Overwhelmed by CPU and motherboard options, help!

[jd680]

Hi all, I would like to have a home server primarily for photo backups at this time. Between my personal photos from my camera, various iPhone screenshots, and a photo-scanning project (slides and family history photos), I have a lot of pictures. I want to back them up and organize them. Currently, I use Apple Photos and Lightroom. The goal is to keep this year’s photos on my personal computer (Windows PC) and the rest on the NAS/server.

Hardware- and software-wise, my thoughts are as follows: I definitely would like ZFS, as it would provide error correction and data protection against corruption. Total storage needs right now are 20TB-30TB. At some point, once I move out of my parents, I’d like to build a media server, but it can be either entirely separate or something to think about in a year or more. I’m leaning toward using TrueNAS or Proxmox, and I'm comfortable building my own machine (used to build computers at a previous job). UnRaid is also an option, though I’d be more inclined to use it for a media server.

I currently have a smattering of HDs, but I'm not sure whether they would be helpful. I could always use them in a DAS for Backups. They are as follows:

M.2 -1TB

HD’s- 3TB, 2TB, 4TB, 500GB, and 2 18TB

Power consumption is essential, and if needed, I set it up to boot in the evening, run its backup, do its thing, and then turn off. If this doesn’t make sense, I’d like it to idle under 80 watts if possible. 6-8 disks in Raid Z2.

Software is likely to run

Is Iminich for photos and likely not much else for this use case. Overwhelmed by motherboard and CPU options. Likely building in a Jonsbro N6 case. Any suggestions appreciated.

If I’m misguided, let me know. I know not all of this might be possible, but at the very least, I’m getting out my thoughts and needs. Would like to spend under $2k on the machine itself, excluding drives.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Do you already have an offsite (and preferably offline) backup solution? I'd spend money on that before you dedicate yourself to building a purpose-made server, since even the backup server is not immune from e.g. a lightning strike or the house burning down.

If it's only for powering up once a day/week to do the backup (which is what I do with my local backup server, with a longer power-up once a month to run SMART tests and array verification), then power usage and probably noise is IME of secondary concern; any old cheap crap should do. Starting up at set intervals is easy enough on almost any hardware that supports rtcwake (the easiest and probably most widely supported) or wake-on-LAN (which would require another device to wake it up).

Normally I'd say that for a backup server, redundancy isn't the primary concern, since that costs a lot in terms of hardware and power... but since this is essentially more of an archive server, and thus the SPOF for your old stuff, then it's probably essential here.

>30TB is... quite a lot of images, so I think you're best off building on the two 18TB drives you've got and ignoring your tiddlers - assuming they're not SMR drives that is. A RAIDZ2/RAID6 needs a minimum of four drives (typically of identical size) so you're already looking at >20W idle for the drives alone (assuming you don't try and use spindown).

For drives that big though, personally I'd opt for mirrors, since the rebuild/restripe time can get sphincter-clenchingly long with large HDDs (I don't have any ZFS arrays with drives that big but I'd expect your talking about 24-48hrs rebuild on a RAIDZ2 with 4x18TB drives); you can start with the 2x18TB in effectively a RAID1 and expand by adding another mirror (doesn't even have to be the same size) further down the line (effectively becoming a stripe of RAID1 arrays in a similar fashion to RAID10). Rebuilds on these are far faster, but they're much less space-efficient especially once you scale past six drives or so (but at the same time can provide better fault-tolerance).

The latest ZFS versions support expanding a RAIDZx as you go in the same way mdadm veterans like me are used to doing; I've not tried this yet either, but it might be worth investigating if space efficiency is more important to you than redundancy.

I've not seen any review yet for the Jonsbo N6, but at first glance it looks like an OK choice if you don't want to go rackmount. I've some doubts whether the fans at the back have enough clout to keep 9xHDDs cool unless they're fairly beefy ones, but that's always fixable with a fan upgrade and/or some earplugs.

You'll want to use an HBA for hooking the mobo up to the backplane - there's a wealth of info about these on the forums but the LSI 9211/9305/9400/9500 are all well battle tested and fine for just supporting SATA HDDs; one of the 8i variants will allow you to connect to eight of the nine drive slots. The backplane on the N6 looks like it's SATA connectors only so if Jonsbo don't provide one, you'll need to use a SATA forward breakout cable from your HBA. The final drive slot can probably be wired direct to the SATA ports on the motherboard, there's probably no point to bump to a 16i to get all of the drive slots handled by the HBA.

