Upgrading Windows Home Server

[Larson]

You'll want to add a raid controller(perc H310 or similar) or move to a different board, if itx isn't a requirement one like this is a tad slower (1537 vs 1540) but offers more options in that regard Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X10SDV-7TP4F

Ah-ha! The X10SDV-7TP4F looks promising indeed! Thank you Deslok. I think that much slower would be okay and ITX is not a requirement. In fact, I was planning on using fractal design's Define R5 case, which can handle an ATX motherboard. I'm assuming that this would include a FLEX ATX motherboard?

It sounds like this board would be much better for storage capacity as well, but how does this work? I see you can have 16x SATA3 or SAS2 drives via LSI 2116, but I don't know exactly what that means? How can you actually attach 16 SATA3 drives to this board?

Thanks again,
James

 

[Deslok]

Ah-ha! The X10SDV-7TP4F looks promising indeed! Thank you Deslok. I think that much slower would be okay and ITX is not a requirement. In fact, I was planning on using fractal design's Define R5 case, which can handle an ATX motherboard. I'm assuming that this would include a FLEX ATX motherboard?

It sounds like this board would be much better for storage capacity as well, but how does this work? I see you can have 16x SATA3 or SAS2 drives via LSI 2116, but I don't know exactly what that means? How can you actually attach 16 SATA3 drives to this board?

Thanks again,
James

You use mini sas hd cables like this one, it has four ports for them

Amazon.com: Cable Matters Internal HD Mini SAS (SFF-8643) to 4 SATA Forward Breakout Cable 3.3 Feet / 1m: Computers & Accessories

 

[Larson]

You use mini sas hd cables like this one, it has four ports for them

Amazon.com: Cable Matters Internal HD Mini SAS (SFF-8643) to 4 SATA Forward Breakout Cable 3.3 Feet / 1m: Computers & Accessories

Okay, excellent. Thanks again. Do you have a recommendation for setting up the OS and Data drives (configuration)? I can't figure out what RAID configurations are possible with this board, or maybe I just use Windows Storage Spaces, huh?

 

[Deslok]

Okay, excellent. Thanks again. Do you have a recommendation for setting up the OS and Data drives (configuration)? I can't figure out what RAID configurations are possible with this board, or maybe I just use Windows Storage Spaces, huh?

From the specs at least one controller offers RAID1 which i'd use for the OS drives, otherwise I'd use storage spaces for everything else

 

[Larson]

From the specs at least one controller offers RAID1 which i'd use for the OS drives, otherwise I'd use storage spaces for everything else

Okay, that brings up two more questions:

1. What would be a good server grade SSD for the OS?
2. Do you know of a good resource for learning (best practice) configuration of storage spaces?

 

[Larson]

What are your power requirements? How many connectors? What size power supply do you need? What board/config did you settle on?

Thanks for the reply; it took me a while to think this through. This is what I'm trying to power:

1. Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-7TP4F (Embedded Intel Xeon D-1537 processor)
2. Case Fans: 3x Fractal Design Venturi HP-14 PWM fans
3. Memory: 64GB DDR4
4. Up to 16x WD4000FYYZ 4TB HDDs
5. Up to 4x SSDs

I'll be starting out with only about half those drives, but I'd like a powerful enough PS to cover the future expansion. Of course, as quiet as possible a PS too, since this will be sitting in the home office. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks.

 

[Deslok]

Okay, that brings up two more questions:

1. What would be a good server grade SSD for the OS?
2. Do you know of a good resource for learning (best practice) configuration of storage spaces?

Is your OS doing anything locally? if not almost any Server or high end consumer SSD is technically ok, intel s3500 drives are failry popular for read heavy as is samsungs PM863

This I don't know, I've had to learn storage spaces via trial by fire mostly although there may be some resources here on the forum if you do a search for it.

 

[Deslok]

Thanks for the reply; it took me a while to think this through. This is what I'm trying to power:

1. Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-7TP4F (Embedded Intel Xeon D-1537 processor)
2. Case Fans: 3x Fractal Design Venturi HP-14 PWM fans
3. Memory: 64GB DDR4
4. Up to 16x WD4000FYYZ 4TB HDDs
5. Up to 4x SSDs

I'll be starting out with only about half those drives, but I'd like a powerful enough PS to cover the future expansion. Of course, as quiet as possible a PS too, since this will be sitting in the home office. Do you have any recommendations? Thanks.

Why use the WD4000FYYZ instead of shucking 8tb mybook enclosures for the WD80EZZX?

 

[Larson]

Why use the WD4000FYYZ instead of shucking 8tb mybook enclosures for the WD80EZZX?

I'm starting with 4x WD4000FYYZ because that's what I happen to have. Plus I love these server grade drives; they have always served me well. But, that's a great idea for further expansion beyond that. I'll have to check into the specs on those. Thanks again Deslok, you've been a great help.

Have any recommendation on a power supply?

 

[Deslok]

I'm starting with 4x WD4000FYYZ because that's what I happen to have. Plus I love these server grade drives; they have always served me well. But, that's a great idea for further expansion beyond that. I'll have to check into the specs on those. Thanks again Deslok, you've been a great help.

Have any recommendation on a power supply?

