Review my server upgrade

[altano]

Hey all, what do you think of this server upgrade?

Goal: I'm converting my storage server into a single hyper-converged server and ditching my VM server.

	Old Part	New Part	Price
Chassis	Supermicro CSE-826BE1C-R920LPB	-	-
Backplane	BPN-SAS3-826EL1	-	-
Air shroud	MCP-310-29001-0N	-	-
HBA	AOC-S3008L-L8E (SAS3)	-	-
PSU	2 x PWS-920P-1R redundant PSUs	-	-
Drives	4 x 18TB WD HC550 SAS WUH721818AL5204 8 x 18TB WD HC550 SATA WUH721818ALE6L4	-	-
Boot SSD	Optane p1600x (m.2) (boot) (118GB SSD)	Kioxia 2TB KXG80ZNV2T04	$290
Motherboard	Supermicro A2SDV-16C-TLN5F	Supermicro H13SAE-MF	$450
CPU	Atom C3958 16-core	EPYC 4464P	$480
Memory	4 x 32GB DDR4 HMA84GR7MFR4N-UH	4 x 48GB DDR5 KSM56E46BD8KM-48HM	$1,050
GPU	Quadro P2000	RTX 2000 Ada SFF	$716
CPU Cooler		Dynatron A47	$50

I'm flexible on budget, but I have a strict 2U, 360w limit on my choices.

Usage profile: backup of a lot of devices, media server, game server, windows VM for cloud gaming, developer tooling (e.g. turborepo remote cache server), development scratch VMs for testing, hobbyist devopsing

 

[louie1961]

I am not sure you need 2TB for a boot drive. Plus, I would prefer a mirrored boot drive and power loss protection on any SSDs, which those Kioxias don't seem to have (unless I missed it?)

Where's your NIC? You aren't going to be happy with all that new horsepower behind a 1GB onboard NIC, are you?

How was the performance on your old setup? You may be able to go for a less capable processor and a more gaming capable video card, to balance the watt budget. The processor you selected is more than 12x the CPU power of that Atom.

 

[CyklonDX]

I would replace AOC-S3008L-L8E (SAS3) with 9400-16i/9500-16i. Not that it would give any performance, but you could connect u.2 disks on it in future.

and same points as mentioned above. *(for me mirror 400G for os is standard for any kind of setup)

 

[altano]

I am not sure you need 2TB for a boot drive. Plus, I would prefer a mirrored boot drive and power loss protection on any SSDs, which those Kioxias don't seem to have (unless I missed it?)

Oh yeah good catch. I only picked that Kioxia because it was on the Supermicro QVL, and I had a lot of trouble with an SSD that wasn't on their QVL before. I am _probably_ going to run some VMs on the main SSD, so I want some space, but 2TB is overkill for sure. Do you know any good 800+GB SSDs that have PLP and would be good in a mirror? Slower and cheaper would be better.

How was the performance on your old setup? You may be able to go for a less capable processor and a more gaming capable video card, to balance the watt budget. The processor you selected is more than 12x the CPU power of that Atom.

Yeah, the Atom was in my storage server and in my VM server I had an Epyc 3251, so my chart above was misleading. The 4464p is ~3.5x faster than the 3251 which feels like a good upgrade. I'm more of a programmer than I am a gamer so I'm not worried about the video card and would prefer more horsepower on the CPU. The most graphics intensive game I've played lately is Baba is You. I would upgrade the GPU less if it made sense but in terms of low-power, low-profile GPUs I'm not seeing much in between the Quadro P2000 and RTX 2000 Ada. The RTX 2000E is even lower power (which I'd take) but is more expensive than the RTX 2000. The RTX A2000 is 22% slower but only ~$100 cheaper and the same TDP. If you know a card that is both lower power consumption and cheaper, but an upgrade over the Quadro P2000, please let me know.

I would replace AOC-S3008L-L8E (SAS3) with 9400-16i/9500-16i. Not that it would give any performance, but you could connect u.2 disks on it in future.

Oh neat, I've never seen that HBA. I'll put it on my list of potential future upgrades!

 

[nexox]

If you want a little more efficiency then you can swap in PWS-501P-1R PSUs, which are platinum rated and closer to your total load, also quite affordable used.

 

[altano]

If you want a little more efficiency then you can swap in PWS-501P-1R PSUs, which are platinum rated and closer to your total load, also quite affordable used.

If I'm reading the test reports correctly, I don't think that would save me too much power. It's hard to compare because the datapoints don't line up, but I think it's 1% at the most, right? Or is that 2%?

500W / 920W

 

[altano]

Oh wow, I clearly don't know how to read these reports because their titanium PSU is worse efficiency than their platinum PSU, which is backwards:

Titanium: 94.11% (typical) / 92.85% (avg)
Platinum: 94.44% (typical) / 93.31% (avg)

 

[nexox]

If I'm reading the test reports correctly, I don't think that would save me too much power. It's hard to compare because the datapoints don't line up, but I think it's 1% at the most, right? Or is that 2%?

Oh yeah I mis-read, I thought you had the PWS-902, not 920, it won't be that big of a difference, probably, though it's hard to tell because the official test data in those reports (notice the * by the 10% load figure,) starts at 180W for the 920, and you have two, so you'll only ever get to the rated efficiency curve at full load, and power supplies do drop efficiency, sometimes significantly, at low load.

 

[altano]

Speaking of hba upgrades: the H13SAE-MF has the following PCI slots:
2 gen5 x16
1 gen4 x4

And I have an HBA that is PCI gen3 x8

That is powering a BPN-SAS3-826EL1 backplane (12Gbps)

I don't want to use an x16 slot on an the HBA but I'm having trouble figuring out if the backplane would be bottle-necked by the x4 slot. Is this math correct?:

gen3 x8 card plugged into gen4 x4 (open-ended) slot will have x4 lanes, negotiated down to gen3 card speed (despite gen4 slot).
gen3 x4 is 8GB/s, or 32Gbps, which should easily saturate the backplane throughput of 12gbps.

If not, I guess I should upgrade to a gen4 or gen5 hba so I can use the x4 slot without bottle-necking anything?

 

[nexox]

gen3 x4 is 8GB/s, or 32Gbps, which should easily saturate the backplane throughput of 12gbps.

The backplane connectors are four lanes of 12G each, and you can connect two of them, as I recall both SAS3 and PCIe 3.0 have the same 8/10 bit encoding overhead, so you would need 48Gbps of raw PCIe slot bandwidth to handle a single connector. The question is how fast are your drives, because 3.0x4 is still around 250MB/s each for 12 drives after accounting for the overhead, and that's probably just about enough for spinning disks.