drives for home NAS and a few other tasks

[Jihays9]

After some research I ditched my initial idea of using a +20U 19" rack and decided to build a server off of some used/some new gaming parts and retired enterprise drives. At first I toyed with the idea of a Dell R730xd but seeing people reports that these are power hungry decided to abandon it all together.

Settled on the following:
-(new) cpu: intel i5-10400 with stock cooler
-(used) mobo: msi z490
-(new) ram: 2x8GB ddr4 3200mhz
-(new) psu: be quiet 400w
-(used) tower: corsair plenty of space for hdd
-(used) hba: lsi 9300 i8
-(used) hdd: 4x6TB 12G sas OR 6x4TB 6G sas, all 7.2k rpm

I can't decide what hdd option to go with, 4x6TB (190€) or 6x4TB (135€). I'm not very experienced with creating and mantaining arrays, so I don't see right now the limitations of each option. Still don't know if I'll use TrueNAS or Unraid, or if it's best to use Proxmox and have VMs with TrueNAS/UNraid.

The server main purposes will be: host a NAS, have BlueIris (or similar) store security cameras footage, a Plex or Jellyfin server. Maybe some other light tasks. Any assistance to point me in the "right" direction will be appreciated!

 

[Chriggel]

The lack of ECC support would make me reconsider using this hardware as a storage server.

As far as the disks go, you need to figure out the basics. Performance (throughput and IOPS), power, redundancy, future expansion. Imagine a spider chart, you can't easily reach the maximum in every aspect. Less drives, less power, but also potentially less performance and less array layout options. More drives, especially more smaller drives, limit future expansion and use more power, but give you more flexibility for your array layout and potentially more performance, should you require it. And then your budget may also be a reason to chose one solution over the other.

By the way, a R730 or R740, fitted with a comparable CPU and the same amount of RAM, will barely use more power than your system. Maybe you want to reconsider, it will also solve the ECC problem.

 

[Jihays9]

is the lack of ECC really a problem? I've never setup a NAS with TrueNAS or unraid, but have been using Synology diskstations for over 10 years at home (and at work) with non-ECC ram and we've yet to experience any issue. Just genuinely asking.

 

[Chriggel]

Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: It depends, but probably still yes.

I always use ECC for my workstations and servers. Is that excessive? Maybe. Do I think that I never had any data integrity problems because of it? No.
But I think it was a mistake when Intel dropped ECC support from consumer hardware 20 years ago, when ECC support was considered a standard feature. Instead, we should have implemented it everywhere and nobody would ask the question today.

The internet is full of "Do I really need ECC" questions. It's the wrong question. Technically, no, you don't. But you definitely should use ECC. It's also not just ECC. ECC is just one part of keeping data integrity. The filesystem is another one and both cover different aspects and work together to achieve a common goal. You're strongly encouraged to use ECC when using ZFS. But the sensible thing is always to start with ECC, no matter which filesystem you use. And no matter how advanced your filesystem is, it's not a substitute for ECC.

"I haven't had problem X in Y years" is meaningless, sadly. Did you really not have a problem? Or did you just not notice it? Even if you really hadn't had any problems, it's not relevant, because the sample size is so small. You could have been lucky. If you like your data, use ECC. If you like to roll dice and hope you get lucky and roll data integrity, you can go without ECC.

People like to question the use of ECC when repurposing old hardware that doesn't support it. I understand that. But that hardware just isn't suitable for everything. This is probably the same argument why the hardware was retired and is available in the first place.

 

[Jihays9]

Would it be great if the above hardware had ECC support? Yes. Am I willing to use a 10 or 15 year old Xeon E5 (or equivalent) just to have ECC support? Probably not. I'd prefer my system not to be idling in the 100W or 200W range honestly.

It seems that neither my experience nor yours is meaningful, simply because we're too small a sample size. Fair enough. By that token, no one's personal experience is meaningful then. To give another perspective, only a third of Synology products support ECC. Am I an advocate for non-ECC systems? Not really, but I'm just trying to be realistic with a home use case.

The system is meant to store Plex media and security footage, and run a few containers. I didn't think ECC to be that critical for this application, however like I said, if it was available I'd take it. Not sure it's worth rethinking my build, but I'll look for some alternatives that can provide a similar power budget and performance.

 

[Chriggel]

Absolutely, my experience isn't statistically relevant either, that's why I said that I'm not even trying to claim that my trouble free time was because of ECC. However, thinking about the concept of ECC and listening to the developers of ZFS is significant. I think it was Matt Ahrens who said the "If you like your data..." thing, probably among other people.

R730 or similar, one CPU, no excessive amounts of RAM, one PSU, will be under 100W for sure. I'm running a dual Xeon 8260M system with 12x64 GB RAM and that uses about 120W during idle, powered by a Seasonic TX-1000. I had various different R730 and R740 configurations that were below 100W.

