Hello -
New to the forums here.
My current homelab consists of various old computers but the main one I am concerned with today is my primary Unraid server.
Budget is around $1700-2000 all in.
HP z820 Workstation running UnRaid
I would also like to go rack mount since I am buying a rack for some network stuff. So a consumer based tower build based on a Meshify 2XL or whatever isn't really what I'm after.
Looking for something with a lot of headroom to grow and something I wont want/need to upgrade for years to come. I self-host as much as is humanly possible.
After some discussion with some folks here is what I have come up with:
My questions/concerns:
My main concern is the memory - the board/cpu supports DDR4-3200 but as far as I can tell the only ECC modules available are 64GB. As I understand it the EPYC works a lot better with 8 modules. So 8 slower modules would be preferable to 2 faster ones?
Is Zen3 or Intel worth considering? The Zen2 is from 2019 which is already a bit old but it does seem like a great value.
Is the HBA correct? Based on the photos of the chassis the expanders seem to terminate into 4 of those dual ported SAS connectors so it seems like I need a 16 port HBA and the 9400 is pretty new but I could probably get away with a 9200 or 9300 series for less money.
Any other thoughts, comments, concerns?
Thanks so much!
New to the forums here.
My current homelab consists of various old computers but the main one I am concerned with today is my primary Unraid server.
Budget is around $1700-2000 all in.
HP z820 Workstation running UnRaid
- Dual socket Intel Xeon E5-2697-V2 (12c/24t each) - 14k passmark each
- 128gb DDR3 ECC
- 2x 1tb Intel NVMe SSDs (Intel 665p)
- 8x internal 3.5" drive slots
- ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card (only 1 slot used due to lack of bifurcation support)
- LSI SAS9201-16e 16-Port (for external chassis)
- 16 HDD's - 8 internal to the tower, 8 external in a custom 16 bay chassis
- Dual port Intel 1gb Ethernet adapter (connected using LACP)
- System idles around 250w
- DIY 16-bay external disk chassis - total of 24 slots
- Essentially entire homelab software stack
- General purpose NAS storage
- Plex + Supporting apps (low user count, max 5-6 streams peak)
- Relatively large library (~4000 movies, tons of shows, 60TB or so)
- Immich (including the ML stuff)
- Eventually Frigate (including the AI stuff)
- Total of approx. 40 containers
- 1-2 VM's (1 windows, 1 linux)
- No continuously running intensive workloads but I do some things that can be pretty bursty like Friday night plex loads or big batch image/video processing jobs
I would also like to go rack mount since I am buying a rack for some network stuff. So a consumer based tower build based on a Meshify 2XL or whatever isn't really what I'm after.
Looking for something with a lot of headroom to grow and something I wont want/need to upgrade for years to come. I self-host as much as is humanly possible.
After some discussion with some folks here is what I have come up with:
- Motherboard: Supermicro H12SSL-i. (ebay bundle with cpu and memory ~$1000)
- CPU: AMD EPYC 7402P
- CPU Fan: Supermicro 4U EPYC (~$40)
- Memory: 8x16gb DDR42133
- HBA: LSI 9400-16i (~$80)
- NIC: Supermicro AOC-STGN-I2S (Intel based 10gb) (~$30)
- GPU: Intel ARC A380 (~$100)
- SSD: In addition to my 2x intel NVMe which will be used for unraid "cache", Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 + 2 1tb of the fastest SSD's I can afford for Docker/VM
- Chassis: Supermicro CSE-847BE1C-R1K28LPB (4U 36-bay) - I won't ever use all 36 bays so a 24 bay would be fine but they are in the same price range it seems. (~$400)
My questions/concerns:
My main concern is the memory - the board/cpu supports DDR4-3200 but as far as I can tell the only ECC modules available are 64GB. As I understand it the EPYC works a lot better with 8 modules. So 8 slower modules would be preferable to 2 faster ones?
Is Zen3 or Intel worth considering? The Zen2 is from 2019 which is already a bit old but it does seem like a great value.
Is the HBA correct? Based on the photos of the chassis the expanders seem to terminate into 4 of those dual ported SAS connectors so it seems like I need a 16 port HBA and the 9400 is pretty new but I could probably get away with a 9200 or 9300 series for less money.
Any other thoughts, comments, concerns?
Thanks so much!