm at for my build. Thanks for those who've helped me get this far!
One thing to note is that I am fully aware that the processor is a wee-bit overkill. However, I had a chance to pick this up from a friend for pretty much the same as the Ryzen 3 3100 I was considering....so here goes.
Purpose
An alternative to an off the shelf 8 bay NAS such at the Synology DS1821+ (4 core embedded Ryzen V1500B) or QNAP TVS-872X (i3-8100T)
Smallish form factor and as quiet as possible.
File server for max 10 people (mix local & remote)
Host occasional Minecraft server for my kids and their friends
Have the capability to act as a media server in the not too distant future (Plex/Jellyfin) by possibly adding a GPU.
Components (Amazon UK links provided and surprisingly they were often cheapest!! Although if you're UK based I'd consider looking at Scan.co.uk amongst others too!)
So I thought I'd share my reasoning behind these decisions and hopefully get some feedback if my assumptions and understanding is misguided!
The case, cooler and fans were all pretty much set from the start. There really isn't much choice out there for mATX cases that hold a decent number of drive bays. There's a fair few other builds kicking around with this case and so it made sense to go with a tested solution. I'll admit that the fans are a little luxury, but having used Noctua for years and never had an issue it seemed a no-brainer. Also, they now have an incredible compatibility checker which allowed me to bit a cooler to fit the CPU, MB & Case!
Having read a number of builds based upon more media workstation or high end gaming motherboards I went around the houses for quite some time flicking back and forth between Intel and AMD platforms. I was tempted by the Xeon W's but found myself soon pushing £600 for the CPU&MB. I tried looking at older boards/cpus, mainly LGA2011v3 and LGA1150 boards but felt ultimately that for what was available to me in the UK I was getting more value with the AMD....(as a side note, it was older motherboards that was the problem...especially in the mATX format as I decided that full size or rack wasn't going to wok for us at the moment!)
My motherboard choice centred around a few priorities, with ECC support and IPMI being the two that wouldn't be easy (or possible) to add in later.
The real nail in the coffin for consumer boards though was the lack of IPMI. Even the most basic of NAS boxes allows you to access them via a network connection to update the bios and cycle power etc...and the additional features that this would make running the system easier.
In the end it boiled down to the ASRock Rack x570D4U and it's older sibling the X470D4U (and their 10GbE cousins!)
I decided I didn't need PCIe 4.0 for now nor 10GbE, so it was the X470 for me as I think the motherboard gives enough expansion for my future needs.
Storage was far more straight forward. I analysed our current usage and felt that 8TB would be sufficient for the next few years at least, but that 10-12TB would give more headroom to accommodate new cameras and larger files. After lots of reading I decided that this would be best achieved by setting up a pool of three vdevs, each containing a 2 disk mirror. I have chosen to pair one Seagate with one WD red in each vdev to reduce the chance of a 2 disk failure in any one vdev. The two SSD's would be another mirrored vdev creating a boot pool.
At a later date I can add a couple of 8TB drives in a mirrored vdev to create a media pool and the m.2 SATA drives would then form another vdev in a separate pool for the cache for Plex.
I chose the gigabyte drives as boot drives simply because I was after the cheapest I could find...I narrowed it down to whatever is on offer and these have the best DWPD at 0.57 compared with 0.3 for most of the others.
The m.2 drives were a little more tricky because the chosen motherboard only supports m.2 SATA not NVMe, and so this limited my choice performance wise, but the WD Red seemed a solid choice, although I was disappointed to find out that the SA500 is almost an order of magnitude slower than the newer NVMEe WD Red SN700...!
So that just leaves the PSU...and 750w may seem big, but here is how I got to that size:
If I apply the 1.25 multiplier suggested in the excellent 'size your PSU' guide I get a MAX power of 432.4W so in theory I could get a 450W PSU and be covered for my planned upgrades. However, there were two factors (aside from future additions) which have pushed me to look at larger PSUs. Firstly is the efficiency curves. Most of the PSUs I have looked at have a maximum efficiency at around 40-60% load, and the second is that by not working the PSU too hard the fan won't kick in and it will contribute to a quieter system. 650W may be a bit too much in the other direction, and I could consider a 550W, but the Seasonic Focus PX-650 seems a bargain at the current price.
