Thinking of building a nas with old Xeon cpu

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Hi I’ve noticed you can get old Xeon cpus on eBay very cheap I’m thinking of building a nas server with one useing truenas I think the software is called, what cpu would be cheap and don’t use too much power and good anuf to run a lot of drives in raid or I’m I dreaming to big lol
 
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Not to say they are the best and getting on a bit now but I'm a fan of the X79 era E5-1650 and 1680 V2s as they are unlocked chips with better control over frequency, voltage and multipliers and top grade silicon so you can often reduce the voltage quite a lot to improve power efficiency in a low power situation but on the flip side not as power efficient as some of the newer Xeons (and the quad channel memory doesn't help in terms of power use).

(They also have the advantage of lots of PCI-e lanes and good storage controller performance out the box and being just about new enough that they'll support a range of storage devices and interfaces albeit booting from NVME is a little complicated to achieve)
 
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Agree that X79 is a good chip due to the number of PCIe lanes. But also agree they can be quite power hungry for something that will be left running constantly. However you could mitigate that by using a network card which has Wake on LAN. I keep my NAS (a DIY one made from an old HP N40L - not the fastest thing in the world though) powered off and then wake it up remotely when I need it. The N40L is very low power so I could probably leave it on. But the WoL strategy may be useful for something which consumes more power.
 
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There are like 13, 25, etc. watt Xeons, etc. but generally they are designed for embedded systems, etc. Xeons in general aren't the go to for low power scenarios and the low power variants are basically the same chips just frequency and voltage dropped - which is one of the reasons I suggested the E5-16xx V2s as you can tune a lot of the parameters to get low power consumption in operation and the silicon is usually really high graded on those chips so they have a lot of potential for big drops in voltage from stock.
 
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What's your budget, and do you want ECC RAM? I've had quite a few older systems over the years though have retired most of it now (last system being a pair of Intel X5660s with 144GB of RAM) - the performance of older stuff can be ok, but it's not always cheaper.

A 4-6 core Ryzen in a cheap ASRock board might use a fraction of the power, while still being cheap and offering a much more modern feature set and great performance for example
 
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Not to say they are the best and getting on a bit now but I'm a fan of the X79 era E5-1650 and 1680 V2s as they are unlocked chips with better control over frequency, voltage and multipliers and top grade silicon so you can often reduce the voltage quite a lot to improve power efficiency in a low power situation but on the flip side not as power efficient as some of the newer Xeons (and the quad channel memory doesn't help in terms of power use).

(They also have the advantage of lots of PCI-e lanes and good storage controller performance out the box and being just about new enough that they'll support a range of storage devices and interfaces albeit booting from NVME is a little complicated to achieve)
cool will Virtualisation of a few systems at same time? i have a pc on 24/7 at mo shairing files over net on windows 10 and thinking of setting up a system running Pi hole and a system running trueNAS could x79 cpus be good anuf for sum thing like that or is that too ambitious? lol



Agree that X79 is a good chip due to the number of PCIe lanes. But also agree they can be quite power hungry for something that will be left running constantly. However you could mitigate that by using a network card which has Wake on LAN. I keep my NAS (a DIY one made from an old HP N40L - not the fastest thing in the world though) powered off and then wake it up remotely when I need it. The N40L is very low power so I could probably leave it on. But the WoL strategy may be useful for something which consumes more power.

There are like 13, 25, etc. watt Xeons, etc. but generally they are designed for embedded systems, etc. Xeons in general aren't the go to for low power scenarios and the low power variants are basically the same chips just frequency and voltage dropped - which is one of the reasons I suggested the E5-16xx V2s as you can tune a lot of the parameters to get low power consumption in operation and the silicon is usually really high graded on those chips so they have a lot of potential for big drops in voltage from stock.

What's your budget, and do you want ECC RAM? I've had quite a few older systems over the years though have retired most of it now (last system being a pair of Intel X5660s with 144GB of RAM) - the performance of older stuff can be ok, but it's not always cheaper.