Patrick did a lot of reasearch on them here
WD My Book 8TB - 5400rpm WD80EZZX with Benchmarks

as far as a PSU goes a lot of that comes down to price/preference you'll pay more for 80+platinum or titanium but they're more efficient, I don't think you need one larger than 750w at a glance and would pick an efficiency you're comfortable with from one of the larger names (EVGA Seasonic Corsair and Thermaltake come to mind) with the number of drives you're considering scaling to I will mention that without backplanes(like you see on the multi drive 5.25 conversion bays) you'll need adapters since most ATX power supplies aren't designed for that many drives

 

[Larson]

Patrick did a lot of reasearch on them here
WD My Book 8TB - 5400rpm WD80EZZX with Benchmarks

as far as a PSU goes a lot of that comes down to price/preference you'll pay more for 80+platinum or titanium but they're more efficient, I don't think you need one larger than 750w at a glance and would pick an efficiency you're comfortable with from one of the larger names (EVGA Seasonic Corsair and Thermaltake come to mind) with the number of drives you're considering scaling to I will mention that without backplanes(like you see on the multi drive 5.25 conversion bays) you'll need adapters since most ATX power supplies aren't designed for that many drives

I seem to vaguely remember Patrick's review; thanks for the reminder! Do you think Cooler Master is on par with the other PSU you named?

 

[Larson]

Anybody know of a PSU that has it all?

1000+ Watt
80 PLUS Titanium
Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) Fan
Japanese Capacitors
10+ Year Warranty
Fully Modular
Digitally Controlled/Monitoring

It looks like the Corsair AX1500i Digital ATX comes closest, but only a 7 year warranty. The EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 T2 also comes close, but doesn't have an FDB Fan and is not digital.

 

[Deslok]

Anybody know of a PSU that has it all?

1000+ Watt
80 PLUS Titanium
Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) Fan
Japanese Capacitors
10+ Year Warranty
Fully Modular
Digitally Controlled/Monitoring

It looks like the Corsair AX1500i Digital ATX comes closest, but only a 7 year warranty. The EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 T2 also comes close, but doesn't have an FDB Fan and is not digital.

Cooler master isn't bad but i don't have much experience with them, as for the rest 1kw sounds like overkill for what you're doing but that corsair does have a 10 year warranty(I don't know if i have any psu's that are that old come to think about it)
AX1500i Digital ATX Power Supply — 1500 Watt Fully-Modular PSU

it was a recent change Corsair Extends Warranty of Advanced PSUs to 10 Years

 

[Larson]

Cooler master isn't bad but i don't have much experience with them, as for the rest 1kw sounds like overkill for what you're doing but that corsair does have a 10 year warranty(I don't know if i have any psu's that are that old come to think about it)
AX1500i Digital ATX Power Supply — 1500 Watt Fully-Modular PSU

it was a recent change Corsair Extends Warranty of Advanced PSUs to 10 Years

Hey, thanks for the article on the increase to 10 year warranties. I guess it's so new that the website still says 7 years. I've been trying to get a hold of Corsair to confirm.

 

[Larson]

Hey, thanks for the article on the increase to 10 year warranties. I guess it's so new that the website still says 7 years. I've been trying to get a hold of Corsair to confirm.

Confirmed: warranty

 

[Deslok]

Confirmed: warranty

good to hear

 

[Larson]

Hey Deslok, do you have any experience with QNAP? You may have seen that Patrick posted on the website about the release of the TVS-x82 and TVSx82T series. I was looking at the TVS-1282T on QNAP's website, and it looks amazing! It seems like it would do everything I'm wanting my Windows Home Server to do, plus give me a Thunderbolt 2 connection, which would be nice for connection directly to a workstation for audio work that I do. Anyway, just wondering if you have had any experience with them. I've been reading some about QNAP on the forums here and it sounds like a lot of bad news: tech support and updating not good; over-priced. However, all the posts are a few years old now. Maybe people have left it behind in favor of FreeNAS. Any thoughts?

 

[Deslok]

Hey Deslok, do you have any experience with QNAP? You may have seen that Patrick posted on the website about the release of the TVS-x82 and TVSx82T series. I was looking at the TVS-1282T on QNAP's website, and it looks amazing! It seems like it would do everything I'm wanting my Windows Home Server to do, plus give me a Thunderbolt 2 connection, which would be nice for connection directly to a workstation for audio work that I do. Anyway, just wondering if you have had any experience with them. I've been reading some about QNAP on the forums here and it sounds like a lot of bad news: tech support and updating not good; over-priced. However, all the posts are a few years old now. Maybe people have left it behind in favor of FreeNAS. Any thoughts?

I don't use it personally, I find systems like QNAP too limiting in how they can be configured and usually more expensive than a DIY solution, it's not a fair comparison to a Xeon-D system with it's non ecc capable i5/i7 but you could do a build using a e3 xeon or an i5 to do a fair comparison to it if you don't need ECC or the extended memory capacity that the xeon-d offers

 

[Larson]

I don't use it personally, I find systems like QNAP too limiting in how they can be configured and usually more expensive than a DIY solution, it's not a fair comparison to a Xeon-D system with it's non ecc capable i5/i7 but you could do a build using a e3 xeon or an i5 to do a fair comparison to it if you don't need ECC or the extended memory capacity that the xeon-d offers

Yeah, I forgot to mention, besides the negative I've read here on these forums, my own concern was the lack of quality (server-grade) parts. Plus, for me, ECC memory is a must have, so I guess that settles it right there. I would also much prefer the extended memory. I suppose there is a Thunderbolt 2 expansion card out there somewhere that would have Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials drivers ... maybe. I guess the main attraction of the QNAP TVS-1282T is it would help this novice to intermediate SMB IT administrator do things like setup virtual machines to do different things, which I've never done. Thanks for your input.

 

[cheezehead]

just as an fyi 2012R2 is 2012R2 regardless of edition for drivers.