So, I think that's the lot hardware wise...I hope my thought process made sense...please hit me up with any suggestions as I'd like to hit that buy button whilst some of these prices are still low!!
Oh, and should I be considering TrueNAS Scale rather than Core because of the poor support for NVIDIA GPUs in Core?
One final thing I thought might be useful was to link (in no particular order) the resources I have found most helpful in my decision making.
One thing to note is that I am fully aware that the processor is a wee-bit overkill. However, I had a chance to pick this up from a friend for pretty much the same as the Ryzen 3 3100 I was considering....so here goes.
Purpose
An alternative to an off the shelf 8 bay NAS such at the Synology DS1821+ (4 core embedded Ryzen V1500B) or QNAP TVS-872X (i3-8100T)
Smallish form factor and as quiet as possible.
File server for max 10 people (mix local & remote)
Host occasional Minecraft server for my kids and their friends
Have the capability to act as a media server in the not too distant future (Plex/Jellyfin) by possibly adding a GPU.
Components (Amazon UK links provided and surprisingly they were often cheapest!! Although if you're UK based I'd consider looking at Scan.co.uk amongst others too!)
- Case (£78): Fractal Node 804
- Motherboard (£255): ASRock Rack X470D4U
- CPU (£215): AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (6 core 3.7GHz 65w Vermeer)
- Cooler (£50): Noctua NH-D9L with NF-A9 92mm Fan
- Memory (£200?): 2x 16Gb KSM26ED8/16ME (still searching!)
- Storage (£480): 3x 4TB WD Red Plus, 3x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf
- Boot Drives(£36): 2x Gigabyte 120GB 2.5" SATA III SSD
- PSU (£75): Seasonic Focus PX 650W
- Case Fans (£95): 3x Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM 1x Noctua NF-A14 PWM
Total Build Cost: £1004 with just boot drives, £1484 including Storage and Metadata cache drives (although shopping around and getting the CPU from my buddy should knock off about £200)
Future additions could be: - Media Metadata drives: 2x WD RED SA500 M.2 2280 SSD
- Media Storage: 1x 8TB WD Red Plus, 1x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf
- 10GbE card: Chelsio T420-CR Dual Port 10GbE (in slot PCIe4 3.0x8)
- Storage Expander: LSI MegaRAID 9220-8i IT Mode (in slot PCIe5 3.0x8)
- GPU for Hardware Encoding: NVIDIA Quadro P400 or similar lower end but 4K capable (in slot PCIe6 3.0x16 operating at x8)
So I thought I'd share my reasoning behind these decisions and hopefully get some feedback if my assumptions and understanding is misguided!
The case, cooler and fans were all pretty much set from the start. There really isn't much choice out there for mATX cases that hold a decent number of drive bays. There's a fair few other builds kicking around with this case and so it made sense to go with a tested solution. I'll admit that the fans are a little luxury, but having used Noctua for years and never had an issue it seemed a no-brainer. Also, they now have an incredible compatibility checker which allowed me to bit a cooler to fit the CPU, MB & Case!
Having read a number of builds based upon more media workstation or high end gaming motherboards I went around the houses for quite some time flicking back and forth between Intel and AMD platforms. I was tempted by the Xeon W's but found myself soon pushing £600 for the CPU&MB. I tried looking at older boards/cpus, mainly LGA2011v3 and LGA1150 boards but felt ultimately that for what was available to me in the UK I was getting more value with the AMD....(as a side note, it was older motherboards that was the problem...especially in the mATX format as I decided that full size or rack wasn't going to wok for us at the moment!)
My motherboard choice centred around a few priorities, with ECC support and IPMI being the two that wouldn't be easy (or possible) to add in later.
- ECC Support (I heard this is recommended
) - IMPI (running without a screen)
- 8+SATA 3 (and or enough PCIe slots to add expansion)
- Intel LAN (1GbE should be fine for the time being, but allow for expansion)
- 2 M.2 slots (for fast metadata drive)
- On board VGA (without needing APU chip support)
The real nail in the coffin for consumer boards though was the lack of IPMI. Even the most basic of NAS boxes allows you to access them via a network connection to update the bios and cycle power etc...and the additional features that this would make running the system easier.