A 4-6 core Ryzen in a cheap ASRock board might use a fraction of the power, while still being cheap and offering a much more modern feature set and great performance for example
not realy got budgit just looking in too stuff at mo, yer i was thinking about getting ECC RAM, i'm looking to run as system with Virtualisation of 3 systems Pi Hole a windows 10/linux and trueNas so ive got not too meny systems/devices hook up at once
 
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A 4-6 core Ryzen in a cheap ASRock board might use a fraction of the power, while still being cheap and offering a much more modern feature set and great performance for example

One of the things you can be juggling here is feature set vs things like number of PCI-e lanes.

cool will Virtualisation of a few systems at same time? i have a pc on 24/7 at mo shairing files over net on windows 10 and thinking of setting up a system running Pi hole and a system running trueNAS could x79 cpus be good anuf for sum thing like that or is that too ambitious? lol

You can get Xeons with tons of cores and full set of virtualisation features along with having quad channel memory so can be used for a range of demanding virtualisation tasks.
 
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One of the things you can be juggling here is feature set vs things like number of PCI-e lanes.



You can get Xeons with tons of cores and full set of virtualisation features along with having quad channel memory so can be used for a range of demanding virtualisation tasks.
is there a xeon you would recommend thats not too pricely
 
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This is a car crash, please stop.

We have an op who clearly has absolutely no idea what they are doing and why with a bunch of people, who should really know better recommending what works for them and that dinosaurs should be re-introduced, I feel like I have read/seen this somewhere before, it never ended well and produced some awful sequels.

Op, if you want to run a NAS/home server then that's great, it's a learning experience that can set people off in unintended paths as you'll gradually realise you can do all sorts with the right box, but this is really not the way to go about it. You mention TruNAS because seemingly you've heard of that, TruNAS is one of many distro's that exist, it's a decent choice in the right circumstances, but it's made a development choice that has very specific advantages and as a result a price has to be paid. What does your likely IO usage look like? Heavy sustained R/W or Write Once Read Often (WORO)? If it's the latter and on the assumption you don't have a bunch of matched drives kicking about but instead but whatever was the best £/TB at the time, have you considered UnRAID and it's pool/parity approach? It also has trade-offs in terms of R/W speed, but it's easily expandable and tends to favour people who want a NAS that runs services.

In hardware terms, for a reasons I don't fully understand you often find people who get the idea to build a 'server' suddenly think they need to buy some ancient ex-corp box because it has xyz. They rarely - if ever - do. Don't buy someone else's e-waste, the term Xeon covers a lot of chips, they range from something that is almost identical to the equivalent generation of desktop chips to high core/power server/workstation CPU's that drop things like iGPU and have more PCIe lanes than most people know what to do with. The thing is those chips are designed to run in well cooled DC's and the hardware is often not flexible or designed for home use. Hot, noisy, fans at 100% if you install an uncertified card, no BIOS updates unless you have a support contract etc. It needs some time spent working out what you need. The elephant in the room is Ryzen, it was the global extinction event to Xeon in this market. Xeon was capable of decent performance, but Ryzen was capable of more while using significantly less power (memory was limited TBH, but nothing you have said gets remotely close to that being a consideration).

Pi-Hole was designed to be run on a first gen Pi, shockingly they're ancient and largely worthless (eg change hands for next to nothing), running DNS on an actual Pi can be a lot easier and means if you reboot your NAS, you don't loose DNS, if you don't understand why that may be better, then perhaps consider every time you do, anyone else trying to use the connection is likely to call you quite unflattering names, and part of learning invariably means trying things, making mistakes, wiping the lot, reboots and updates.

So, lets try this again, you'd like a NAS/server to run how many drives? You'll be doing what sort of work on it? eg storing media files you write and then play occasionally. Will you be wanting to run something like Plex? The win10 instance you mention, what will that be used for? What hardware do you have? Anything specific that you can think of that you need to run/do that may dictate hardware requirements eg game. Also, what's your budget? Do you hate the person who pays the power bill?

Answer those and you'll get much, much better advice that isn't just a bunch of people telling you what works for them rather than trying to recommend something useful for what you want to do.
 
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The elephant in the room is Ryzen, it was the global extinction event to Xeon in this market. Xeon was capable of decent performance, but Ryzen was capable of more while using significantly less power (memory was limited TBH, but nothing you have said gets remotely close to that being a consideration).

Assuming OP does actually want to do stuff involving lots (as in actually lots and not just 4 discs or something) of drives in RAID, etc. without the costs of stuff like Threadripper and other Ryzen HEDT offerings the Ryzen chips more equivalent to older Xeons are much more limited for pci-e lanes and storage performance/features despite having a lot of newer features in other areas and a power/performance advantage. (Which is why I leaned towards the E5-16xx chips as they offer similar performance to 1st and 2nd gen Ryzen while having a decent amount of overhead silicon quality wise so you can tune them for much lower power use than stock - but that does require some advanced tinkering. Some of the other Xeons are much more locked down BIOS wise especially if you don't have access to BIOS updates, etc.).