CPU and motherboard are probably the least important things here then IMHO. If you're buying new, a low-end ryzen desktop build will have all the CPU power I think you could realistically want I think, as well as the option of using ECC RAM (albeit UDIMMs)... if you can find/afford them at this time that is. The N6 case doesn't seem to provide anything other than the 9x3.5" hot-swap for drive bays so you'll probably want something you can boot off SATA DOM or NVME (probably 2xM.2 boot drives is the path of least resistance these days) to avoid "wasting" the hot-swap slots.

A mATX mobo form-factor limits your choice in the used enterprise market somewhat, but there's still plenty of options available. I'm still a big fan of the Supermicro C3000 options like the A2SDi-8C_-HLN4F since they tend to include a lot of built-in IO and they sip power... but they're old now and nothing to really match them has been released, and the limited CPU speed can definitely be a hindrance; but again that might not be a problem for a mere archive server.

 

[jd680]

HI, thanks for answering and providing such a detailed reply. So I currently have both an offline backup solution and an off-site backup via cloud (Backblaze B2). Good point about the actuality of if I only power on the backup once a week to do a backup. RTCwake seems rather useful. Redundancy is essential in my use case as it's an archive of photos and is rather crucial. Good point about 30TB being a lot of photos. Honestly, unsure of how much storage space I need, I shot out a number, thinking it would at least be more than enough. Also, I was thinking in total space, including redundancy protection. Likely closer to 20TB usable. I will be scanning the photos and slides as TIFF files, which might be 100MB per image/slide. Have several thousand. The 2 18TB drives could be helpful as a backup to the NAS. I prefer to use RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 for overall protection and redundancy. Would donate or sell my old drives. Keep them for later, then throw them into an UnRaid system for media storage (Plex).

Your point about the rebuild times with that amount of TBs of HDs is a good one to bring up. 6x8TB drives instead, or 6x10TB? I would be in a RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 configuration. I'm weary of using RAID1 as a config, as I'd be wary of data loss. Interesting, the ZFS supports the expansion, once again, I'm worried most about redundancy, but also space efficiency is a thought on my mind.

I'll have to look at the various Jonsbo cases, but I like the similar form factor. Would like to look at noise and cooling factors. I'm familiar with using an HBA, but would that be needed if the MB already has 6 SATA connections? Regardless, good notes on using the HBA for the Jonsbo case.

For me, given that I would start in my use case, figuring out my CPU/MB combo, it has me racking my brain the most. Are the Ryzen G models worth using for this case? I'm in between Ryzen and Intel. I've used both in my personal systems. Do you have any other suggestions, like the Supermicro C3000 options? I would like to see a spreadsheet to sort through options. Should I use Newegg or another site to sort through options? Was thinking of purchasing said MB and maybe CPU on eBay or Newegg. Don't necessarily need new parts, but could if not much price difference.

 

[MBastian]

Likely building in a Jonsbro N6 case. Any suggestions appreciated.

I would like to throw the JMCD 12S4 into the mix. I eyed the Jonsbo NAS cases for some time but the N4 is kind of meh and the N5 and N6 are too deep for the intended place. I have read good things about this JMCD case and already ordered one. The option to have SAS drives is really nice. Just make sure you order the right option with the right cables. 12S4-2 with SFF-8643 to SFF-8643 in my case

If power usage is a concern stay with Ryzen G (with Bx50 boards) or Intel (No Idea here what exactly, I do like ECC and Intel consumer boards do not support that). Also be aware that older LSI HBAs have broken ASPM support. Get at least a 9305 or better 9400. A Lenovo 430 can be had for a bargain sometimes and can be cross flashed to a LSI 9400.

Edit: there is also the slightly smaller JMCD 9s2 with 9 slots but it can hold only mATX boards.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

HI, thanks for answering and providing such a detailed reply. So I currently have both an offline backup solution and an off-site backup via cloud (Backblaze B2). Good point about the actuality of if I only power on the backup once a week to do a backup. RTCwake seems rather useful.

Good that you've already got backups sorted then. And yes, rtcwake's a great little util and has been supported on any x86 BIOS I can remember using.

