WWYD - Going Insane On Options for Unraid Build

[DaddyGrant]

Hey Guys,

I have a AsRock Taichi X370 w/ a Ryzen 1700 and 32GB of ram. I'm not hitting any performance constraints (thanks to the p2000) and it's strictly a media box build for Plex. My SATA cache drive is getting full (95% of the 480GB) and I'm thinking about my next steps. All the PCI-E slots are full with a P2000, 10GB SFP+ card and a SAS3 controller. I'm not against buying a few things but I can't got balls to the wall crazy.

My goal:

• Minimum
  
  • Low to Moderate Heat and Energy cost
  • At lease one m.2 slot for VMs. (I have too many m.2 collecting dust)
  • 8 SATA Ports
• Nice to have
  • IPMI
    
  • To reuse as much of my spare parts as possible and not turn this into a full rip and replace. (If I do buy a new MB, then I would really want IPMI)
    
  • 5 PCI-E Slots or 4 PCIE- slots on a motherboard with integrated 10GB
  • SAS3 for SATA Breakout. (This would eliminate the SAS3 PCI AIC)

On the shelf:

• Two (2) Intel 1.2TB p5320 DC PCI-E card. I'm hoping this will be my new cache drive(s).
  
• 64 GB DDR 2666 Registered memory - Brand New and Collecting Dust
  
• AsRock x399m motherboard (Still only 3 PCI-E slots)
• AsRock X470DU w. IPMI motherboard (Still only 3 PCI-E slots) - Brand New/Cancelled Project
  
• Threadripper 1950x w/ Noctua Cooler

What would you do? @IamSpartacus , @msvirtualguy , @Patrick ..anyone

A friend suggested selling the spare Motherboards to finance a new MB for the Threadripper. But I'm lazy with posting For Sale or maybe I'm just a hoarder

 

[msvirtualguy]

Sorry man..not really a "Plex" guy. I just don't see value, personally, in storing and streaming that stored media these days. There are certainly others that have a ton of experience with this and i'll defer to those folks. I'm certain they will ask questions like how many concurrent streams, are you transcoding, etc..but again, i'll defer to the experts when it comes to all things Media streaming, transcoding..etc.

 

[Spartacus]

With the P2000 it essentially doesn't matter, that can do double digit streams without a problem (depending on the rate) so CPU you need would depend on the CPU intensiveness of your VMs/docker containers.
First I assume thats a typ-o and you have p3520 not 5320s? (unless you work for intel the current release are the 4XXX line so last gen is 3XXX)
As for the rest:
-What is your budget/max price you wanna pay?
- What size M.2 drives do you have? are they sata or pcie?
-Do you have a case for your build or getting a new one? (which one?)
- Are your cache drives actual PCIE form factor? or are they M.2 NVME?
-How many drives do you have/want other than the PCIE SSD for cache?
-Is the ram DDR4 ECC? or regular? 2 sticks or 4?
-Do you care about noise? What noctua cooler model do you have? (and what cooler is on the Ryzen 1700?)

Pre-emptively my recommendation would be transfer that Ryzen 1700 to the x470DU, to get you IPMI capability and bump up the ram to the 64Gb 2666 (assuming its compatible).
Then get/use two 1TB regular M.2 SSD on the X470 board instead and sell the PCIE SSD so you dont need the extra slots.
That leaves you with 8 SATA ports and 8 SAS3 ports for your data drives, you have your P2000 for Plex transcoding, 10GB SFP and a decent redundant cache that can double as your VM storage (I personally use none of the cache for Plex media, solely VM/docker data pretty much).

 

[IamSpartacus]

My math is showing that with an HBA (x8), 10Gb NIC (x4), M.2 (x4), and GPU (x16) you're over provisioned with regard to PCIe lanes if you stick with Ryzen (ie. x470 board). And while you may not ever hit a bottleneck with your workload, I'm not personally fan of building a new system where all the components could not possibly run at their full rated speed simultaneously if you wanted them to. That said, that's a personal opinion and a point of view that I force onto others and certainly your workload may not be impacted by the lack of PCIe lanes.

The Threadripper platform would obviously give you the most room to grow, the problem there is heat and energy usage. I kind of went through a similar rebuild in that I was looking to lower heat/energy costs and migrated from a dual Xeon E5 v3 setup to a single socket EPYC 7302p. Of course that's not exactly cost efficient here.

I think you're going to need to decide what is more important. Heat/energy costs or platform expansion/flexibility.