In hardware terms, for a reasons I don't fully understand you often find people who get the idea to build a 'server' suddenly think they need to buy some ancient ex-corp box because it has xyz. They rarely - if ever - do. Don't buy someone else's e-waste, the term Xeon covers a lot of chips, they range from something that is almost identical to the equivalent generation of desktop chips to high core/power server/workstation CPU's that drop things like iGPU and have more PCIe lanes than most people know what to do with. The thing is those chips are designed to run in well cooled DC's and the hardware is often not flexible or designed for home use. Hot, noisy, fans at 100% if you install an uncertified card, no BIOS updates unless you have a support contract etc.

This is something often overlooked but I assumed here the OP would be building something more based around a workstation/desktop chassis using something like a single socket X79 board - you can still pick up the guts for this on places like Amazon and ebay, etc. often fairly cheap - though it is getting towards the end of the days for that - ~3 years back or so you'd get some decent mileage out of the kit, these days the life left on some of this still may be relatively short.

I mentioned in my first reply it wasn't necessarily the best option just something which works for me.
 
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Assuming OP does actually want to do stuff involving lots (as in actually lots and not just 4 discs or something) of drives in RAID, etc. without the costs of stuff like Threadripper and other Ryzen HEDT offerings the Ryzen chips more equivalent to older Xeons are much more limited for pci-e lanes and storage performance/features despite having a lot of newer features in other areas and a power/performance advantage. (Which is why I leaned towards the E5-16xx chips as they offer similar performance to 1st and 2nd gen Ryzen while having a decent amount of overhead silicon quality wise so you can tune them for much lower power use than stock - but that does require some advanced tinkering. Some of the other Xeons are much more locked down BIOS wise especially if you don't have access to BIOS updates, etc.).



This is something often overlooked but I assumed here the OP would be building something more based around a workstation/desktop chassis using something like a single socket X79 board - you can still pick up the guts for this on places like Amazon and ebay, etc. often fairly cheap - though it is getting towards the end of the days for that - ~3 years back or so you'd get some decent mileage out of the kit, these days the life left on some of this still may be relatively short.

I mentioned in my first reply it wasn't necessarily the best option just something which works for me.

The same generation of hardware you recommend did quite nicely with PCIe 2.0 HBA's, the H300 does OK on a PCIe 2 x4 slot, let alone the x8, they're hardly bandwidth hogs, especially in a gigabit bound domestic NAS project. In fact lots of the ended up linked to disk shelves or local SAS drives, heck even break out to SATA at a push. Ryzen's PCIe limits are well documented, but for an average GPU+HBA set-up it's high unlikely to be an issue. I stopped buying/using x99 based boards and the accompanying LGA2011-3 v3 and v4 Xeon's circa 3 years ago, probably longer, I loved the x99 platform, I have 192GB of the stuff because when virtualising i'll almost always hit RAM limits before CPU, but even I could get away with moving to a 64GB limited x370 platform. I really wouldn't want to suggest LGA-2011 let alone LGA-2011-3 CPU's in this day and age unless the usage is PCIe lane heavy and power isn't a consideration. Op specifically states cheap and power efficient, x79 and x99 boards are respective CPU's are going to be neither up front and especially in terms of ongoing usage.

A modern AMD with APU can run under 10w idle with a little work, lowest I got a barebones x99 with v4 Xeon was 57w (32GB/Nvidia 210/NVME), add an HBA and it's pushing 70w. That's over 5x the power just to idle, once you start doing anything you can expect 100w. Non HEDT AMD makes more sense vs a HEDT Xeon, a non HEDT Xeon (eg with iGPU) makes more sense vs Ryzen if Quicksync is a factor, but then again you can pick up a full i3-8100 ex corp box for £100ish or a CPU+MB for £40sih with lower power usage/TCO. Sadly we live in a world where our Hero's of yesteryear are e-waste now :(
 
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Ryzen's PCIe limits are well documented, but for an average GPU+HBA set-up it's high unlikely to be an issue.

Not to be awkward about it but especially the older Ryzen boards have all kinds of weird and wonderful, sometimes due to the motherboard manufacturer being cheap, limitations with the PCIe lanes - sometimes it is just as simple as having to choose between certain SATA ports and how many NVME slots are live but in other cases plugging in stuff like HBAs can inexplicably kill off other features which may or may not be vaguely mentioned in the manual! I've a number of times been asked to look at people's builds because they think the board or CPU is faulty only to eventually find it is a PCIe/chipset limitation.

