Xeon-D home streamer & storage

[adamtaro]

Hello, all.

I've been running FreeNAS with 4x 2TB disks (RAID-Z) on an HP Gen7 MicroServer (N40L), primarily as storage, but with increasing use of Plex Media Server and Nextcloud. I'm thinking it's time to upgrade to something nicer. I've been spec'ing and operating ZFS systems for about 10 years now, but this would be the first one I'd be assembling from the ground up.

I like the tiny footprint on the MicroServer considering its power draw, size, and noise (after a PSU and fan replacement). It's disappointing that there are so few mainstream (nice-looking) 5-6 bay enclosures on the market. I value a discreet little box, staying quiet and cool and low-key.

What I'm looking at building might be a little overpowered for today, but I'm looking for some longevity and headroom, as this will be for Plex streaming and be a bit of a home lab.

• SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F-0 (the one with the Xeon D-1528 [35W, 6 core])
• 2x 16GB ECC RAM [Samsung DDR4-2133 16GB/2Gx72 ECC/REG CL15]
• 5x 4TB WD Red
• Seasonic SSR-450RM ATX PSU (contingent on case)

I'm divided on the case. I had been considering the Lian-li PC-Q25 (5 internal hot swap bays), but I see that the Fractal Design Node 304 (6 internal fixed bays) is equivalently "nice-looking" and with an equivalent build quality. I don't need 24/7 uptime, so there's no big loss in giving up external hot swap trays. I'm disappointed both chassis are larger than they need to be (~20l, compared with the ~14l on the MicroServer and the 7l on my gaming PC).

I'd like to have a raid capacity of 15+ TB, and a 5x 4TB in RAID-Z seems to do that nicely, and more cheaply than 4x 6TB, which was also under consideration.

I've been considering what to do for my jails storage. I'd like to put it on a separate SSD-backed pool. Is that 1x M.2 plus 1x SATA SSD (120 - 256 GB each) mirrored for the jails pool, with a pair of USB 2.0 Flash drives for the boot volume? Or do I discard redundancy for frequently snapshotting a non-redundant volume attached to M.2 and use a SATA DOM for boot?

I'm happy with where I'm landing in terms of value for money (likely around $1800, depending on what I can find with WD Reds on sale, and where I land w/r/t jails and boot storage). Saving $300 on the processor + mobo feels like a big step down, splurging $300 more in that area doesn't seem like it helps me much, either.

Does anyone have a better suggestion on a smaller, still-nice, still-quiet case?

Am I completely bonkers in trying to put my jails and plugins (and someday dockers) on faster volumes, away from the big storage?

 

[Dice]

Am I completely bonkers in trying to put my jails and plugins (and someday dockers) on faster volumes, away from the big storage?

No. That's a good idea, many people do it.
Another bonus is that you could probably move the system data set to the jail-pool, and reduce hits to all the spinning drives.

 

[adamtaro]

No. That's a good idea, many people do it.
Another bonus is that you could probably move the system data set to the jail-pool, and reduce hits to all the spinning drives.

Nice. It's been hard to understand the separation between the boot media from the system data set in some of the materials I've seen, so I wasn't super confident of that.

And the pool mirroring between an M.2 PCIe connection and a SATA drive? Not too weird?

 

[Dice]

And the pool mirroring between an M.2 PCIe connection and a SATA drive? Not too weird?

Once the drives are recognized and steadily available (ie, one of several reasons to why USB-drives are flaky) to the system it does not matter.

 

[Ericloewe]

And the pool mirroring between an M.2 PCIe connection and a SATA drive? Not too weird?

What would you gain from that?

 

[adamtaro]

What would you gain from that?

merely redundancy.
I know I'd by capped by the speed of the slower SSD of the two, but are there further dysfunctions I should be aware of?

 

[Ericloewe]

No, but it would seriously tickle my OCD.

 

[adamtaro]

No, but it would seriously tickle my OCD.

Ha! Well, I appreciate your candor.

I wanted to give the applications running in jails some decent storage, and since they tend to be databases (whether literally a MySQL instance or lots of little files), IOPS rule the day. So, an SSD. I also wanted some redundancy for safety's sake.

With 5 SATA ports taken by the main pool, that leaves one on the motherboard. If I'm to get that redundancy, I need to split between SATA and NVMe.

Would you do something differently?