CPU & Mobo for NAS and small Gaming Servers

[S7ewie]

Hi all, I’m a complete newbie to home servers but I’ve been building and upgrading my own gaming pc for the past 14 years or so and I also have a small 2 bay Synology NAS.

I want to build a home server, partly because it looks like a really cool project but also because I want to expand my NAS and also host a few small game servers. Video transcoding is not currently a major priority but I don’t want to write it off.

I took to reddit to ask for some advice but didn’t get much response, so fingers crossed this community is more active haha.

I’m currently thinking of a 3U server chassis (though I’ve yet to find one I really like), with an ATX or Micro ATX motherboard. I’m leaning towards something like the i5-10400 for CPU but looking for advice and suggestions.

Not sure what motherboard to go with. Ill probably start with around 4 hard drives but will likely expand to 8+ in the future so either needs to have plenty of sata ports or pcie for expansion.

I don’t really have a budget but I want to be cost effective, as in, I don’t want to spend 5 times more than I need to for something that will achieve my goals. Ultimately I want something quiet and efficient.

Any advice or recommendations would be massively appreciate.

 

[i386]

I wouldn't look at "consumer" cpus for nas/server: they often don't have support for ecc, limited io in terms of pcie lanes and "low" memory support.
my preference would be a xeon or epyc cpu (or for a simple fileserver also embeded options like xeon-d/atom).

For the storage I would recommend you to learn about sas hbas/raid controllers and what they can do
If you learned about sas you could go on ebay and search for supermicro chassis with sas2 or sas3 expanders, if you're in the US this could be pretty cheap, in europe & australia it's more expensive. This might be little expensive in the beginning but from my experience that's cheaper over time than building something with "consumer" chassis/parts.

A "quiet" system could be challenging, especially when you really use 8+ hdds and workloads that use only one core (causing the cpu to not power down -> more heat -> fans spin faster and produce more noise)

My advice for you would be to really think about what you need (required) and separate it from what you want (optional/"nice to have") (example you need 30 TB to store your bluray disc now and will add 60tb in the next 5 years -> 90tb storage required).
This can be used to determine a budget

 

[S7ewie]

@i386 Thanks for the response! You've given me some things to think about haha. How important is ecc? I don't know much about xeon CPUs so how to they compare in performance and price to something like the i5-10400? Motherboards too.

Will definitely look into raid controllers! I assumed these were just extensions but they look like they do more than just that.

Unfortunately I'm from the UK so a lot of the supremicro and similar stuff I see coming up a lot are quite expensive to get over here.

Thinking about it, "quiet" isn't vital as as it will be sitting in a cupboard downstairs but it will still be our personal home so I don't want to hear it roaring in the living room when trying to watch TV haha.

Need:

• I completely overshot with the amount of hard drives.. My current NAS has 2TB in RAID1 (4GB total) and it's getting quite full. I don't use it for movies and TV shows etc so its mostly photography, video for editing and PC backups.
  • Realistically, I'd like 4 so that I have the option for other RAID configurations. That alone should give me a LOT more storage capacity.
  • Expanding to 8+ in the future is me being VERY futureproof so arguably I can forget about that part for now, that won't happen in the near future.
  • I'd like to start somewhere between 10-20TB usable storage.
• Game servers - Hosting games like Minecraft, DayZ, Satisfactory etc. for probably 2-5 friends (10 absolute max) and likely don't need to be running all at the same time.
• Space is a limitation, the cupboard isn't that deep so I can't have anything deeper than about 500mm which is partly why I wanted to build my own from consumer parts.

 

[i386]

ECC: I'm biased on this becuase I didn't have a workstations/server since 2014 without ecc.
The more memory a system has the higher are the chances for problems with memory that could be detected and fixed with ecc.
BUT I have also seen some systems with 128gb ram without ecc and that never had problems with memory or corrupted any data.

Xeon cpus are available in a wide range. Some are pretty similar to regular i3/i5/i7/i9 in terms of base and turbo clock (I have to admit that I lost the overview of the current/last generation xeon cpus ), other are more conservative (eg: lower turbo clock).
In general the xeons are more stable and could offer a lot more cores (depending on the socket) and pcie lanes (for fast networking and/or nvme ssds)
The motherboards for xeon cpus are more expensive than consumer counterparts. I would say most of them are of better quality that your usual evga/msi/gigabyte/asus mainboard and offer features for remote managing via ipmi.