I still lean somewhat towards the E5-16xx v2-4 setups though as they often appear for quite cheap and can be a good place to build experience even if you end up replacing them sooner rather than later when you understand better what you need.

This is all a bit of an aside unless the OP actually intends to build and utilise a system with a serious storage array setup though - as you said really need a better understanding of what the OP really needs to recommend something.
 
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For anyone reading the above and looking for a cheap AMD board

ASRock B450 Pro4 supports ECC and the PCI layout is adequate for most home servers, especially if you grab a GPU like the Zotac GT710 which only needs a PCIEx1 slot. Note none of the retail Ryzen APUs support ECC so if you want ECC you need a "normal" Ryzen.

In mine I have an NVME drive, a decent HBA and a 10Gb NIC and everything runs at max advertised speed with no PCIE constraints
 
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Most home server/lab setups don't need ECC IMO - outside of very specific applications. Bit different in the business world.
 
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This is a car crash, please stop.

We have an op who clearly has absolutely no idea what they are doing and why with a bunch of people, who should really know better recommending what works for them and that dinosaurs should be re-introduced, I feel like I have read/seen this somewhere before, it never ended well and produced some awful sequels.

Op, if you want to run a NAS/home server then that's great, it's a learning experience that can set people off in unintended paths as you'll gradually realise you can do all sorts with the right box, but this is really not the way to go about it. You mention TruNAS because seemingly you've heard of that, TruNAS is one of many distro's that exist, it's a decent choice in the right circumstances, but it's made a development choice that has very specific advantages and as a result a price has to be paid. What does your likely IO usage look like? Heavy sustained R/W or Write Once Read Often (WORO)? If it's the latter and on the assumption you don't have a bunch of matched drives kicking about but instead but whatever was the best £/TB at the time, have you considered UnRAID and it's pool/parity approach? It also has trade-offs in terms of R/W speed, but it's easily expandable and tends to favour people who want a NAS that runs services.

In hardware terms, for a reasons I don't fully understand you often find people who get the idea to build a 'server' suddenly think they need to buy some ancient ex-corp box because it has xyz. They rarely - if ever - do. Don't buy someone else's e-waste, the term Xeon covers a lot of chips, they range from something that is almost identical to the equivalent generation of desktop chips to high core/power server/workstation CPU's that drop things like iGPU and have more PCIe lanes than most people know what to do with. The thing is those chips are designed to run in well cooled DC's and the hardware is often not flexible or designed for home use. Hot, noisy, fans at 100% if you install an uncertified card, no BIOS updates unless you have a support contract etc. It needs some time spent working out what you need. The elephant in the room is Ryzen, it was the global extinction event to Xeon in this market. Xeon was capable of decent performance, but Ryzen was capable of more while using significantly less power (memory was limited TBH, but nothing you have said gets remotely close to that being a consideration).

Pi-Hole was designed to be run on a first gen Pi, shockingly they're ancient and largely worthless (eg change hands for next to nothing), running DNS on an actual Pi can be a lot easier and means if you reboot your NAS, you don't loose DNS, if you don't understand why that may be better, then perhaps consider every time you do, anyone else trying to use the connection is likely to call you quite unflattering names, and part of learning invariably means trying things, making mistakes, wiping the lot, reboots and updates.

So, lets try this again, you'd like a NAS/server to run how many drives? You'll be doing what sort of work on it? eg storing media files you write and then play occasionally. Will you be wanting to run something like Plex? The win10 instance you mention, what will that be used for? What hardware do you have? Anything specific that you can think of that you need to run/do that may dictate hardware requirements eg game. Also, what's your budget? Do you hate the person who pays the power bill?

