New home NAS and Hypervisor setup

[TallGraham]

Hi everyone

Stumbled across this site and am so glad I did. I'm now not the only geek in the world trying to build a huge NAS/Hypervisor setup

So this story all started back in 2008 when I first built my home esxi server. I won't bore you with all the details and all the endless hardware I have been through and tried. Suffice to say I can never get it quite as I want. This time I am determined to do it. For the last 18 months I have been selling off all of my old bits and pieces and picking up what I can where I can. The plan is to have a setup that runs as low powered and as quietly as possible.

The plan so far is this:

NAS Server
As many disks as possible for various storage, up to 20 disks.
Ability so serve out data via iSCSI and also shares.
Low power and as silent as possible.

I currently have:

1 x Adaptec 6405 4 port 6Gbps RAID card (PCI-e 4x)
2 x Adapetc 5805 8 port 3Gbps RAID card (PCI-e 8x)
2 x Intel PT1000 Quad Port Gigabit NICs (PCI-e 4x)
4 x 4GB DDR3 DIMMs

With these cards I am looking for an ATX motherboard that has enough slots. The best one I have seen so far is the ASRock Z77 Entreme9

ASRock > Z77 Extreme9

The best processor I have seen so far is Intel Core i5 3470T which has max TDP of just 35W.

The biggest time has been spent looking at cases. I was going to use 2.5 hard disks to save on power and noise and was thinking of these hotswap bays from IcyDock:

MB996SP-6SB_INTERNAL MULTI-BAY_ICY DOCK manufacturer Removable enclosure, Screwless hard drive enclosure, SAS SATA Mobile Rack, DVR Surveillance Recording, Video Audio Editing, SATA portable hard drive enclosure

I had been planning to fit these to a Corsair Obsidian 550D but wasn't sure on how much airflow would get through the 5.25 drive bays with the door closed. I did email Corsair but they haven't replied

Then I saw the 50+TB thread by nry and the XCase rackmount cases. Whilst I can't have a network rack as I don't have the space, I could stack this on the top of my desk. Just worried about how noisy this will be.

Hypervisor Servers
The idea here was to have 3 x servers that are totally diskless and headless. These will boot the OS via iSCSI to the NAS server. This would allow me to use this as both a Hyper V and ESXi cluster just by changing the LUN the server boots from. See the link below for which Intel cards can be upgraded to boot iSCSI. This even includes the single port PCI-e CT desktop adapter.

Intel® Server Adapters — Which adapters support Intel® iSCSI Remote Boot?

I had wanted to use mini-ITX but just couldn't find any motherboards that supported 32GB of RAM. In the end I got 3 of these Intel DQ77MK motherboards when I saw them on offer. These have APM built in so I can run KVM over IP and have them totally headless.

Intel® Desktop Board DQ77MK: Overview

Processors I wanted to use for these are the Intel i7-3770t which run at a maximum TDP of 45W. These get great reviews and when I compared them appear to do everything that the Intel Xeon E3 chips do.

I searched and searched for some small MicroATX cases with no joy. Now I'm thinking about a simple 2U rackmount case from XCase for each one. The trouble is I already have 2 x Intel PT Quad Port network cards that I was going to use and they are full height.


So that's the starting point, after much rambling on. Any ideas on equipment would be great. I'd really like the NAS server motherboard to be able to run headless as well with it's own IP based KVM like the Intel boards.

 

[dba]

...The biggest time has been spent looking at cases. I was going to use 2.5 hard disks to save on power and noise and was thinking of these hotswap bays from IcyDock:

MB996SP-6SB_INTERNAL MULTI-BAY_ICY DOCK manufacturer Removable enclosure, Screwless hard drive enclosure, SAS SATA Mobile Rack, DVR Surveillance Recording, Video Audio Editing, SATA portable hard drive enclosure

I have several IcyDock backplanes and I like them - for SSD drives. For spinning drives, all of them that I have seen have what I consider a big problem: The disk caddies are metal, fit loosely, and can vibrate. Spinning drives do not like vibration.

 

[nitrobass24]

Agree w/ DBA.

For your NAS...have you considered buying a NAS appliance? I replaced my DIY SAN/NAS (Norco 4020 w/ 4x 640GB(raid10) & 10x 1TB(RAID6) & 6x 2TB(Raid5)) w/ a Synology DS1812 w/ 5x4TB drives (RAID5). Its silent...compared to anything else I am running. Can carve out iSCSI, NFS, SMB, CIFS shares as needed. I can backup automatically to another device or even Amazon Glacier. I am using NFS on my synology and have not had any performance issues running about 10 VMs plus acting as a home media storage server...all on the same array.

