Early threadripper worth it for Unraid now?

[decto]

Currently have a Dell T20 Xeon 1225V3 16GB ECC DDR3 running my unraid with 6 x 4 TB 3.5" HDD + 4 x 2.5" SSD for cache and specific uses... e.g. VM's etc.

Have a quad Gigabit Intel Lan (pfsense) + flashed LSI raid card with 2 x SAS for 8 SATA drives so can run 12 drives in total. More would be better as currently not all of the drives are in the main array. I expect I'd need a discrete GPU so I need at least 3 PCI-E x 8 slots, ideally more.

Server used for Plex, VM's, gaming servers etc.

I'd like to move to a more spacious case and a have a little more CPU grunt and memory so I have less start / stop with the VM's and game servers.

Gen 1 threadripper looks very cheap right now, especially the 1920X. Paired up with a low end X399 board and some ECC ram looks like a great platform for a new server build. The 2920X is around £100 more expensive for around 10% extra performance, so not sure it is really needed.

I assume this would give me around 3700X / 3800X performance, though significantly lower on single core.

A 3700X + X570 would be more expensive and be limited to 2 dram channels with a lot less PCI-E lanes. I could get a cheaper B450 x 470 board but these lose some of the SATA and often have realtek lan. As ECC is generally not much faster than 2666Mhz, bandwidth could be an issue for the VM's.

Any other options?

 

[decto]

Lots to think about, thanks Avalon.

I currently have 6 x 4TB in the array, 2 x parity + 4 storage. I'd like replace the 2 parity drives with 8TB or greater, that would give me the other 2 x 4TB straight back into the pool.
As time goes by I'd then slowly retire drives replacing with bigger ones to add storage. I'm not so keen on really large drives as it already takes 12 hours for a parity check with 4TB drives.
8 drives is about the max I want to go to with this type of system.
The other drives, from the board are cache x2 or VM / scratch drive for a VM
When I had a quick look at cloud storage, it seemed a bit of a grey area, not really clear in some cases what 'unlimited' means or storage providers I've never really heard of that could disappear overnight.
I'd probably still want to keep 2 copies even if it was copied to the cloud as it the provider goes bump and I pull out my local copy I'm back to one copy.

The controller I have is an LSI rebrand, possibly HP though it was listed as a PCI-E 2 x8, I'd have thought with anything less than PCI-E 2.0 x4 it would be a bottle neck as 1 PCI-E 2.0 lane is 500MB/S while a single HDD can hit north of 150MB/s these days.
When it's doing a parity check, all drives are accessed together. The Lan card is x4 PCI-E 2.0 though it would be unlikely I fully load more than 1 or 2 ports with internal file transfers.

I had considered 2700 / 2700X though the cheap deals on motherboards no longer seem to exist. A 370 Taichi is double the price you paid, and a 470 Taichi is dearer still.
In these cases the 1920X + motherboard is around £100 more expensive than 2700X + mid range board. There are some cheaper X370 about, but I'd need to look at quality and ECC compatibility which is sketchy for a lot of brands and with the inclusion of NVMe drives you're lucky to get 2x PCI-E x8 + one or more x1


Plenty to think on.

 

[decto]

So after a bit more digging and a timely Gamers Nexus video published yesterday I'm now agreed that threadripper is not good value for my needs so no rush to buy now.
I have been looking for suitable AM4 motherboards. Plenty of inexpensive boards but very few with any evidence of ECC support, Intel LAN and reasonable PCI-E , X8 X4 X4 , X8 X8 X4 etc.
Cheapest seems to be ASUS PRIME X370-PRO but only 1 Trancend ECC kit on the Zen QVL list, nothing on the Zen+ QVL list and very mixed forum comments mostly from 2017. CH6 has no ECC support, which leads to the X370 X470 Taichi as no other potential ECC boards have more than X8 X8 X1 as it seems to be mostly Asrock and a few ASUS

The Asrock Rack X470D4U looks interesting if a little expensive, no more so than a threadripper board though. X8 X8 X4, ECC, 6 SATA, 2 M2, 2 Intel NIC, IPMI. Only for Zen+ or Zen 2 which is fine.
No unnecassary frippery so should be good for power consumption.

I've looked a google storage, google drive now seems to be replaced by google one with tiers at 2TB £8 per month, 10TB £80 per month, 20TB £160 per month.... so ouch.
There is a 'unlimited' G-suite for £8pm but the small print says 1TB.

Anyhow, thanks for the detailed replies on TR, a different perspective helps.

 

[decto]

I guess ECC is a personal choice. I do have a WHS2011 server running on a 10 year old AM3 motherboard with 4GB of DDR 2 ram, it was used with XP MCE for a couple of years then I went with WHS and moved the box out of the lounge.
It's been running ever since though for the last couple of years it's just been running backup processes for other machines and is firewalled off everything else. With some more drive bays I'd either virtualise of move to an alternative backup solution.
It doesn't have ECC and the world hasn't ended yet.

The case in my head is:
The server will run 24/7 with rare reboots. Unraid often gets over 180 days uptime.
Likely to be in use for 6 or more years, possibly 10 like WHS.
The cost of unbuffered ECC Ram isn't that much more expenisve. I found new samsumg 16GB ECC UDimms @ £75 - £90 depending on speed.
This server will have a least 32GB on a smaller process node. More oppertunity for failure.
Faster desktop Ram at XMP settings may be more likely to fail in a long service life.
Going with slower (non XMP) Ram negates the majority of any performance advantage of non ECC memory
A 'server' or premium board is likely to be more reliable.

The majority of the duties are non critical.
These days I prefer the box to just run quietly in the background with no issues.
Given the cost of Case, PSU, Drives etc ECC isn't that much extra.

More a question of why not?

If it saves me a day of troubleshooting or restoring 20TB from backups over it's life, I'd consider it money well spent.


As for other capabiliites, It's mainly a NAS that runs VM's a few local game servers and Plex (with supporting apps) so I don't need super fast storage speed or masses of number crunching.
The existing 4 core (no HT) CPU is feeling a bit tight with the VM's I run, 2 of them are windows, so more cores and 32/64GB of Ram should set me up for a good while.