New Home Server to Replace ageing Micro-Server for Plex/Virtual Machines recommendation

saayinla · 14 Mar 2018 at 14:16

Hi All,

I am in the market for a new All-in-One Server.

I currently have a struggling Microserver 54NL AMD box and I recently added a Hp Deskpro SFF PC as the AMD on the micro server was a pain . I use it for Plex , backs etc. I would love to have a couple of VMs etc for seeding (Behind a VPN of course).

I have 4 x 4TB drives. WOuld love the ease of the swappable Microserver drives in a bnew server but also want some grunts like a Xeon processor for plex/VM hosting.

Any advise will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

pommy02 · 14 Mar 2018 at 15:28

Dell T30? £360ish with the xeon

hyperseven · 14 Mar 2018 at 16:14

Gen8 and pop in a xeon, running a i3 3240 in mine, 4 threads, was only twenty odd quid.

BongoHunter · 14 Mar 2018 at 16:20

HP ML10? E3 Xeon and 64gb memory limit with a reasonable PCIE layout and 5-6 sata ports.

Probably going to cost slightly more than the Dell with the Xeon, but cheaper with a G4400...

Personally I avoid these microservers now as I believe all of the proprietary bits on them (and in some cases extremely basic BIOSs for example) can make them more expensive painful for home use long term than building your own - unless you get an awesome deal or a decent wedge of cash back. I exclude the gen8 microservers from this sweeping statement though as they were pretty close to perfect!

If you have a case and PSU available then picking up any ECC capable i3 or E3 Xeon and a c232 motherboard maybe a cheaper option - and upgrading the thing is much much easier

Edit:
£250 for HPE ML10 G9 - G4400 + 4GB Ram + No HDD
£300 for HPE MicroServer G10 (entry) - Opteron X3216 + 8GB + No HDD
£400 for Dell T30 - Xeon E3-1225v5 + 8GB + 1TB HDD
£500 for HPE ML10 G9 - Xeon E3-1225v5 + 8GB + 1TB HDD
^These we're cheapest by Google shop thing - so there might be better deals out there with cashback.

If you roll your own then:
£140 for ASRock - E3C232D4U-V1L Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
£72 for 8GB Kingston ECC 2400
£85 for i3-6100 3.7 GHz (2c) OR £160 for Intel Xeon E3-1225 V6 (4c)

£297 Total for the i3
£372 Total for the Xeon

TBH you could probably get away with a G4560 - they are less than £50 (2c4t) and run at 3.5Ghz!

You've already got disks so a cheap tower, and any PSU and I think youve got a better value system then the HP or Dell stuff above - you could also save a few more quid by getting 2133 RAM, or save some leccy with a 35W TDP Intel chip (cheapest is i3-6100T @ about £100).

I think the real advantage comes when you want to upgrade later - your going to have a lot more choices and you have 0 chance of a propriatory PSU/case/motherboard ruining your day (though surpisingly at least the formfactors of the ML10 look pretty standard so that one might be alright).

saayinla · 14 Mar 2018 at 17:07

Many thanks all for taking your time to respond.

I have been looking at the Dell T30 also, just a bit ****** i ll need an additional controller to be able to use more than 4 SATA connection which is annoying and pushes me back to the Gen8 range. I suppose I can get a used Gen 8 for about £200+ on the bidding site plus aboht £100 for the Xeon E3-1230V2 for an upgrade.

What is the maximum amount of RAM I can stick in the Gen8?

I ll just have to make do with the 4 Bays for now.

BongoHunter · 14 Mar 2018 at 17:28

saayinla said:
Many thanks all for taking your time to respond.

I have been looking at the Dell T30 also, just a bit ****** i ll need an additional controller to be able to use more than 4 SATA connection which is annoying and pushes me back to the Gen8 range. I suppose I can get a used Gen 8 for about £200+ on the bidding site plus aboht £100 for the Xeon E3-1230V2 for an upgrade.

What is the maximum amount of RAM I can stick in the Gen8?

I ll just have to make do with the 4 Bays for now.

Spending 300 on a gen8 at this point surely cant be better value? This years i3 would out perform that v2 Xeon I would think (well almost) and its cheaper!

Anycase with 3 5.25 bays will allow you to use a bay converter to give you 4-5 Hotswap 3.5 drives

E.G:

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Corsair Graphite Series 230T Compact Mid Tower Case (CC-9011036-WW)= £61.99
1 x OcUK Professional 5 x 3.5" SATA Hot Swap into 3 x 5.25" Drive Bays - OC-H500= £69.95

Total: £143.64 (includes shipping: £11.70)

Edit: that ASrock board I posted above has 6 Sata and an m2 slot on a x2 link

saayinla · 14 Mar 2018 at 20:06

BongoHunter said:
Spending 300 on a gen8 at this point surely cant be better value? This years i3 would out perform that v2 Xeon I would think (well almost) and its cheaper!