UK: that's one of the results of brexit for you ._.
Is that for new parts only or also for used parts from ebay or other platforms?

Your requirements are pretty moderate
for storage you could get 2 or 4 large hdds (14-16tb each) (or another, more expensive option: an all flash server with two 3.84tb ssds ) and a normal desktop/tower chassis.
With your listed game server I have no ideas what cpu you would need (more cores vs higher clocks).

What kind of storage do you want to run? software raid (zfs, mdadm, btrfs) or hardware raid?

 

[S7ewie]

@i386 Yeah fair enough on ecc. I get the impression it's not vital. I'm trying to understand what actually happens when there is a problem with memory. I can't see me needing more than 128GB RAM, at least to start with I imagine I'll have about half of that.

Hmm okay, can you recommend any xeons and motherboards worth lookin at? The way I see it, the i5-10400 + mobo should cost me around £200 new here, and from what I can gather, that should be plenty capable of doing what I need. I'm happy to look at other options and pay more if necessary but I don't want to be paying double or more if I'm not going to see the benefit. I know I said I didn't have a budget but at the same time I don't want to spent thousands just to host a minecraft server haha.

Believe me.. I didn't vote for it A lot of what I'm seeing on ebay is being shipped from the states but I'll keep an eye out. I'm just not sure what to look for when it comes to server hardware, I'm far more used to the consumer stuff haha.

To be honest, I haven't looked into storage all that much yet I was going to create a post in the dedicated subforum for that. I thought CPU was the best place to start. I've only really skimmed the surface looking at software such as TrueNAS and a friend recommended unraid. I'm learning that there's a lot more to server storage than PC storage haha.

 

[nexox]

I have had so many weird and difficult-to-diagnose issues due to bad memory in the past, I also went for ECC on all machines except laptops. Everything goes through system memory, and it's (mostly) allocated dynamically, which means a single bad region of memory can be used by and corrupt just about anything including running applications, displayed graphics, network IO, and disk IO. Usually this leads to spurious blue screens or kernel panics, but it can cause less obvious issues where you could, for instance, download a firmware update, verify the checksum, and then when you write it to the hardware it gets corrupted and bricks your device (I have seen this happen.)

I don't know if memory generally got better or if the server grade registered dimms are just higher quality, but I have had fewer ECC failures across thousands of sticks (including work systems) than I did previously in a dozen or so consumer dimms in my personal machines.

 

[Whaaat]

or if the server grade registered dimms are just higher quality

and it becomes even more suspicious when you see how 2133 reg ecc memory can be overclocked to 3200 )))

 

[Dehelvin]

For a home server, consider using server-grade CPUs like Intel Xeon or AMD EPYC for reliability and performance. Choose a motherboard with ample SATA ports or PCIe slots for future expansion. Learn about SAS HBAs and RAID controllers for efficient storage. Look for a 3U chassis with good airflow and quiet fans. Plan your budget based on storage needs. Prioritize noise reduction and power efficiency. Consider redundancy and data backup solutions for safety.

 

[zer0sum]

My go to low end NAS hardware is still the venerable Supermicro X10SRL-F and whatever v3/4 Xeon takes your fancy

You can run up to 22 cores and 1TB of ram and they can be found for $150-200 if you're patient.
PCIe slot layout is pretty slick if you want to fill it up with 10G NIC's, HBA's and bifurcated dual port nvme cards

PCI-E 3.0 x8
PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16 slot)
PCI-E 3.0 x8
PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16 slot)
PCI-E 3.0 x8
PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8 slot)
PCI-E 2.0 x4 (in x8 slot)

I like the M1015 as it is an absolute bargain, but if you're going to hook up SSD's then go with the M1215

 

[i386]

[/QUOTE]

My go to low end NAS hardware is still the venerable Supermicro X10SRL-F and whatever v3/4 Xeon takes your fancy

Great board, I'm still using one for my application server