Home NAS Upgrade

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

shanehm2

New Member
Jan 12, 2018
25
2
3
40
Ok I am wanting to upgrade my aging NAS.
It runs unRAID 6.0.2 and in that sense the OS will not be changed at all so please refrain from suggesting another solution.

My current setup is:
CPU: Xeon E3-1220v2
Cooler: Noctua something
Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCL+-F
RAM: 4 x 8GB (32GB) Kingston Unbuffered ECC 1333mhz DDR3
PSU: Corsair AX-850i
Case: Antec 300
Drives: Various from 750gb~2TB (that will addressed at a later date)
No add in cards.


My new setup is that I want to be able to add a few dockers and have plex working from there. Maybe a few basic vms to play around with and I don't want to have to upgrade in the next 3 years. Also I want to have 10gb on the motherboard and possibly lots of sata.

What I have got planned is:
CPU: Intel Silver 4114
Cooler: ??????? Please help :D
Motherboard: Supermicro X11Spi-TF
RAM: ????? Please help :D hoping to get 128gb in as I think that will last me since unRAID itself uses bare minimum memory and the rest will be used towards dockers.
PSU: Taken from above RIG
Case: Lian-Li PC-D8000B
Drives: Taken from above RIG
Add-in cards: LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode.
SSD: 4x460gb~512gb in RAID 10 for the cache drive to have redundancy and speed.

If anyone can give me any feedback or help it will would be great. Also I am limited to pretty Australian retailers for the CPU, motherboard which I already have places that have them. RAM and cooler is my greatest worry
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
1,439
320
83
30041
For Plex use, I have found that E3 and E5-1xxx are a better choice than E5-2x or xeon silver. Even my old i7-4770k has a much smoother streaming experience when serving multiple transcoded streams. If you are doing all direct play, it does not matter to that extent. For plex the single core performance matters a lot.

I assume you chose the X11SPI board because of the 10G built in.I prefer the X11SPL-F where all available pcie are exposed and I can configure to my need. if you are set on onboard 10g, look at the X11SPH-nctf or its SFP+ variant. They have built in SAS3 HBA, 10g and 3 nvme (one m.2 and 2 oculink) and are better value.

All my 3647 cpus are in 2u servers and use either Dynatron B5 or Supermicro SNK-P0068AP. I am happy with both.
 

mackle

Active Member
Nov 13, 2013
221
40
28
If it were me I'd update the drives at the same time, rather than leave it for down the road, unless the $$'s weren't there yet. With a new build I'd also personally go with a new PSU.

128gb of RAM is going to cost you a pretty penny at the moment. Although it's anyone's guess when prices are going to break you might want to consider starting out with 64gb or 96gb in a configuration that allows you to expand to 128gb once prices come down, and once you have a better idea about your ram needs.
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
838
213
43
Did you upgrade to UnRAID 6.4 yet? There's loads of new features plus the ability for 10GB to run really well. I highly suggest going that route if possible, speed matters.
 

shanehm2

New Member
Jan 12, 2018
25
2
3
40
For Plex use, I have found that E3 and E5-1xxx are a better choice than E5-2x or xeon silver. Even my old i7-4770k has a much smoother streaming experience when serving multiple transcoded streams. If you are doing all direct play, it does not matter to that extent. For plex the single core performance matters a lot.

I assume you chose the X11SPI board because of the 10G built in.I prefer the X11SPL-F where all available pcie are exposed and I can configure to my need. if you are set on onboard 10g, look at the X11SPH-nctf or its SFP+ variant. They have built in SAS3 HBA, 10g and 3 nvme (one m.2 and 2 oculink) and are better value.

All my 3647 cpus are in 2u servers and use either Dynatron B5 or Supermicro SNK-P0068AP. I am happy with both.
Yeah I looked at the e3 and e5 cpu's. However I don't want to buy a CPU that is starting to become previous gen and the silver is pretty good bang for buck. Also I am not going to be using m2 or nvme ssd's nor SFP networking.

If it were me I'd update the drives at the same time, rather than leave it for down the road, unless the $$'s weren't there yet. With a new build I'd also personally go with a new PSU.

128gb of RAM is going to cost you a pretty penny at the moment. Although it's anyone's guess when prices are going to break you might want to consider starting out with 64gb or 96gb in a configuration that allows you to expand to 128gb once prices come down, and once you have a better idea about your ram needs.
Unfortunately the budget won't be stretching for a new set of drives which would be about $200~$300 AUD per drivee.

For ram I might go with 64gb for the moment, but what is the best configuration ?? 4x 16gb or 2x 32gb. Also ecc reg or whats the best ram type to go with

Did you upgrade to UnRAID 6.4 yet? There's loads of new features plus the ability for 10GB to run really well. I highly suggest going that route if possible, speed matters.
Not as of yet I am going to wait until I do this upgrade as 10gb nics onboard is for my project towards the end of the year to have 10gb between my server, me and a few other of my machines
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
838
213
43
honestly 64GB max for UnRAID is ridiculously enough. I got away with 16GB and multiple dockers for awhile. I now have 128GB and everything sits in cached RAM.