Anycase with 3 5.25 bays will allow you to use a bay converter to give you 4-5 Hotswap 3.5 drives

E.G:

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Corsair Graphite Series 230T Compact Mid Tower Case (CC-9011036-WW)= £61.99

1 x OcUK Professional 5 x 3.5" SATA Hot Swap into 3 x 5.25" Drive Bays - OC-H500= £69.95

Total: £143.64 (includes shipping: £11.70)

Edit: that ASrock board I posted above has 6 Sata and an m2 slot on a x2 link

This is brilliant, I didn't even realise they do hot swappable standalone kit like this.

Is it safe to assume the hot swap drive bays will fit into the 3 5.25" bay of this case or any case for that matter?

Whats the best bang for buck CPU I can get for the above board both in terms of grunt and performance.

many thanks for your help.

BongoHunter · 14 Mar 2018 at 20:58

saayinla said:
This is brilliant, I didn't even realise they do hot swappable standalone kit like this.

Is it safe to assume the hot swap drive bays will fit into the 3 5.25" bay of this case or any case for that matter?

Whats the best bang for buck CPU I can get for the above board both in terms of grunt and performance.

many thanks for your help.

They will fit most cases - but not all, some cases have protrusions into the drive cage (normally handy for installing a single 5.52 drive) but they can stop some cases being compatible - though 2 mins and a pair of tin snips would sort you out if you got a case you needed to do this to, though it's normally obvious if it will work or not if you look at a few pics.

You can get versions of these that will put 3 hdd into 2 bays, or 4/5 drives into 3. InWin, Supermicro, Icy Dock and Silverstone all have products in this space.

Might be better off getting a case like the Silverstone CS380 (£100) if you don't already have a case, or the CS350 if(££££££!) if you want something you could rackmount.

Best case for a home server like this right now is probably the InWin MS08, but they are very very hard to find in Europe for some reason at the moment: https://www.in-win.com/en/ipc-server/ms08/

Good value CPU for that ASrock board would probably be the i3 - it's sits squarely in the middle of the Pentium and Xeon for price and performace. But the Xeons are worth it if you need the extra cache or performance for Virtualisation - worth checking on the ASrock site to find out if all versions of that board will support the very latest Intel CPUs - you might need to flash the BIOS for support if your unlucky enough to get a board that's been sat in a warehouse for a while.

saayinla · 14 Mar 2018 at 22:59

BongoHunter said:
They will fit most cases - but not all, some cases have protrusions into the drive cage (normally handy for installing a single 5.52 drive) but they can stop some cases being compatible - though 2 mins and a pair of tin snips would sort you out if you got a case you needed to do this to, though it's normally obvious if it will work or not if you look at a few pics.

You can get versions of these that will put 3 hdd into 2 bays, or 4/5 drives into 3. InWin, Supermicro, Icy Dock and Silverstone all have products in this space.

Might be better off getting a case like the Silverstone CS380 (£100) if you don't already have a case, or the CS350 if(££££££!) if you want something you could rackmount.

Best case for a home server like this right now is probably the InWin MS08, but they are very very hard to find in Europe for some reason at the moment: https://www.in-win.com/en/ipc-server/ms08/

Good value CPU for that ASrock board would probably be the i3 - it's sits squarely in the middle of the Pentium and Xeon for price and performace. But the Xeons are worth it if you need the extra cache or performance for Virtualisation - worth checking on the ASrock site to find out if all versions of that board will support the very latest Intel CPUs - you might need to flash the BIOS for support if your unlucky enough to get a board that's been sat in a warehouse for a while.

Thanks for your detailed analysis and time once again.

I love the Silverstone case and found this while searching online as my Computer Cabinet is not very deep, I ll struggle to plug the power cable at the back plus no clearance to be able to open the case door at the front.

What do you think of the Mini ITX form factor?

I would prefer to go for the Xeon Option once and for all as it will save me the trouble and hassle of upgrading in the very near future.

saayinla · 15 Mar 2018 at 06:45

joshwba1200 said:
I have the dell T30 does eveything i need it to do for a reasonable price

What CPU do you have in yours and how many SATA 3.5 drive can one fit inside?

BongoHunter · 15 Mar 2018 at 08:31

saayinla said:
Thanks for your detailed analysis and time once again.

