Hi everyone, I'm on a bit of a mission to build a replacement NAS for my home network. I currently have a Synology DS1515+ which has served me well for 6 or so years. It's fully populated with 5 x 14TB Western Digital Enterprise drives creating about 48TB of usable space.
I house my system in a 10U network cabinet which is the only space I have. The new system needs to fit into this cabinet.
As you can see, I have at most, 4U of space, ideally 3U. I tried to find a suitable case to fit here, but couldn't find one that has the features I want and less than 300mm deep.
I then came up with the idea of building a 1U Unraid host and connect it to an external 2U disk shelf. Again, 2U <300mm disk shelves don't exist so I've decided to modify the case of a 2U Supermicro SuperChassis 826, which has a SAS Expander and 12 drive slots. I'm going to essentially chop the case in half and remount the PSU. This will then fit
Now I need to build the 1U host server. It must have 10GBE and an external SAS HBA to connect to the SAS expander in the 826 chassis. It's going to be a host for Unraid, Home Assistant, Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, NZBGet and a few other docker containers. I may run a full Linux or Windows VM on there too but those will be for occasional use only.
My Plex media is already in 1080 and 4K, all of my media players can direct play these formats so no need for transcoding, although I think I should keep my options open by having an Intel CPU with Quick sync.
Due to the space restrictions, I think that Mini-ITX will be my best options. There are a few 1U cases that will take a Micro-ATX board but not many. Most are designed for Mini-ITX. However, the choice of Mini-ITX boards, with 10GBE is very slim and those that are out there, are quite tricky to get old of due to component shortages.
I had kinda settled on the ASRock Rack E3C246D4I-2T, which supports the E-2100 and E-2200 series CPUs, up to and including the i9-9900k. These have an iGPU for potential Plex transcoding and should be powerful enough for what I need to use it for. I can then use the PCI-E slot for the SAS HBA.
However, didscussing this elsewhere, some suggested I go with a new CPU series, namely 12th Gen, but the motherboard support is slim on the Mini-ITX side. There's also a question mark over whether Unraid fully supports the iGPU in the 12th gen or the core layout (efficiency vs performance cores).
Ryzen would have been a good choice if not for lack of support for the APUs, fastest CPU would be the 5800G. There are a couple of ASRock Mini-ITX AM4 boards that have 10GBE though.
Therefore I am a bit stuck. I have either motherboard supply issues, CPU support issues or APU issues. Any other suggestions, anything I am missing?
I house my system in a 10U network cabinet which is the only space I have. The new system needs to fit into this cabinet.
As you can see, I have at most, 4U of space, ideally 3U. I tried to find a suitable case to fit here, but couldn't find one that has the features I want and less than 300mm deep.
I then came up with the idea of building a 1U Unraid host and connect it to an external 2U disk shelf. Again, 2U <300mm disk shelves don't exist so I've decided to modify the case of a 2U Supermicro SuperChassis 826, which has a SAS Expander and 12 drive slots. I'm going to essentially chop the case in half and remount the PSU. This will then fit
Now I need to build the 1U host server. It must have 10GBE and an external SAS HBA to connect to the SAS expander in the 826 chassis. It's going to be a host for Unraid, Home Assistant, Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, NZBGet and a few other docker containers. I may run a full Linux or Windows VM on there too but those will be for occasional use only.
My Plex media is already in 1080 and 4K, all of my media players can direct play these formats so no need for transcoding, although I think I should keep my options open by having an Intel CPU with Quick sync.
Due to the space restrictions, I think that Mini-ITX will be my best options. There are a few 1U cases that will take a Micro-ATX board but not many. Most are designed for Mini-ITX. However, the choice of Mini-ITX boards, with 10GBE is very slim and those that are out there, are quite tricky to get old of due to component shortages.
I had kinda settled on the ASRock Rack E3C246D4I-2T, which supports the E-2100 and E-2200 series CPUs, up to and including the i9-9900k. These have an iGPU for potential Plex transcoding and should be powerful enough for what I need to use it for. I can then use the PCI-E slot for the SAS HBA.
However, didscussing this elsewhere, some suggested I go with a new CPU series, namely 12th Gen, but the motherboard support is slim on the Mini-ITX side. There's also a question mark over whether Unraid fully supports the iGPU in the 12th gen or the core layout (efficiency vs performance cores).
Ryzen would have been a good choice if not for lack of support for the APUs, fastest CPU would be the 5800G. There are a couple of ASRock Mini-ITX AM4 boards that have 10GBE though.
Therefore I am a bit stuck. I have either motherboard supply issues, CPU support issues or APU issues. Any other suggestions, anything I am missing?