I think building your own has its place....like when you are building a Data Warehouse or a 50TB cluster...but if you just need 20TB for a couple of hosts...then maybe a simpler, smaller, quieter solution makes sense.

Just a thought.

 

[TallGraham]

Hi dba

Thanks for the feedback regarding the Icydock bays.

I'm now looking to XCase Pc cases and computer cases online at X-Case. at some of their 4U Rackmount Chassis. Can't decide between these two really. I think nry is using one of them in his build.

X-Case RM 420 Hotswap 4u, RPC-4220 Norco online at X-Case

25 bay hotswap home server case online at X-Case

The first is a 20 bay case, where as the second is a 24 bay case but is designed for home use. The 20 bay base is 660mm whilst the 24 bay is considerably shorter at 550mm. It looks like the motherboard would be a real squash, however would fit better on my desk.

From reading here and other forums I can see people say the stock fans sound like jet engines. So I guess I will replace them. I had planned to put a fanless PSU in the Corsair Obsidian 550D. Has anyone done this on one of these cases? The direct air on it from the centre mounts fans would hopefully help with cooling.

I forgot to mention that I have also picked up a Cisco SG300-28 switch to plug all of this into when I get it up and running. Main reason for this was that it has no fans so again will run silent. Plus I use Cisco at work so am familiar with their stuff, even though this is a cut down SMB device.

 

[TallGraham]

Hi nitrobass24


Thanks for the input and sharing your story. This is all exactly the kind of info I am looking for to help me make decisions. So many reviews of kit online are just naff I find. Mainly people videoing getting things out of the box. I've been in IT now for almost 20 years and want to know all the geeky stuff that goes with it as well

I had considered an off the shelf NAS. Part of me feels like a cheat as I should be able to make my own, and want to But the other part appreciates what they can do, and the warranties available. I like the idea of the cloud backups that you mention. Oddly enough we were talking about this as an offsite disaster recover option for or VM backups today.

That Synology box looks really nice, and I mean really nice. Costs over £1,000 from my search on the internet, and that's without any disks. I know I'll likely spend that making my own any way so price really shouldn't be an issue. I do want to run Windows Server 2012 on there though. I work at an educational establishment so I am very lucky in that I can be enrolled on the Microsoft Dreamspark program and get free access lots of software for development use. If I run server 2012 then this can act as my domain controller as well. I can add all the funky stuff for: DHCP, DNS, FTP, and then use products like Serviio for my media library as well.

 

[TallGraham]

So the next question for everybody is about the Xeon E3-1220L v2 processor.

Is anyone running this? How powerful is it? I can't seem to find any decent comparisons or benchmarks online.

I'll be running Windows Server 2012 on there hopefully and want it to do basic stuff like: AD, DHCP, DNS. Plus running Serviio, and being my NAS

 

[PigLover]

E3-1220L does not have any on-chip graphics. With vPRO AMT you need graphics on the chip to get full remote KVM.

Some people have reported success running this CPU on Z77 chipset boards as a true headless. Makes a very good extremely low power server config. But doing this requires you to be comfortable with text based management. And you might need a video card temporarily to do the install.

Also - if you decide to go this way - be sure to get the E3-1200Lv2. You definitely want the ivy bridge version.

 

[RimBlock]

Hi TallGraham,

There are two main paths for a storage server in your environment. Dedicated (only acts as a storage server) or an All-in-one (does other things as well and is usually a virtual host).

For the dedicated, something like the E3-1220Lv2 should be perfect (although officially OEM / tray only). Low tdp at 17W, 4 cores and will manage basic stuff.

For all-in-one you may be better looking at something like the E3-1240v2. It has 4 cores with Hyperthreading and handles ECC ram (i.e. it is an i7 that works on server / wiorkstation boards with ECC support). For this build I would also suggest something like the Supermicro X9SCM-iif. It has IPMI with KVMoIP (with a graphical interface), 4 PCIe slots (2x x8 and 2x x4 in x8 slots), dual lan with both chipsets supported by ESXi, onboard video etc. With htis board you are paying for what you want and not for things like sound and overclocking features. These boards also tend to be rock steady. You would need to get some ECC ram for it but the price difference for ECC uDIMM is pretty close to non-ECC ram.

