Building a new server for Unraid

[DRSpalding]

Hi,

I am considering updating my server running Unraid. I created it using an old desktop EVGA X58 mobo reusing my Core I7-980x CPU. It (was) is a beast, but the mobo is getting long in the tooth and has already been repaired once to fix the PCH/Northbridge fan. It ran overclocked for many years. It also has only SATA 2.0 (3.0 Gb) so it's performance is lacking a bit there. It also uses quite a bit of power, likely 140/190w at idle/busy. It has 3 8TB Seagate Exos enterprise hard drives.

The usage is primarily for video/audio storage and backups of my machines at home.

What I am considering is a Supermicro X10SDV-4C-TLN4F (Xeon D-1518) version with the onboard fan mounted in a Fractal Design Node 304 case. That ticks all the boxes for me like SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, 10Gbps networking, and low power (35w TDP on the CPU) which would probably run at about 50w total at idle instead of 140w. The only issue is that I could possibly get a less expensive one on Ebay like this one: X10SDV-4C-TLN2F mITX Intel Xeon D-1521 which is 45w instead but doesn't appear to have a fan and costs US$360, about US$200 less than the MSRP for the model with the D-1518. So, can I easily add a fan or are there air coolers for the SoC socket that the Xeon D series that I can mount in place of the server-rack-mount "have to have its own airflow" model?

Secondly, perhaps I should look to a different, non-server board, perhaps an AMD version with ECC capability and could I get it less expensively and be relatively certain that the ECC will work to catch single bit errors for me automatically?

Thanks in advance for any advice and guidance.

Dan

 

[Peanuthead]

Do you plan on increasing drive count at all in the near future?

 

[DRSpalding]

Nope. Having 3 x 8TB netting me roughly 16TB usable data storage with one parity drive is sufficient for my needs. But one of the nice things about having either a CPU with a GPU onboard or a mobo with embedded video (and the onboard 10Gbps networking) like the Supermicro does is that it keeps that one PCI slot free on the mITX mobo available for HBA if more drive space is required. The Fractal Design Node 304 has space for six 3.5" or 2.5" drives and I suspect that these 8TB drives will likely be the last mechanical drives I ever purchase. Unraid makes it pretty simple to replace drives w/o having the requirement of being exact duplicates. A suitable sized NVMe drive would work ok for that too, so a card that puts multiple NVMe drives onto a card that fits into the PCI slot would also be just peachy.

I'm not wed to Unraid either--if I have to move to FreeNAS (TrueNAS now?) I can do so. I do like the way Unraid stores files natively in xfs on one drive though w/o striping the data/parity across all of the drives. I'm not in it for the speed necessarily, just the having my stored safely in multiple places. I back up the array to another drive fairly routinely as well.

The main reasons I am looking to upgrade are the energy usage of the server running 24x7 and that the hardware it is running on is about 10 years old now, and the SATA 2.0 speeds are 1/2 of the more recent SATA 3.0 spec.