In the end it boiled down to the ASRock Rack x570D4U and it's older sibling the X470D4U (and their 10GbE cousins!)
I decided I didn't need PCIe 4.0 for now nor 10GbE, so it was the X470 for me as I think the motherboard gives enough expansion for my future needs.
Storage was far more straight forward. I analysed our current usage and felt that 8TB would be sufficient for the next few years at least, but that 10-12TB would give more headroom to accommodate new cameras and larger files. After lots of reading I decided that this would be best achieved by setting up a pool of three vdevs, each containing a 2 disk mirror. I have chosen to pair one Seagate with one WD red in each vdev to reduce the chance of a 2 disk failure in any one vdev. The two SSD's would be another mirrored vdev creating a boot pool.
At a later date I can add a couple of 8TB drives in a mirrored vdev to create a media pool and the m.2 SATA drives would then form another vdev in a separate pool for the cache for Plex.
I chose the gigabyte drives as boot drives simply because I was after the cheapest I could find...I narrowed it down to whatever is on offer and these have the best DWPD at 0.57 compared with 0.3 for most of the others.
The m.2 drives were a little more tricky because the chosen motherboard only supports m.2 SATA not NVMe, and so this limited my choice performance wise, but the WD Red seemed a solid choice, although I was disappointed to find out that the SA500 is almost an order of magnitude slower than the newer NVMEe WD Red SN700...!
So that just leaves the PSU...and 750w may seem big, but here is how I got to that size:
Component | idle Watts | peak Watts | |
| Motherboard | 25 | 25 | |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 10 | 65 | |
| Memory | 12 | 12 | |
| CPU Cooler | 0.6 | 1.2 | |
| Fans | 3.0 | 6.7 | |
| 3x 4TB WD Red Plus | 12.3 | 63 | |
| 3x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf | 11.85 | 64.8 | |
| 0.34 | 5.22 | |
| 2x WD RED M.2 SATA 500GB | 0.1 | 6.7 | |
| 1x 8TB WD Red Plus | 4.1 | 21.7 | |
| 1x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf | 3.95 | 21.6 | |
| Chelsio T420-CR Dual Port 10GbE | 6 | 12 | |
| LSI MegaRAID 9220-8i | 8 | 11 | |
| NVIDIA® QUADRO® P400 | 5 | 30 | |
| 102.24 W idle | 345.92 W peak |
If I apply the 1.25 multiplier suggested in the excellent 'size your PSU' guide I get a MAX power of 432.4W so in theory I could get a 450W PSU and be covered for my planned upgrades. However, there were two factors (aside from future additions) which have pushed me to look at larger PSUs. Firstly is the efficiency curves. Most of the PSUs I have looked at have a maximum efficiency at around 40-60% load, and the second is that by not working the PSU too hard the fan won't kick in and it will contribute to a quieter system. 650W may be a bit too much in the other direction, and I could consider a 550W, but the Seasonic Focus PX-650 seems a bargain at the current price.
So, I think that's the lot hardware wise...I hope my thought process made sense...please hit me up with any suggestions as I'd like to hit that buy button whilst some of these prices are still low!!
Oh, and should I be considering TrueNAS Scale rather than Core because of the poor support for NVIDIA GPUs in Core?
One final thing I thought might be useful was to link (in no particular order) the resources I have found most helpful in my decision making.
- CORE hardware guide
- Hardware recommendations Guide
- UncleFester's FreeNAS Beginners Guide
- Proper Power Supply Sizing Guidance
- Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA
- What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?
- Why you shouldn't buy a single model/batch of HDDs.
- Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!
- The ZFS ZIL and SLOG Demystified
- ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ.
- Six Metrics for Measuring ZFS Pool Performance
- Noctua Compatibility Centre
- Kingston memory number decoder (other memory manufacturers also have guides that can be searched for)
- Manufacturers websites for specs, manuals (too many to list, but most of the information is out there somewhere!)
