drives for home NAS and a few other tasks

[Jihays9]

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!

What motherboard are you using? For a 9th gen i3 I can only find used c246 or c242 really expensive, 300 or 400€ minimum.

 

[nexox]

In the US Supermicro X11SCx boards are commonly available for around $200, for instance: Supermicro X11SCL-F Server Motherboard - Intel C242 Chipset - Socket H4 LGA-1151 672042327652 | eBay

 

[Phenic]

If you don't need transcoding for Plex, you can consider this Epyc system. Being server grade Epyc it has ECC support, IPMI and stuff.

Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 AMD EPYC 3151 4x2,7 Ghz Mini-ITX Mainboard+ ATX Adapter Server - RAM-König

 

[frankharv]

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!

Well take the dive they are cheap enough. Twin Optane plus T520 would be nice. Bifurcation required.

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[nexox]

Well take the dive they are cheap enough. Twin Optane plus T520 would be nice. Bifurcation required.

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Bifurcation support is a good reason to avoid Intel, since they mostly only let you have that on the big Xeons, which use more power and generally don't include the fast-transcoding iGPU.

 

[Jihays9]

In the US Supermicro X11SCx boards are commonly available for around $200, for instance: Supermicro X11SCL-F Server Motherboard - Intel C242 Chipset - Socket H4 LGA-1151 672042327652 | eBay

Shipping+vat+import fees & handling makes it over 350€. Not worth it in my opinion…

If you don't need transcoding for Plex, you can consider this Epyc system. Being server grade Epyc it has ECC support, IPMI and stuff.

Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 AMD EPYC 3151 4x2,7 Ghz Mini-ITX Mainboard+ ATX Adapter Server - RAM-König

While I may not need transcoding most of the times, I still want the server to have a gpu and that board won’t allow me to plug a dedicated one either. It’s a no go for me.

 

[pricklypunter]

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

The B400 was an ODM board, manufactured for a smaller server manufacturer. I tripped over it by accident, when I was looking for a suitable chassis for my build. I still get messages about it, which is amazing, despite posting about the build years ago

It was about EOL when I got mine, plus I think by comparison, there probably weren't a bazillion of them manufactured either. Anyone that was lucky enough to have scooped one up at the time, probably still has it running in a cupboard somewhere, they are robust.
I haven't seen any for sale in a long time, but I would be willing to bet there are still some old server chassis out there in the disposal market with one tucked inside. The closest board that is readily obtainable from that era, would likely be the x9SCxxx boards from Supermicro. Again, a really old board series, but can be had really cheap and is still plenty usable. For something a smidge better, you could also look at an X10SRI-F, throw in some RAM and a E5-16xx CPU etc. These are a bit more expensive, and will idle higher, but opens the door to more cores, RAM options, PCIe 3.0, more slots and etc

The funny thing about choice, sometimes there's too much of it, and you just have to roll the dice and move forward

 

[Jihays9]

X10SRI-F

This one is old and gets too expensive for my budget.

The funny thing about choice, sometimes there's too much of it, and you just have to roll the dice and move forward

Amen to that!

Still wrapping my head around whether I need ECC, and assessing computing power vs cost. What metric should I use to gauge power, a passmark score? If so, what figure should I be looking at?
While this will be mainly a NAS and streaming server, it should be powerful enough to also run frigate, home assistant, maybe nextcloud, and a few other things like sonarr+radarr, etc. I don't really have a reference that I can correlate with and say that'll make it smooth enough. I'm concerned the E3-1265 v3 (passmark 6000) won't be powerful enough? the i5-10400 is 12000 and the i5-12400 is 19200 (only 25€ more expensive).

 

[i386]

A nas will be fine with two cores and 4 threads @ 2GHz for 10GBE, it's all the other stuff that will require more computing power or require additonal hardware that will increase pwoer consumption.

Go for a system with ecc, you will sleep better even when it costs more

 

[Jihays9]

A nas will be fine with two cores and 4 threads @ 2GHz for 10GBE

That's half a Xeon E3. So I guess my point is, if I go ECC, my budget only fits E3 v3 right now.