 

[DaddyGrant]

-What is your budget/max price you wanna pay?
$400
- What size M.2 drives do you have? are they sata or pcie?
500ish m.2
-Do you have a case for your build or getting a new one? (which one?)
Got a case. AV15
- Are your cache drives actual PCIE form factor? or are they M.2 NVME?
Current is SATA - The P3520's are PCI-E NVME
-How many drives do you have/want other than the PCIE SSD for cache?
1 for VMs
-Is the ram DDR4 ECC? or regular? 2 sticks or 4?
4 sticks of the ECC and 4 stick of regular DDR are available.
-Do you care about noise? What noctua cooler model do you have? (and what cooler is on the Ryzen 1700?)
Currenly the stock cooler but I also have a Noctua NH-L12 in a box.

With the P2000 it essentially doesn't matter, that can do double digit streams without a problem (depending on the rate) so CPU you need would depend on the CPU intensiveness of your VMs/docker containers.
First I assume thats a typ-o and you have p3520 not 5320s? (unless you work for intel the current release are the 4XXX line so last gen is 3XXX)
As for the rest:
-What is your budget/max price you wanna pay?
- What size M.2 drives do you have? are they sata or pcie?
-Do you have a case for your build or getting a new one? (which one?)
- Are your cache drives actual PCIE form factor? or are they M.2 NVME?
-How many drives do you have/want other than the PCIE SSD for cache?
-Is the ram DDR4 ECC? or regular? 2 sticks or 4?
-Do you care about noise? What noctua cooler model do you have? (and what cooler is on the Ryzen 1700?)

Unfortunately both m.2 ports on the AsRack x470 are not full x4 PCIE3, but I like your angle.

Pre-emptively my recommendation would be transfer that Ryzen 1700 to the x470DU, to get you IPMI capability and bump up the ram to the 64Gb 2666 (assuming its compatible).
Then get/use two 1TB regular M.2 SSD on the X470 board instead and sell the PCIE SSD so you dont need the extra slots.
That leaves you with 8 SATA ports and 8 SAS3 ports for your data drives, you have your P2000 for Plex transcoding, 10GB SFP and a decent redundant cache that can double as your VM storage (I personally use none of the cache for Plex media, solely VM/docker data pretty much).

 

[DaddyGrant]

@Spartacus I ran with your idea and recalled that QNAP makes a combo 10GB/m.2 add in card. It would fit the bill but it's so pricey I might well buy another motherboard.

@IamSpartacus - I would love to get an eypc rome build going but It's hard for me to justify the cost seeing how little CPU my build requires with the P2000. I saw you post about you CPU under-utilization. Good stuff.

I think you're going to need to decide what is more important. Heat/energy costs or platform expansion/flexibility.

The elephant in the room! I'm going to lean towards heat/energy. The rack is in a guest room closet. Florida life = Hot Garage and no basement.

 

[IamSpartacus]

The elephant in the room! I'm going to lean towards heat/energy. The rack is in a guest room closet. Florida life = Hot Garage and no basement.

The one thing I didn't see mentioned is what size case you're using? If 3U or 4U that supports full ATX then I would strongly recommend a Full ATX SuperMicro X10 board paired with a lower powered Xeon E5 v3. They are getting real cheap these days. Throw a 3U/4u Noctua on it and it's literally silent.

 

[DaddyGrant]

@IamSpartacus It's a 4u case. The x10 is something to consider. I'm leaning towards using the asrock x470u with one large 2TB SSD. I'll be over-provisioned on lanes but it's fine for the intended use (Plex and it's related dockers).

I would just need to pickup an m.2 with high endurance. I read the Intel DC p4101 m.2 is a good choice. My app data/cache is backed up weekly so running it without raid1 is Ok especially with a DC grade drive.

The one thing I didn't see mentioned is what size case you're using? If 3U or 4U that supports full ATX then I would strongly recommend a Full ATX SuperMicro X10 board paired with a lower powered Xeon E5 v3. They are getting real cheap these days. Throw a 3U/4u Noctua on it and it's literally silent.

 

[Spartacus]

-How many drives do you have/want other than the PCIE SSD for cache?
1 for VMs

No I meant how many data drives do you have (HDD) (I'm assuming <15 based off the case ?).

Unfortunately both m.2 ports on the AsRack x470 are not full x4 PCIE3, but I like your angle.

Do you have to use NVME drives? If you've only got one or two VMs regular sata drives would work and not suffer much if at all with ~500MB/s r/w. If you're really looking to get the speed out of it you could do 4x 500gb SATA SSD (2x M.2 + 2x 2.5") in a raid 10 cache which would get you the full 10Gb saturation.

Edit:
I'm personally running 4x Samsung evo 860 for my cache on my main.
For my high r/w workload I actually picked up some multi PB endurance enterprise SAS SSD and put them in a supermicro enclosure (also 4x but 400gb/ea in raid 10 on my backup box cache)

 

[talSTH]

@DaddyGrant Not really helping directly with the build but would you be selling your X470DU motherboard?