All-in-One setups.
An All-in-One (AIO) setup is usually a machine doing multiple jobs, usually via some form of virtualisation software (ESXi / Hyper-V / Zen etc).

A common setup would be to have a SAN VM with the hardware controllers passed through to the Vm via VT-d (passthrough). The attached disks are then shared to other VMs residing on the same host (Windows 2012 for Domain Controller, File server, Web server, etc).

The VMs need to be started in a specific order to make sure the SAN is available before the other VMs but this is usually fairly easy to setup.

To my knowledge, all mITX board I have seen only have two Dimm slots and as 16GB ram sticks are not yet common, I have not seen any repoted as working with them. The Supermicro and ASRock boards look pretty comparable price wise in the UK judging by Amazon. The other issue with the ASRock is that it most probably uses a PCIe switch to give all those PCIe x16 slots and some cards can be pretty touchy with them.

The E3-1240v2 is around GBP50 more than the E3-1220Lv2 (if you can find it) and will cost around GBP7/month more to run 24x7 at full load. This figure is based on the TDP which is not actual power usage but can give an indication and a 20p KWh cost. If you are not running full load, the price difference per month is likely to be a fair bit less.

RB

 

[nry]

Thought I would say hello here. Looks like your getting off to a good start

One thing I would say about the TDP of the CPUs is not to become to concerned over that value. If you search the internet for low power i3 you should stumble across some posts in german about how some users are seeing 12-15w idle with a 65w TDP processor.
Not too sure if you saw that part of my setup but idle with my 1220 v2 (without 10GbE) I was seeing 31w and under load 50w ish.
That's using a picoPSU with a fairly inefficient power brick and two disk (5400rpm and a SSD), might try see power consumption without disks later!

I personally would avoid 2.5" disks, they generally cost more. When I had 8x Hitachi 5400rpm drives running in my Xcase it wasn't silent but still pretty quiet considering.

For booting from iSCSI I would highly recommend iPXE. It has been so easy to work with iPXE - open source boot firmware [start]

 

[Andreas]

Low power and silent go hand in hand.
Not sure if it really makes any difference which of the i7-3xxx CPUs you select with 3 raid controllers in the system. The CPU will idle with ca. 2 watt and while I don't know the exact power consumption of the your controllers, I wouldn't be surprise if each is using between 10-15 watt. 15-20 times the energy of the CPU (in idle).
Thats the reason, why I used one single controller for my 72TB home server.
E3-1245v2 CPU, 32 GB ECC RAM, 4xGBit/s, Adaptec 72405, 24 x WD Red 3 TB = 150 watt at the wall outlet when idle but all disks spinning
noise level = very low.
idle CPU temp with stock Intel fan = 30C (+8C over ambient)

Andy

 

[TallGraham]

Wow! Thanks again for all the great feedback. I've worked in IT for almost 20 years using various hardware, doing networking, and even software development. Still nothing beats getting feedback from forums like this where people who actually have the hardware you are looking at can give you helpful feedback. The first thing I always tell our new apprentices at work is "You will never know everything about IT, and anyone who says they do is a liar!" The area is so diverse nowadays.

OK, I will address all the great points people have made here:

@Piglover
Thanks for the great feedback about the E3-1220L v2 processor. Good point about it not having video. I have looked away from the Z77 board and am now thinking about maximum power savings so looking at the Supermicro X9SCM-iif motherboard that RimBlock recommended. This board has built in video and IPMI so I can run it headless.

@RimBlock
Great post with great info. Thanks very much indeed. You have made some good points and mentioned some things I wasn't even aware of.

I am now looking at using the Supermicro X9SCM-iif motherboard as this is MicroATX so will fit nicely into the case. The IPMI will be brilliant and give me the headless I am after, plus the bonus of two onboard Intel cards to go with the quad port Intel PT card I have. I had supermico boards back in the PentiumII and PentiumIII days they were always rock solid then as well. You are spot on with this board though, "It does what it says on the tin" with no extra fluffy bells or whistles that I don't want.

I am looking for the NAS/SAN to be a dedicated. Although it will do a few extra bits like be a domain controller with DHCP, DNS, and probably serviio for my media. I have run this before from and Intel Atom with Server 2008 R2. Took a while to boot, but it worked. I want this to be a low power as possible so I can pick up files when away from home. If I need any VMs running I can leave one of the hypervisor nodes running.