Answer those and you'll get much, much better advice that isn't just a bunch of people telling you what works for them rather than trying to recommend something useful for what you want to do.
lol i was mainly after a system to store all my files in witch a have qite a few TB in the 100s and don't want them roting away lol, every thing else was after thought, i have a windows 10 pc thats 24/7 shareing files that why i was asking about VM server and wanted to set sum thing up that stops adds at router that why i said like PI hole, will probly useing a hell of a lot of WD gold HDD's, i brought up TueNAS as it's first one that come to mind and i like the UI, i pay the power bill , i only had the idea to pick up a xeon coz there so cheap on ebay


what i'm looking for in a server

to be able to have a lot of HDD's
i was thinking raid 6
i will be sorting music program file, video files every single retro game ever to come out ect,
yes i wont to beable to copy them to server then play them off
ive never used plex my self proably not use that
the windows pc just share files
ECC ram


don't realy have budgit
 
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Assuming OP does actually want to do stuff involving lots (as in actually lots and not just 4 discs or something) of drives in RAID, etc. without the costs of stuff like Threadripper and other Ryzen HEDT offerings the Ryzen chips more equivalent to older Xeons are much more limited for pci-e lanes and storage performance/features despite having a lot of newer features in other areas and a power/performance advantage. (Which is why I leaned towards the E5-16xx chips as they offer similar performance to 1st and 2nd gen Ryzen while having a decent amount of overhead silicon quality wise so you can tune them for much lower power use than stock - but that does require some advanced tinkering. Some of the other Xeons are much more locked down BIOS wise especially if you don't have access to BIOS updates, etc.).



This is something often overlooked but I assumed here the OP would be building something more based around a workstation/desktop chassis using something like a single socket X79 board - you can still pick up the guts for this on places like Amazon and ebay, etc. often fairly cheap - though it is getting towards the end of the days for that - ~3 years back or so you'd get some decent mileage out of the kit, these days the life left on some of this still may be relatively short.

I mentioned in my first reply it wasn't necessarily the best option just something which works for me.
i'm defo going to need more than 4 drives lol ive got backups of every game from atari to first xbox backup lol, yep thats what i was thinking (workstation/desktop chassis)
 
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For anyone reading the above and looking for a cheap AMD board

ASRock B450 Pro4 supports ECC and the PCI layout is adequate for most home servers, especially if you grab a GPU like the Zotac GT710 which only needs a PCIEx1 slot. Note none of the retail Ryzen APUs support ECC so if you want ECC you need a "normal" Ryzen.

In mine I have an NVME drive, a decent HBA and a 10Gb NIC and everything runs at max advertised speed with no PCIE constraints
cool will look in to that
 
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lol i was mainly after a system to store all my files in witch a have qite a few TB in the 100s and don't want them roting away lol, every thing else was after thought, i have a windows 10 pc thats 24/7 shareing files that why i was asking about VM server and wanted to set sum thing up that stops adds at router that why i said like PI hole, will probly useing a hell of a lot of WD gold HDD's, i brought up TueNAS as it's first one that come to mind and i like the UI, i pay the power bill , i only had the idea to pick up a xeon coz there so cheap on ebay


what i'm looking for in a server

to be able to have a lot of HDD's
i was thinking raid 6
i will be sorting music program file, video files every single retro game ever to come out ect,
yes i wont to beable to copy them to server then play them off
ive never used plex my self proably not use that
the windows pc just share files
ECC ram


don't realy have budgit

I'm not sure if you understand the implications here, so let me be absolutely clear: Running large disk arrays on premises will cost you a small fortune in power both directly and indirectly. Using the published UK average electricity price, it's £248/yr +VAT +CCL to run 100w of local server 24/7, and that's going up significantly again later in the year.

Before you go any further please understand that your average disk is pulling 5-7w spun up idle, add 50% for heavy load, so lets say you build a modest system with 24 drives, ignoring the obscene price of server chassis in recent years, that's (for simplicity's sake) 175w of idle drives, chuck in 60w for an idle system ('cheap' Xeon servers on bay can be anything unto 3-6x that) and then a pair of 4i HBA's, you're likely looking at 250w+ just to sit idle and run nothing. To put that in context, your electricity bill is now £620.50 +VAT + CCL higher each year, that's without actually doing any form of media management (honestly the fact you don't seemingly use media management/front end horrifies me). Lets say you discover the joys of media automation and start running some background services and now your CPU/IO is actually being used, 60w becomes 110w and your bill is now £744.60 +VAT + CCL. Now add in the cost to purchase the hardware, the spare drives, the UPS, spare drives and administration costs in dealing with backups (RAID is NOT a backup), the upfront could easily run into thousands and the ongoing costs (which will go up significantly again later this year) are going to be getting on for a grand a year. You also have the noise and the need to cool them in the summer - my office hit 26c this week with only a laptop running, if the rack was on, i'd need to drag the AC unit into service and have it running 24/7, again thats not cheap.