If you are still using the motherboard above just go with 16GB sticks and keep filling them up as required. That'll save you some cash in the short term.

A 4 Core XEON with 8 threads is gonna do everything you need and more. Docker takes next to nothing CPU and the most bang for your buck is a solid SSD drive for your plex and docker images where it can dump all encodings to the disk and serve it upto you.

I have 8 docker images all running all the time and i barely notice any cpu bottlenecks. My SSD's are my limiting factor if anything as well as my spinning disks that the server has to read from before shoving it into plex to play.
 

shanehm2

New Member
Jan 12, 2018
25
2
3
40
Ok I have reviewed your guys comments.

The alteration I am looking at is:

64gb of RAM in 4x16GB configuration. I am looking at 4 of these sticks MTA18ASF2G72PDZ-2G6H1R Micron Server Memory which are on supermicros tested memory list.

Edit there is also this store M393A2K40BB2-CTD - Samsung 1x 16GB DDR4-2666 RDIMM PC4-21300V-R Single Rank x4 Module

Has anybody had any dealings with that store ?

Xeon Silver 4110 or 4108 as definately the lowest I want to go is 8 cores as just a personal preference. They seem to be very identical in terms of cache and turbo speed but the 4108 has a base clock of 1.8ghz and the 4110 has a base clock of 2.1ghz and for me its a difference between 4108 at $670 and 4110 at $800 (Australian dollars for both values)

So now with that little summary above.

a) With the CPU above it's giving me peace of mind that I will have power there shall I want to dedicate one or more cores to a dedicated 24/7 vm which might be the case in the future.

b) With the ram it will leave me 4 free slots and if I feell the need to fill it down the line, I will have another 4 free slots to work with.

Also as I said above about the SSD's I will be starting of with 4x SSD's as cache drives and then when I get the plex docker sorted I will use unassigned devices and attach an SSD from there
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
838
213
43
1. 300mhz is nothing, you won't notice that in plex decoding, get more RAM, you'll notice that far more than CPU speed.

2. 4 SSDs is overkill. If you have the capital get 2 1TB SSD's and save yourself some room for expansion. UnRAID uses BTRFS for the Cache disks which you won't see in your RAID10 set unless you implicity set the RAID in the hardware and ignore UNRAIDs recommendation. I have 3 512GB SSDs with 756GB of space. This is how UnRAID carves up drives. Unless you are needing brazillian IOPS let UnRAID handle the RAID structure and you go about your business.
 

TLN

Active Member
Feb 26, 2016
523
84
28
34
Just FYI:
I got a ASrock EPC612D4u-2T8R board, it's matx, have 2x10G NICs, LSI93xx SAS (8 ports) and supports Xeon E5-v5 CPUs. I'm not sue what I want to do with it, so I might put it up for sale. I have matching CPUs: 2683v3 (14 cores) and 2618Lv3 (8 cores) as well as 16Gb memory sticks. Both CPU's can be "Turbo un locked",which allows to run turbo freq for all cores. But I bet, even without it, it will score better then 4110, since it's 3.0+ Ghz CPU.
 

halfelite

Member
Oct 10, 2014
62
17
8
40
Just curious why not run a CPU that has built-in GPU so you can use hardware decoding with plex? Then you don't have to worry about raw power for Plex.
 

fractal

Active Member
Jun 7, 2016
309
69
28
33
You have a decent bucket of bits there. Now you want virtualization.

Do you want mehh at both, good at one and bad at the other or good at both?

Good at both in one box will cost you. Good at both in two boxes is modest. Mehh at both with one box for the price of two boxes is standard.
 

shanehm2

New Member
Jan 12, 2018
25
2
3
40
No I am not wanting virtualisation aka ESXi. I am wanting it at the level of that if I want to test out a operating system I don't have to setup a dedicated physical machine. I can simply grab the iso and spend 2 mins configuring the vm and start to install it and test it.

Also the cost is not that much of a worry for me as previously stated I am wanting this machine to last me for several years and this is the current generation of xeons.
 

shanehm2

New Member
Jan 12, 2018
25
2
3
40
So after several months of being busy with a family member passing away and alot of other things work related etc this had been put on the back burner, until that is now :D

I saw the release of the Xeon e-21xx series and I am going to go the path of a e-2186g except I cant find one for sale anywhere

Is there going to be a release date for people to buy them even tray or is it a vendor only cpu line up ? As I looked on the Intel site and it said release Q3 2018 and in one or 2 days it will be end of q3 with none for sale or every site saying none in stock.

On the motherboard side of things the Supermicro X11SCA-F that patrick review is going to be the board I will go with