@nry
Hi there, thanks for dropping in. Great feedback on your experiences with the E3-1220L v2 processor. What does this little low power cpu equate to? I'm guessing it is better than an Atom but more like an i3 than an i5 or an i7, but clearly with all the server cpu bits enabled.

Thanks for the link to the iPXE stuff it looks very cool. I have Intel cards and have found the Remote Boot firmware update from Intel for them. This installs the iSCSI boot firmware to the NIC. I think I linked to a page on it above. It will even work on a standard Intel CT PCIe desktop adapter which you can pick up for around £25. I'm wondering whether to risk flashing this to the onboard NIC of my Intel DQ77MK boards, or just use one of the ports on the Intel PT quad cards that I have. Although these are sadly full height, so I think I'll need to ebay them and them get the low profile ones that will fit in the 2U server case. Unless I can find a cheap case one that will use a riser card and full height going horizontally.

I am looking at 2.5 drives because they are quieter, use less power, and produce less heat. I know they aren't great but I can get a 1TB Samsung/Seagate for about £55.

Samsung 1TB HN-M101MBB Spinpoint M8, 2.5", 9.5 mm, SATA II - 3Gb/s, 5400rpm, 8MB Cach - ST1000LM024 - Scan.co.uk

It gets good reviews and from reading around quite a few people are using them in the 2.5 off the shelf NAS boxes.

The thing that bothers me more is SATA. We use HP LeftHand SANs at work and had some disks fail a while ago. One SAN has 450GB SAS drives, 6 in a RAID 5 array. One SAN has 1TB SATA drives, again 6 in a RAID 5 array. When we replaced one of the SAS drives it rebuilt in about 30mins. When we replaced one of the SATA drives it took over a day to rebuild! God only knows how long it would take to rebuild with a 2TB or 3TB SATA disk. I've been looking at SAS and SSD drives at the moment but they are just too expensive in comparison though. If I use RAID 6 then I will be able to cope with two failures. Also I was looking to run 2 separate arrays of 8 disks, due to the cards mainly. But would likely still do the same if I got the single 24 port card as well.

@Andreas
Just to clarify the i7 I am looking at is for the hypervisor nodes, separate 2U servers, and not the NAS. But your points on power consumption are really great.

I have been doing some sums for the cards I have and they come out like this (based on manufacturers websites):

Adaptec 5805 is 0.45A @ 3.3VDC and 1.0A @12VDC. So if my Maths is right and adding a bit more, Adaptec said multiply your final figure by 1.05, its 14.16W per card (I have 2)

Adaptec 6405 is 0.125A @ 3.3VDC and 0.8A @ 12VDC. So again if my maths is right this is 10.51W

Adaptec 72405 is 0.1A @ 3.3VDC and 1.8A @ 12VDC. This gives 23.03W for the one card as opposed to 38.83W for the three cards I already have.

You are certainly correct about saving power with the one card. Trouble is I already have the other three lying around here from older systems. Not sure what I'd get for them if I sold them and haven't seen a price yet for the 72405 here in the UK.

Intel Pro 1000 PT Quad port is 12.1W according to the Intel site.

 

[nry]

Think it is more of a i5 as it has 4 cores (4 threads) where as a i3 has 2 cores and 4 threads. Does also have all the server goodies too which I will never use . Might be wrong here but that's what I based my purchase of it on.

Pretty neat if you can integrate the iSCSI booting into the ROM, only reason I am going down the iPXE route is so I can dual boot and have it all controlled via a PHP script.
Also allowing me to easily boot memtest, other OS installers etc

How many disks are you looking at getting? If it's just one disk I thought maybe it would be worth it, but 3x 1TB 2.5" is £115, or a 3TB 3.5" drive is £80. Power consumption is probably about the same if you add the 3 disks up, also I'm not too sure how much 1W costs per year to run 24/7 but I think it was around £1.04 last time I calculated it. I would have assumed the performance is slightly better from the 3.5" drives too (based on my experience with consumer drives it is anyway).

Know what you mean about the rebuild times! My 8x3TB RAID 6 array took around 1 day to rebuild on my old Adaptec controller. Painful process that was to watch as I was worried about another disk failed!!