So have you considered if you can better achieve this differently? I have off-site servers using remote unlimited storage that cost me less per month can powering up my rack for a few days, zero set-up costs, hardware is maintained same day if it dies, and zero up-front costs, This includes backup and versioning. Ofcourse I am limited to my connections upload in getting my data to the off-site storage, but pulling it can be as high as line speed (read near gigabit for me, so other than extra latency, not really significantly different than reading from a local NAS, especially if it needs to spin up a drive).

If you choose to ignore the above, then read on...

For as long as I can remember it's been about £/MB or GB or TB and nobody cared about power or cost per bay. Now (and more so going forward) they are getting more important. Fewer higher density drives can be more favourable than smaller drives with a lower £/TB. Most people have a random selection of drives based on whatever was the best £/TB at the time they needed more space. So something like UnRAID works well here. You use the largest drive for parity and then the rest are storage. You can then take unto one drive failure with no data loss. If another drive dies, you only loose the data on that single drive and the rest are easily mounted/read. If you want dual parity like R6, then you add two parity drives. In read terms, you're limited to the network speed unless you have dropped the coin on 2.5/10Gb. Going R6 requires you to have matching drives and you're still limited to the same network bottleneck. ZFS gives you better data security, but again expanding VDEV's is a BALL ACHE at best and again you need drives of the same capacity really.

If you want to go the data integrity route, ZFS is superior, BUT you really, really need to understand what you're buying into and the expansion path, it will hurt you down the line if you don't and exit strategies tend to be expensive/time consuming. RAID 6 is pretty pointless from a performance perspective in a home environment and if you want dual parity, UnRAID - you obviously have a separate 3:2:1 backups anyway. The files you mention tend to be small and your clients are generally going to be limited to gigabit without going 2.5/10Gb. ECC is almost always pointless in a home environment, it's use was often justified by a selective quote from a NAS distro developer, the full quote unsurprisingly gave important context that's often ignored because people haven't actually read it, just regurgitated it because thats what someone told them, so it must be true. The money can often be better spent on much more beneficial things like a UPS that will usually be used more... I can count on two fingers in the last two decades how often ECC events have happened in my own experience, let alone that anything being useful (1 finger at best).

All ASROCK X/B based AMD boards supported ECC, with other OEM's it was hit and miss despite the chips supporting them, as pointed out above it's chip dependant though. Some AMD boards will even run without a GPU at all as I found in the quest to free up some slots.
 
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Before you go any further please understand that your average disk is pulling 5-7w spun up idle, add 50% for heavy load, so lets say you build a modest system with 24 drives, ignoring the obscene price of server chassis in recent years, that's (for simplicity's sake) 175w of idle drives, chuck in 60w for an idle system ('cheap' Xeon servers on bay can be anything unto 3-6x that) and then a pair of 4i HBA's, you're likely looking at 250w+ just to sit idle and run nothing. To put that in context, your electricity bill is now £620.50 +VAT + CCL higher each year, that's without actually doing any form of media management (honestly the fact you don't seemingly use media management/front end horrifies me). Lets say you discover the joys of media automation and start running some background services and now your CPU/IO is actually being used, 60w becomes 110w and your bill is now £744.60 +VAT + CCL. Now add in the cost to purchase the hardware, the spare drives, the UPS, spare drives and administration costs in dealing with backups (RAID is NOT a backup), the upfront could easily run into thousands and the ongoing costs (which will go up significantly again later this year) are going to be getting on for a grand a year. You also have the noise and the need to cool them in the summer - my office hit 26c this week with only a laptop running, if the rack was on, i'd need to drag the AC unit into service and have it running 24/7, again thats not cheap.

If you care about power use don't install Windows 10/11 or server variants either :s I've a lightweight mini PC I use to sync 2 portable FileHub routers - with Windows 7 or OSes based off Linux on there it averages about 3 watt idle, with Windows 10 on there it averages closer to 7 as there is so much going on in the background when Windows 10 thinks the system is idle...
 
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If you care about power use don't install Windows 10/11 or server variants either :s I've a lightweight mini PC I use to sync 2 portable FileHub routers - with Windows 7 or OSes based off Linux on there it averages about 3 watt idle, with Windows 10 on there it averages closer to 7 as there is so much going on in the background when Windows 10 thinks the system is idle...

I can't imagine a situation where any reasonable person would consider installing Windows as a NAS OS, storage spaces isn't in a good place for this usage and snapRAID/DrivePool are far from perfect and regular questions are asked about the developer of the latter for a number of reasons.
 
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