Are the remaining 2 cores and 4 threads @ 3.X GHz enough to power "all the other stuff"?

 

[nexox]

Frigate has some specific hardware requirements, you may want to build a separate machine just for that. Everything else should run on almost any computer you can put your hands on, I'd be more concerned that there don't seem to be any SSDs in your build - some of those services are likely to do some random IO, which will tank the performance of your storage array. More memory also always helps when you want to run lots of services, just another one of those features that makes an E5 Xeon or equivalent Epyc look good - they take ECC RDIMMs which are available in much larger capacity and much cheaper than the UDIMMs (ECC or otherwise) that desktop CPUs use (this includes low-end server CPUs derived from desktop CPUs like the Xeon E3.)

 

[Jihays9]

Frigate has some specific hardware requirements, you may want to build a separate machine just for that. Everything else should run on almost any computer you can put your hands on, I'd be more concerned that there don't seem to be any SSDs in your build - some of those services are likely to do some random IO, which will tank the performance of your storage array. More memory also always helps when you want to run lots of services, just another one of those features that makes an E5 Xeon or equivalent Epyc look good - they take ECC RDIMMs which are available in much larger capacity and much cheaper than the UDIMMs (ECC or otherwise) that desktop CPUs use (this includes low-end server CPUs derived from desktop CPUs like the Xeon E3.)

As for frigate cpu requirements, the one they mention to be an overkill is a dual core cpu (passmark 3900), however less powerful one they suggest is a 4-core cpu (passmark 5500). Go figure.

I won’t have dedicated machines because I don’t want to deal with the extra maintenace. I’m aware of the single point of failure, but don’t consider the NAS that critical (so far) and already have a dedicated opnsense router.

Yesterday I put together the i5-10400 and installed TrueNas. It idles at 17W, no hba, no hdd, only 1 ssd and 2 ddr4 sticks. Just to get an idea of how much it would draw just sitting there. Then after 40 min or so I got an “IPVS rr no destination available” error and realized how much I miss IPMI. This thing will be running in the attic of my garage, though accessible, not very convenient.

Made me order a Supermicro X10SLL-F and Xeon E3-1265l v3. Just hope that thing can idle 15-20w (no hba, no hdds) which doesn’t seem unrealistic and has got enough juice to power all the things I mentioned reasonably smooth.

 

[Jihays9]

Well, this seems to be a big problem for me too. Is this something generalized with Supermicro boards?

 

[nexox]

Just the BMC will consume 7-8W, even while the machine is off, so 15W idle seems unlikely. Does that board even support an iGPU? I can't keep track of all the desktop chipsets, but usually the Supermicro iGPU boards have extra video outputs beyond the VGA port. In any case, you can just set up remote console via IPMI and use that rather than the KVM feature, much easier to use in my opinion.

 

[Jihays9]

Just the BMC will consume 7-8W, even while the machine is off, so 15W idle seems unlikely. Does that board even support an iGPU? I can't keep track of all the desktop chipsets, but usually the Supermicro iGPU boards have extra video outputs beyond the VGA port. In any case, you can just set up remote console via IPMI and use that rather than the KVM feature, much easier to use in my opinion.

Thanks for bringing it up. Confirmed it won’t work. Source:

Post in thread 'Activating Plex hardware acceleration'
Activating Plex hardware acceleration

 

[Jihays9]

Found a suitable alternative that comes with ddr4 and intel c226 chipset, a Thinkserver TS150. Afaik these boards run moderately low power and have the ThinkServer Management Module (TMM) for remote control.
Do all have TMM or is that an add-on?

 

[T_Minus]

What motherboard are you using? For a 9th gen i3 I can only find used c246 or c242 really expensive, 300 or 400€ minimum.

The superMicro board, it wasn't cheap when I got it and still not cheap, but not stupid expensive ITX board price anymore