 

[TallGraham]

So after some great feedback I think the idea so far for the NAS box is this:

Case: 25 bay hotswap home server case online at X-Case
Motherboard: Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X9SCM-IIF
CPU: Xeon E3 1220L v2 Intel Processor Specifications

Having trouble finding this motherboard in the UK. Any suggestions where people have bought theirs before please? Also ideas for CPU coolers? The CPU from Scan.co.uk is an OEM one.

Now I'm wondering about disks and controller cards. Sadly these appear to be the expensive bits. Thanks again to nry above for the continual feedback and ideas.

As any of you have read I currently have 3 x Adaptec RAID controllers laying around from old builds. These are:

2 x Adaptec 5805, 8 port, 3Gbps, PCIe x8
1 x Adaptec 6405, 4 port, 6Gbps, PCIE x4

Andreas made a good point earlier about getting a single 24 port controller which I kind of like. The Adaptec 72405 looks to be £850+ at the moment though. My mind was then turned to SAS expanders which I have never used and know nothing about. The other thought was where to sell my current adapters if I wanted to raise the cash for the new 24 port one. These are not the normal run of the mill hardware.

Questions about the SAS expanders. I am guessing you are still limited by the throughput of the actual RAID card to the PCIe bus? So my 5805 PCIe x8 cards would be better than the PCIe x4 6405 card even though they are only 3Gbps. Is this thinking correct?

I assume as well that the drives just show up in the RAID card BIOS as normal and you can do what you want with them? Got no idea which expander would be best for my Adaptec card though, googling doesn't turn up much. Is anyone actually running one of these cards with an expander that can offer some ideas please?

If my above thinking about the expanders is correct, then I wonder if the new Adaptec 7805 plus an expander would be cheaper than the Adaptec 72405. The 7805 would at least give me the new design to utilise the x8 PCIe 3.0 bus that Adaptec have used.

Now you must all be thinking "Has this guy actually bought anything yet?" Well no, but I'm following nry's advice about get it right and buy once. Been out the hardware game for a few years as I was doing software development so need to get it right. The wrong RAID card or RAID chassis is an expensive mistake to make.

As soon as I have bits there will be lots of build pictures, don't worry

 

[nry]

Your going to want some replacement fans for that case if your running this on/near your desk!

I bought my version of the X9SCM from ServerCase, the IIF model is out of stock at the moment so might be worth getting in touch with them to see when they have stock.
https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/search/x9scm
Only used them once before, no complaints and all delivered in under 24 hours. Besides that I couldn't find many reviews of the company.

If you have the budget go for a 24 port controller I would go for it, otherwise SAS expanders can work very well. One thing to watch is the compatibility with your controller there are endless posts floating around the internet about compatibility issues with various controllers and expanders which vary depending on the firmware too.
SAS expanders are also limited by the number of links, usually 4x3G or 4x6G some offer dual linking I believe but the controller needs to support this too.

Can't offer any advice on the Adaptec controllers as I can't stand them personally, but some SAS expanders I investigated were:

Chenbro CK23601 / 6G (I have this one)
HP SAS Expander / 3G (468406-B21)
Intel RES2SV240 / 6G (They do a 36 port model too but I couldn't find this in the UK)
Areca ARC-8026 6G (Cost stupid amounts)

 

[Mike]

I still do not get the fuzz about the 1220L. As all late intel processors power down most of the internal components, idle power usage is as low as it's going to get with or without an L at the end of the model-name. You're paying extra for a crippled CPU, intented for the same audience as CULV systems. I'm not picking on ya but see more value in an ordinary 1220, 1230 or cheap Pentium.

 

[mrkrad]

This all stems from the core2duo/pentium-4 netburst (fb-dimm) era where you couldn't get a box with 8 dimms below 300 watts idle. ever since nehalem you could have a box with 6 drives in the 80 watt range.

Folks must remember the cheaper cpu's that run at lower mhz (non-L) without HT/turbo are the leakiest ones. There's a reason that cheap quad core is the same TDP as a 6core. Leaks. With leaks you cannot save as much power and must run at a higher VID to keep things going.

since Westmere, all cpu's could use low voltage dimms or higher density to save power, but its all ancillary if the cpu's are all rated similar in TDP and gated. RAM/CARDS/DRIVES/RAID cards - the only thing they fixed since the 5500 chipset was pci link state, but many folks just said screw it due to the buggy nature of tylersberg and ran their cards balls out rather than deal with overhead and latency of trying to save a few watts.