 

[Jihays9]

R730 or similar, one CPU, no excessive amounts of RAM, one PSU, will be under 100W for sure. I'm running a dual Xeon 8260M system with 12x64 GB RAM and that uses about 120W during idle, powered by a Seasonic TX-1000. I had various different R730 and R740 configurations that were below 100W.

With this setup I could have ECC for a similar price point (and power usage):

-intel core i3-9100E
-Supermicro X10SLL-F
-2x8GB ddr4 2400MHZ (ECC)
identical psu, hba, etc

CPU, mobo and ram would now be used parts and significantly less powerful than an i5-10400. Begs the question, the wear and tear of these 10 year old components could be the earliest point of failure rather than worrying about the lack of ECC on brand new sticks.

 

[unwind-protect]

Count me in as another ECC supporter.

The problem with anecdotal evidence here is that if you don't have ECC you can't tell whether you need(ed) ECC. You don't just lack error correction, you also lose error reporting and logging.

 

[pricklypunter]

It doesn't sound to me that outright performance is a goal or hard limit here. I might look at one of the older X9 boards, maybe the X9SCA-F with a V2 12xx chip. Most can be snagged for $60-70 complete with CPU, RAM and Cooler. That would make a nice cheap, pretty low powered NAS with enough grunt and tick the ECC box etc. It really depends on what your end goal is here

 

[frankharv]

Instead of ditching Dell 730xd just build something something else with LGA2011 v4.

I recently bought a ASRockRack MATX LGA2011 board from newegg and put it in an old Silverstone SugoSG01
Intel 8x25" in the drive bays. 4 x NVMe and 4 X SATA
Turned out to be a nice reconstitution.

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPC612D4U#Specifications

Look at the 2650LV4 LGA2011 CPU. It is low power and supports 40 lanes.(still pricey used @~ $110) 14/28 cores@65W
Heck the 2608LV4 only has a TDP of 50W and 8/16 cores..

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2608L v4 (20M Cache, 1.60 GHz) - Product Specifications | Intel

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2608L v4 (20M Cache, 1.60 GHz) quick reference with specifications, features, and technologies.

www.intel.com

 

[nexox]

For whatever this data point is worth, I got a single socket Xeon E5 v2 system with 128GB of DDR3, IPMI, and a SAS3 HBA to idle a bit under 40W, it was a fairly low-clock 8 core CPU, but still plenty for a NAS (which is what I built it as before I got distracted by NVMe and needed more PCIe lanes.)

 

[Jihays9]

Your motherboard suggestions are all pretty nice, thank you! I’ve looked at some compatible Xeon with a moderately low tdp (less than 80-90W) and the single thread performance is really low compared to a more modern cpu. I liked the e3-1275 v2, seems a good compromise, not sure how low will idle though.

I’m still not on the boat of a 50W idling NAS with such low single thread (and overall) performance and slow memory. While it’ll be mainly a NAS it should host a few other things too and I don’t want it to be very sluggish. Additionaly, I can see it running maybe 5 or 6 containers and 1-2 VMs.

All of this is because of ECC? It’s hard to compete with the i5 performance, lower idling power and igpu. I’m more on the fence that what I was before honestly, but I fear I’ll regret taking the old server cpu route all for a RAM event that most likely will never happen anyways.

I have had a brand new ddr4 ram stick fail on my pc after a few months of use. All of a sudden problems booting, unstable, etc. Ran the memtest86, identified the problem, got a new stick under warranty. Plugged the os hdd on my laptop, got a hold of everything, then wiped it clean and never had any issues afterwards.

 

[pricklypunter]

I built a similar system using an even cheaper board, Inventec B400, but using an E3-1245v2, which has the same TDP as the E3-1275v2. I can't remember the exact idle wattage I seen at the time, but it was really low, something like low to mid 20's. Your drives and add-in cards will pull way more juice. The box I built happily handles several VM's, and runs 24/7 to this day. It hosts a firewall (PfSense), a media server (Plex), a small storage server (Debian/ ZFS), a DHCP and DNS server (M$ Server) and an IP-PBX (Debian/ Asterisk), UPS software plus several sandbox VM's that I like to spin up and go play in from time to time. To be fair, I am careful what formats I store media content in, so that transcoding is kept to a minimum, 95% of what I keep on there can direct play to the clients. Overall, it's not winning any speed races for sure, but the single thread performance is more than capable of what I ask of it, in fact it barely breaks a sweat normally.