Good point about 30TB being a lot of photos. Honestly, unsure of how much storage space I need, I shot out a number, thinking it would at least be more than enough. Also, I was thinking in total space, including redundancy protection. Likely closer to 20TB usable. I will be scanning the photos and slides as TIFF files, which might be 100MB per image/slide. Have several thousand.

I can't claim to have any knowledge of your pipeline, but personally if you're "just" using TIFFs (it's actually a container format so the actual codec in use for compression can vary) I'd give JPEG-XL/JXL some serious consideration. I was able to use it on my digital camera archive and it was able to save about 50% of space on most files, and is losslessly convertible back to the original JPEG format (including all metadata). Lossless compression, high colour depths, multiple additional channels, CMYK and a whole bunch of other stuff are all supported. It's languished the last few years what with google removing support for it from chromium, but it was just made the latest standard for PDF image compression so web browser support will soon be near universal.

The 2 18TB drives could be helpful as a backup to the NAS. I prefer to use RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 for overall protection and redundancy. Would donate or sell my old drives. Keep them for later, then throw them into an UnRaid system for media storage (Plex).

If I wanted to keep the drive count (and thus power utilisation, noise and heat) down, I'd probably start off with using these 18TB drives directly. It's probably my old-skool experiences with drives dying during RAID5 rebuilds talking so hopefully someone with more modern experience can confirm or deny this, but for drives this big I'd probably want to use mirrors rather than parity. But there's a whole heap of "it depends..." happening here with regards to what you want to spend, if you think you'll need to expand, how good you think your backup recovery is in case the whole array goes boom, etc etc etc...

Your point about the rebuild times with that amount of TBs of HDs is a good one to bring up. 6x8TB drives instead, or 6x10TB? I would be in a RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 configuration. I'm weary of using RAID1 as a config, as I'd be wary of data loss. Interesting, the ZFS supports the expansion, once again, I'm worried most about redundancy, but also space efficiency is a thought on my mind.

Parity RAID rebuilds generally scale upwards with the size of the array (i.e. you need to re-read the whole array/filesystem and calculate parity to write to the new drive), whilst mirror RAID rebuilds only scale upwards with the size of the drives (e.g. to replace a single 10TB drive, you only need to read 10TB off its pair and write 10GB to the new/replacement one).

Bear in mind that a 6x10TB RAIDZ2 would only net you an array of "only" 40TB raw; 30TB in a RAIDZ3 (although by your admission that size estimate might have been on the large side). If you only have a maximum of 6x SATA drives, your only expansion option would be to replace all six drives with larger ones.

I'll have to look at the various Jonsbo cases, but I like the similar form factor. Would like to look at noise and cooling factors. I'm familiar with using an HBA, but would that be needed if the MB already has 6 SATA connections? Regardless, good notes on using the HBA for the Jonsbo case.

It's getting rather difficult to find boards these days with more than 4x SATA connections, and even if you only need 6x SATA now it could limit your expansion options in the future; not to mention many motherboards use a couple of different SATA controllers. There's no "right" answer to this, and if onboard SATA fits your needs then go for it, but most people here I think would go the HBA route rather than rely on the board.

For me, given that I would start in my use case, figuring out my CPU/MB combo, it has me racking my brain the most. Are the Ryzen G models worth using for this case? I'm in between Ryzen and Intel. I've used both in my personal systems. Do you have any other suggestions, like the Supermicro C3000 options? I would like to see a spreadsheet to sort through options. Should I use Newegg or another site to sort through options? Was thinking of purchasing said MB and maybe CPU on eBay or Newegg. Don't necessarily need new parts, but could if not much price difference.

If you're talking about AM5 models, I don't think there's any use case in the G series - all new AM5 chips come with a basic iGPU that's fine for "does it boot? Can I log in on the console?" usage, whereas older AM4 chips didn't have the iGPU outside of the G series. If you go down that route (and once you get used to its advantages it's a difficult thing to not want) most server/workstation boards will come with an IPMI solution though, so even iGPUs aren't strictly needed there anyway. The only real use-case for most iGPUs these days is the onboard video [de|en]coding engine, and I think Intel is still considered better than AMD in that regard.

Personally I'd settle on the rest of the spec before I committed to a motherboard and CPU - I think choices like HBA yes/no, ECC yes/no and IPMI yes/no are more important ones to get a handle on first.