I love the Silverstone case and found this while searching online as my Computer Cabinet is not very deep, I ll struggle to plug the power cable at the back plus no clearance to be able to open the case door at the front.

What do you think of the Mini ITX form factor?

I would prefer to go for the Xeon Option once and for all as it will save me the trouble and hassle of upgrading in the very near future.

Mini ITX is great for home server setups like this but there are quite a few gotchas that rule them out for me...

- your only going to get a single PCIE slot, so you'll be wanting a high end board that either has enough Sata / raid on board already, or has better that 1Gb nics built in. Supermicro have some awesome Xeon D ITX boards that have 10GB NICs and 8 Sata ports - very expensive though!

- many of the ITX boards only have 2 regular dimm slots, and may force you to use sodimms. 2 slots means you'll be paying for fewer higher capacity dimms, rather than more cheaper ones, so it's worth researching, some ITX boards for XeonD will take 128gb of registered memory for example, but you would need to spend £1200+ on dimms alone!

In general you way pay more for less Capability with ITX - so might only be worth it if very short on space. How deep is the rack/cabinate do you have?

On the plus side - cases for ITX boards can be had quite easily that already have hotswap caddies built in, and you can get a very tidy professional looking solution - beware on the ITX InWin case with hotswap drive bays - it only takes a single half height exapanion card!

bimbleuk · 15 Mar 2018 at 08:58

While you are looking a QNAP NAS running QTS 4.3.4 because it does everything you mentioned plus more in the first post and can be more power efficient and unobtrusive while doing it. I have a 4K TV plugged directly to mine via HDMI and use a version of myKodi 17.6 to watch films with sound output to an AV amp.

I did originally use Plex server on the NAS and used the Plex client in the TV but the direct connection just made it simpler for me.

Entry price can look a bit steep though for an up-gradable one with 4 bays, quad core, 16GB and PCIE slots etc.

I'm currently switching between an Ubuntu desktop (also accessible by VPN) and their own Hybrid Desktop currently to see which I prefer but both can run builds of Kodi or Plex and many other apps. You can also run docker VMs simultaneously on the actual QTS server which runs in the background so there's almost too many options to run things on them!

I'm also on the verge of installing a 2 x M.2 NVME + 10gbe PCI card I mine to start converting my home LAN to 10gbe.

GPU pass-through is just starting to take off too on certain models but it is early days for that but there's only so much you can fit in a small cube box!

pioneer2000 · 15 Mar 2018 at 13:38

What on earth do you need 10gbe for in a home environment?

BongoHunter · 15 Mar 2018 at 15:10

pioneer2000 said:
What on earth do you need 10gbe for in a home environment?

If I tried to backup or restore 1 TB of data over a 1Gb nic I'd probably need to allow 2 hours?

1gb is fine for streaming or gaming, or using a VM. But as soon as you want to move data at scale, or use it as a virtual data store for VMs on another host you need 5, 10, 25 or 40 Gb NICs unless your extremely patient or performance doesn't matter.

Without an SSD cache in a NAS though it's probably pointless as you may be disk speed limited rather than network speed limited anyway depending on your setup.

pioneer2000 · 15 Mar 2018 at 16:05

and how often are you backing up / restoring terabytes of data at home?

Stelly · 15 Mar 2018 at 16:59

Gen 8 with a xeon is rapid!

Thats what I have my plex on

Stelly

Stelly · 15 Mar 2018 at 16:59

I have the switch as well and have teamed the NICs

Stelly

BongoHunter · 15 Mar 2018 at 19:08

pioneer2000 said:
and how often are you backing up / restoring terabytes of data at home?

I have no idea what the OP needs in this regard - but personally I do a full backup once a week of my whole system (4 TB) - a backup that takes a whole working day to run is no good as far as I'm concerned

bimbleuk · 16 Mar 2018 at 08:29

pioneer2000 said:
What on earth do you need 10gbe for in a home environment?

I think I can do what I want in my home thanks!

I have just done a complete backup, refresh and restore of my NAS with larger drives and that was several terabytes of data. No I won't be doing that very often but having 10gbe will make it that much quicker in the future.

Personally I'm only planning a single RJ45 10gbe connection between my main PC and the NAS via the PCIE upgrade slot (the addition of 2 x NVME M.2 drives is a bonus and something else to play with) until the cost of the NICs/Switches continue to fall than I'll consider other devices in the house.

Plus if no one starts to buy the new tech we'll be stuck with 1gbe forever

2013 · 21 Mar 2018 at 20:08

hyperseven said:
Gen8 and pop in a xeon, running a i3 3240 in mine, 4 threads, was only twenty odd quid.

Hi im thinking of doing the same, did you see much improvement ?