As I stated earlier, it really depends on your goals here, budget etc. Everyone's yardstick is different. All I will say is that if you are planning on storing data that's precious to you, then you really want a good power supply, ECC RAM, reliable disks, a good balance of performance/ redundancy/ integrity with whatever storage array flavour you opt for, and lastly a good back-up plan

 

[Jihays9]

I built a similar system using an even cheaper board, Inventec B400, but using an E3-1245v2, which has the same TDP as the E3-1275v2. I can't remember the exact idle wattage I seen at the time, but it was really low, something like low to mid 20's. Your drives and add-in cards will pull way more juice. The box I built happily handles several VM's, and runs 24/7 to this day. It hosts a firewall (PfSense), a media server (Plex), a small storage server (Debian/ ZFS), a DHCP and DNS server (M$ Server) and an IP-PBX (Debian/ Asterisk), UPS software plus several sandbox VM's that I like to spin up and go play in from time to time. To be fair, I am careful what formats I store media content in, so that transcoding is kept to a minimum, 95% of what I keep on there can direct play to the clients. Overall, it's not winning any speed races for sure, but the single thread performance is more than capable of what I ask of it, in fact it barely breaks a sweat normally.

As I stated earlier, it really depends on your goals here, budget etc. Everyone's yardstick is different. All I will say is that if you are planning on storing data that's precious to you, then you really want a good power supply, ECC RAM, reliable disks, a good balance of performance/ redundancy/ integrity with whatever storage array flavour you opt for, and lastly a good back-up plan

I have the same approach to storing media, try to direct play everything. As for how precious my data is, it depends. Most of the data will be media, can be re-downloaded.

The rest (a way smaller percentage) will be a couple of laptops and phone backups. That is precious, however, I store these devices backups on my parents Synology, then on two different hdds (3.5” and 2.5”) and lastly on my own Synology at home. So while I may be “rolling the dice” on non-ecc hardware, I try to keep some redundancy on several different places.

This is a noob question, but what I don’t know is where the OS/system data is stored on something like TrueNas or Unraid. By that I also mean, where do Docker images, configurations and VM data is stored? Because that may become precious over time.

 

[nexox]

I have had a brand new ddr4 ram stick fail on my pc after a few months of use. All of a sudden problems booting, unstable, etc. Ran the memtest86, identified the problem, got a new stick under warranty. Plugged the os hdd on my laptop, got a hold of everything, then wiped it clean and never had any issues afterwards.

Did you verify that all of the data stored on your system was untouched? If you don't have checksums or similar protection then there's a good chance that failing memory corrupted some data and you still have that corruption hanging around even with the new stick.

The other advantage of ECC is that server memory seems to be made a whole lot better and (in my experience) fails way less often than desktop memory.

 

[Jihays9]

Did you verify that all of the data stored on your system was untouched? If you don't have checksums or similar protection then there's a good chance that failing memory corrupted some data and you still have that corruption hanging around even with the new stick.

I didn’t verify that. In all fairness though, if after 4 years of daily use, I haven’t come across said (allegedly) corrupted file(s), maybe it wasn’t that critical after all.

I’ve not been able to find a single Inventec B400 anywhere. Are these not sold anymore, not even as used on ebay?

 

[nexox]

I didn’t verify that. In all fairness though, if after 4 years of daily use, I haven’t come across said (allegedly) corrupted file(s), maybe it wasn’t that critical after all.

You got lucky - my last experience with a bad memory stick corrupted not only some important files in my Windows install, but also the main copy of the Windows iso I used at the time. Every time I thought I had fixed the problem I just hit another issue, all caused by that one bad DIMM, after unraveling all of that I decided ECC was worth the price.

 

[frankharv]

I built a similar system using an even cheaper board, Inventec B400, but using an E3-1245v2, which has the same TDP as the E3-1275v2.

I built my recent Mini-NAS on SuperMicro X11-SCL LGA1151 ITX board.
Saying that with ITX build you only get one PCIe slot.
So a CPU with 20 lanes is OK. You really have to plan your usage.
I used a bitifuraction M.2 riser card with two NVMe and a Chelsio T520 Low profile card on top.

But I see so many LGA1151 ATX/MATX boards with a multitude of PCIe slots and laugh. HAH.
You got 20 lanes but all those slots.

So pay attention to what you want from your accessory slots. Just because they have many x16 slots they might be deceving.
For NVMe you need many PCIe Lanes. For a NAS with ZFS a few NVMe fronting some spinners provides a nice boost.
LGA2011 offer twice the lanes of LGA1151 or similar.

 

[Jihays9]

A Supermicro X11SSL-F paired with a E3-1225 or 1265 v6 I guess should fit my needs. Do you have any idling power consumption estimates? I’m guessing similar to the v2 mentioned above?

 

[T_Minus]

I have 2 mini-nas built on the i3-9100F WITH ECC support, running ECC RAM.

Nowadays though you may be better off buying an E-21xx Intel XEON though as prices have come down a LOT, and I got one of those for only slightly more than the 9100F iirc for a build I'm doing now.

But yeah, V5\V6 also good, and super-hard to find iTX V3\V4 but they also work great.

I too wish they had 1 more PCIE slot, I've been exploring using the M2 with an adapter to get me m2 usage + another PCIE slot, I really would like 10Gig + HBA + m2 (optane)....would be great!