New server - Need direction

exceluk1 · 13 Mar 2022 at 13:16

Hi,
It's come to that point in my life where I would like to invest in a server and looking for direction on hardware. Having done some research i'm finding the options on hardware distracting (too many options and routes).

Purpose

NAS - While the size of the pool is not a major concern atm a starting pool of around 8TB would be a good base to start from. I plan to use Proxmox as the OS and Truenas scale as the controller, so PCI passthrough is a must? At the moment I have no need for redundancy of the main data but perhaps some way of backing up VM images / snapshots?
Plexserver - Have no need for transcoding, this will just be used for home use, direct stream all content.
Usenet - The likes of NZBget, Raddar ...
Roon / Jriver - A media server that can support DSD
Work related - VMs Freeswitch, Avaya and other SIP based. None of these require much to run in a test environment and will only be spun up when testing.

Constraints

Cost - I have a budget of £1000, for all hardware inc HDD.
Power - In the current climate power costs are a concern, the ability to shut down and restart serves when needed is something I need to learn.
Noise - While this will be setup in a spare room, if the Mrs can hear the server running in the middle of the night I'm going to hear her .

I've had a look at a build over at https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-5-0/3072 but there are so many options.

Have also used https://uk.labgopher.com/ and found.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/22486735...-53481-19255-0&campid=5338198609&toolid=10050

Before going pushing the button any ideas are most welcome.

Thanks

Avalon · 15 Mar 2022 at 14:18

How can you say power efficient, quiet and £1K and then look at a rack mount DL380 G9 with LGA2011-3 Xeon's that went north of €1.6K? That's literally the exact opposite of what you say you want. Ryzen decimated the LGA2011 Xeon market for home lab use except in very limited scenarios, with the lack of cheap power, they're now looking even less appealing. Avoid HP, you need a way to bypass the paywall for anything update related, non certified hardware = fans @ 100% and ear defenders.

From what you've given us, how fast is the connection? RAR/PAR work probably wants to be kept off the array on something NVMe based. You can buy a (not awful) rack mount case from OCUK's parent company for very little, personally I would go with something nicer from SuperMicro or similar, throw a reasonable quality board in with a Ryzen (if you are absolutely sure you won't need HW transcodes eg friends/family) or an 8th gen i3 (4c) or i5 (6c). You get decent performance, decent power efficiency and cheap upgrade path going forward, but lack ECC. Intel NIC's for Gigabit (2T minimum), 10Gb depends on your switching. Drive wise if you are only talking about 8TB then it's pretty minimal, onboard controllers will keep you going and you can always HBA out to a shelf if/when you outgrow. You can pick up some quite reasonable 7th gen onwards intel based desktop/workstation/server bargains via eBay that would likely suit your needs for £80-200 + NIC + storage that will run quietly enough that you could probably sleep/watch a film in the same room as them.

casper_uk · 17 Mar 2022 at 19:06

I would look at unraid. Any old (cheap) pc could be put together, including second hand/spare parts etc you already have. I used a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, B450M MORTAR MAX, 32 GiB DDR4 for mine. It runs my jellyfin server, takes care of the arr's via dockers etc and plods along with 1% cpu usage even when watching something from jellyfin so is cheap to run.

exceluk1 · 20 Mar 2022 at 03:08

Avalon said:
€1.6K?

From what you've given us, how fast is the connection? RAR/PAR work probably wants to be kept off the array on something NVMe based..

I thought it looked a bargain at £950.
Only 120mb. NVMe might be possible, was looking at mirroring 2 x 2.5 ssd for OS /VM. Let the adventure begin.

I've ended up with a R720xd 2x Intel E5-2670 32GB RAM 36TB 12x 3TB 3.5" SAS

Avalon · 23 Mar 2022 at 10:36

exceluk1 said:
I thought it looked a bargain at £950.
Only 120mb. NVMe might be possible, was looking at mirroring 2 x 2.5 ssd for OS /VM. Let the adventure begin.

I've ended up with a R720xd 2x Intel E5-2670 32GB RAM 36TB 12x 3TB 3.5" SAS

Presumably you chose to drop power efficient and quiet in favour of low purchase price and paying £3-400+/yr to run it, or you really hate your Mrs and she pays the power bill?

A R720XD of that spec (without drives) will be getting on for 100w idle at the wall, 3TB SAS drives are 5-7w idle (60-84w for 12), add 50% for load. Actually doing anything vaguely load related will see you north of 200w (£350/yr) with drives spun up, a lot more if used in anger. Each watt costs me £1.75/yr inc 5% VAT (price capped), that's going to go up again later this year. An efficient Ryzen set-up can idle sub 20w (£35/yr), a recent intel system with iGPU can idle much lower and is capable of 20+ HW transcodes (H264 1080 >720).

Personally, if you have a reasonable connection, merging local SSD/HDD pools and cloud storage and efficient local hardware and a remote VPS or budget server can give you a much, much better outcome - I don't even spin up most of my rack/disk shelves anymore, it's cheaper to let google deal with the storage than idle a rack and that's without the heat/noise.

Hope it works out for you