Even with my E5620 running at MAX,MAX,MAX performance in bios with no os control, I still idle around 99 watts, but do not suffer the penalties the same processor under OS control (ESXi to be specific) - esxi was brutal with that chipset and you'd feel some serious latency as processors moved from 10% to over 20% and the cpu's ramped up (slowly). I'd bet 90% of the dual 6-core ESXi boxes sit at maximum Cstate and Pstate 95% of their life and folks are wondering why their dual 6 core box is just not snappy.

I hope they fix this in the newer generation - smart phone folks had the same problem and we do tricks like on wakeup, turbo to 120% for XX seconds, or upon touch, spin up to turbo for a few seconds to reduce the latency caused by bringing the cores back online, getting the bus back up to speed.

 

[TallGraham]

More great feedback and info. Thanks again to everyone for comments.

@nry

Thanks again for your help here. I saw you bits about the fans and airflow in your build so have learnt that bit. And how did someone describe the stock fans "Sound like Jet engines" LOL

I will contact Servercase and ask them about the board, they seem to have the cheapest price by far. Still seems a lot but way cheaper than the Z77 board I was originally looking at.

I also saw some interesting 2U cases on there as well.

Buy 2U Standard Chassis having 6 x 3.5" internal + 2 x 5.25" drive bays from Server Case UK

Buy 2U Compact Rackmount microATX Chassis from Server Case UK

I like the D-213-MATX because of the two 80mm fans at the front. Although there was some talk about the cooling not being great because of the airflow. I found this great link to a guy who modded his case to fix this. Not sure I'd need to go quite that far for my needs as I'm only using an i7-3770t and an Intel PT Quad port network card.

IStarUSA D-213-MATX Airflow Improvement - TBCS Community Forums

They make a newer D214-MATX version which looks to have solved the airflow issues.

Industrial Chassis | iStarUSA Products | D-214-MATX - 2U Compact Rackmount microATX Chassis

The first case gets my eye though as it has the horizontal slot for my full height. I know it is deeper, but at 550cm it is no deeper than the NAS case will be. Should line up perfectly. I wonder how noisy those fans would be? Might be able to run the i7-3770t with a passive heatsink though. Not sure if anyone on here has used either case before?

Thanks for the clarification on the SAS expanders too. I was guessing there would be a bottleneck on the connection too. Down too either 4x3G or 4x6G depending on what card I used. Also I guess on the PCIe connector throughput as well to the system. No good having a huge semi-speedy array if it can't chuck the data around the network quickly. I'm intrigued as to why you hate Adaptec cards, could you elaborate a bit? I have always preferred them. The new 7 series looks awesome.

I have seen the Adaptec 72405 on eBay from the US for about £550. In the UK the lowest I have seen is almost £1,000 new. The eBay one does say "used" as well. And being in the UK that's a lot of cash for something I may have to return if there is a fault.

I am guessing this site would be the best place to sell my current 3 Adaptec cards.


@Mike and mrkrad

Thanks for the feedback on the processor. One of the reasons I'd like the low power one is it stops me doing more with the NAS that I originally plan too. I want it to be a simple NAS/DC/DHCP/DNS/Serviio server. If I drop in a more powerful chip I will just start adding more rubbish I don't need.

It looks like a 2 core 4 thread CPU. So powerful enough for what I want I think.

 

[johnduhart]

@Mike and mrkrad

Thanks for the feedback on the processor. One of the reasons I'd like the low power one is it stops me doing more with the NAS that I originally plan too. I want it to be a simple NAS/DC/DHCP/DNS/Serviio server. If I drop in a more powerful chip I will just start adding more rubbish I don't need.

It looks like a 2 core 4 thread CPU. So powerful enough for what I want I think.

Hah, that sounds like something I would do.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

 

[Patrick]

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

Great to see someone is using this feature!

 

[TallGraham]

I have been talking to the guys at ServerCase.co.uk that nry recommended to me. I have to say so far they have been brilliant. Not bought anything yet but, quick and extremely helpful responses from their pre-sales team.

On another note I have gone back to my spreadsheet for my build and noticed that DDR3 RAM has practically doubled in price in the last couple of months! What the hell!!!!! 16GB of non-ECC DDR3 (2 x 8GB) is now over £100! Checking around on the web people think it will go even higher! That is mental!

Mind you I do have some old RAM I could sell off to help fund what I am after. Just another kick in the nuts to delay my system build