dOLOb uild log

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dOLOb

New Member
Nov 23, 2020
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Build’s Name: Idk yet
Operating System/ Storage Platform: TBD
CPU: N/A
Motherboard: going to be replaced soon
Chassis: CaseLabs SMA8
Drives: 16 x 1 TB HDDS, 2 x 128 GB M.2s
RAM: 32 GB DDR4
Add-in Cards: RTX 2080, 2xDell PERC H310, Elgato 4K60 Pro
Power Supply: 850 Watt Thermaltake ATX
Other Bits:

Usage Profile:
It's not even functioning yet, but my goals are listed below.

Other information…


I'm just starting this to document the progress of my server build and using it as a spot to post my thoughts/links/whatever comes up. For anyone reading this I'm not super knowledgeable, but I am learning, so if you have any advice or information please share.

Currently, some of my interests for what I'd like my server to do are:
  • Self-hosted cloud for immediate family and myself
  • Ability to perform entire computer backups
  • Plex server
  • NAS
  • DVR
  • Web server
  • Private game server
  • NVR backup using RTSP somehow
I'm currently stuck on the hardware I would need to put this server together because I want it to be a DIY type where I curate all the parts, put it together and install a hypervisor and continue on from there. The thing right now is that I don't know much about anything related to server hardware. I do have some components from previous builds though.
  • RTX 2080
  • 850 Watt ATX Power supply
  • CaseLabs SMA8 with support for 18 3.5" hard drives
  • 32 GB regular desktop RAM (4 x 8 GB)
  • Dell PERC H310 x 2 in IT mode - to support up to 16 hard drives
  • 4 x Mini SAS to 4 SATA backplane cables since each of the Dell PERC cards have 2 slots each
  • Elgato 4K60 pro - the idea behind this is to be able to use it for the DVR function
  • Had a i9 9900ks but I sold it when I decided I wanted to start this project
  • Maximus ROG XI Extreme z390 motherboard - going to sell this since I wouldn't have enough PCIe lanes on this platform to support the GPU (16 lanes) + the 2 RAID cards (8 lanes each) + the capture card (I think it's 4 lanes) = at least 36 PCIe lanes.
  • A bunch of 1 TB drives, but planning on buying some external drives to shuck
  • A couple 128 GB M.2 SSDs (can't remember if they're SATA or NVME at the moment).
This has one of my biggest pet peeves when looking for processors: when searching or comparing processors online, PCIe lane count is not an option for a filter. Does anyone know why that is? Ideally, I'd like to have around 40-48 open/free PCIe lanes not including the chipset or whatever else the processor reserves for its own functionality. Is that an abnormal amount of PCIe lanes to demand? Are my expectations too high? Please let me know so I can begin to re-evaluate my expectations if needed.
 

zack$

Well-Known Member
Aug 16, 2018
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Xeon Socket 2011-3 and 2066 will give you 40 and 48 lanes respectively. Your issue will be which MBs give you the PCIe lane count, the PCIe configuration you desire and other desirables.

At the moment, Xeon V3 CPUs are the best bang for buck. However, for gaming, your gonna get better performance with the Xeon w-2100 and w-2200 CPUs. Though be warned, the selection pool for MBs is much smaller than the Xeon v3/v4's.

For your 16 HDDs, you can also consider a sas expander like the Intel res2sv240 (use the molex power input) and save a x8 slot (wouldn't recommend this if you decided to change those 16 HDDs to SSDs).

I don't think your expectations are too high, there are lots of people here who do an AIO server with similar objectives.
 
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dOLOb

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Nov 23, 2020
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Xeon Socket 2011-3 and 2066 will give you 40 and 48 lanes respectively. Your issue will be which MBs give you the PCIe lane count, the PCIe configuration you desire and other desirables.

At the moment, Xeon V3 CPUs are the best bang for buck. However, for gaming, your gonna get better performance with the Xeon w-2100 and w-2200 CPUs. Though be warned, the selection pool for MBs is much smaller than the Xeon v3/v4's.

For your 16 HDDs, you can also consider a sas expander like the Intel res2sv240 (use the molex power input) and save a x8 slot (wouldn't recommend this if you decided to change those 16 HDDs to SSDs).

I don't think your expectations are too high, there are lots of people here who do an AIO server with similar objectives.
Wow thank you so much for all your input! Trying to go through all the Xeon processors, years, versions, and so on was super overwhelming. Now I think I've narrowed down which processor and motherboard combo I want. I'm thinking one of the V3's with an X99 motherboard.

That's a genius idea about the expander...I didn't know how those would work. I did some research on them and it seems like I would just need a Mini-SAS to Mini-SAS cable. So can I just plug in a Mini-SAS to Mini-SAS cable from one of the 2 ports on my Dell Perc H310 into any of the ports on the expander and then have the hard drives plugged into the expander with Mini-SAS to SATA ports? It almost seems like the same concept as a router connecting to a switch and then connecting to network devices. Is that a good analogy?
 
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zack$

Well-Known Member
Aug 16, 2018
701
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Yes, you can use one port or even two ports giving a breakout of 5 and 4 ports respectively.

Not so sure about the analogy but the main point is there is always gonna be a performance drop using an expander in this manner, which is exacerbated by the storage medium. With 1TB HDDs, I wouldn't be worried though. It will likely be negligible.

Did you decide on an OS?
 
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BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
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hmm, some interesting/unusual hardware. Elgato 4K60 pro for example only supports unprotected HDMI and requires windows 10 for drivers.
Plex with Plex Pass (right now on 25% sale) includes both DVR and Hardware transcoding (2080 is supported).
I guess you could install Plex on windows 10 (VM?).
For hypervisor, seems like it would shortlist between ESXi and Proxmox VE
 
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dOLOb

New Member
Nov 23, 2020
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Yes, you can use one port or even two ports giving a breakout of 5 and 4 ports respectively.

Not so sure about the analogy but the main point is there is always gonna be a performance drop using an expander in this manner, which is exacerbated by the storage medium. With 1TB HDDs, I wouldn't be worried though. It will likely be negligible.

Did you decide on an OS?
Ok that's cool. Do you know if you gain some performance from using two ports on the HBA going to the same extender?

Thanks for pointing that out to me though about the performance drop with the expander. Since I'm planning on going with a Xeon, I might just use the two HBAs since I will have PCIe lanes to spare.

I have looked into Proxmox, VMware Esxi, and Microsoft Server/Hyper-V. But to be honest I'm still learning/trying to figure out which one would be best. I'm leaning to Proxmox though because from what I can see it's free and the other ones are pretty expensive. I actually have already installed Proxmox and remoted to it but I wasn't able to figure out how to install it to an NVMe drive. It was just a test so I have to do some more research.

hmm, some interesting/unusual hardware. Elgato 4K60 pro for example only supports unprotected HDMI and requires windows 10 for drivers.
Plex with Plex Pass (right now on 25% sale) includes both DVR and Hardware transcoding (2080 is supported).
I guess you could install Plex on windows 10 (VM?).
For hypervisor, seems like it would shortlist between ESXi and Proxmox VE
Thanks for pointing that out to me about the unprotected HDMI...I was not aware of that limitation. I used to use it for streaming, and since I'm not streaming anymore I was going to repurpose it. I was planning on installing PLEX on a Windows 10 VM because I did play around with it on my desktop and got it to work pretty well. I did snatch up that lifetime license :)