Hello everyone,
I'm looking to build a fairly stable base installation that is a bit on the quiet side as I'm in an apartment, but can be moved to a bigger/louder case whenever I have room for a rack or actually have a closet or some other place to put it that's out of the way. Additionally, I'm initially building this with 8, 10TB disks in mind, in a single vdev Z2 configuration, but would like the ability to expand to more disks once I have the space for a 4U case that could hold them all. Eventually I'd like to have a total of 3 8 disk vdevs in Z2. As far as backups go my level of hoarding data is still manageable so, a cloud service will work fine till I can build a mirror offsite somewhere. Edit: The main purpose of the storage is for media and file storage.
My general plan since space is at a premium but money isn't necessarily, is to have this box be a general "lab" box that's running ESXi, with a couple of (possibly mirrored) SSDs for datastore storage. As VMs on there I'd like to have the following:
With the above in mind I have selected the following parts and gotten general prices. For reference, all the prices I'm using are based around cursory Ebay searches so generally all parts will be used:
I'm looking to build a fairly stable base installation that is a bit on the quiet side as I'm in an apartment, but can be moved to a bigger/louder case whenever I have room for a rack or actually have a closet or some other place to put it that's out of the way. Additionally, I'm initially building this with 8, 10TB disks in mind, in a single vdev Z2 configuration, but would like the ability to expand to more disks once I have the space for a 4U case that could hold them all. Eventually I'd like to have a total of 3 8 disk vdevs in Z2. As far as backups go my level of hoarding data is still manageable so, a cloud service will work fine till I can build a mirror offsite somewhere. Edit: The main purpose of the storage is for media and file storage.
My general plan since space is at a premium but money isn't necessarily, is to have this box be a general "lab" box that's running ESXi, with a couple of (possibly mirrored) SSDs for datastore storage. As VMs on there I'd like to have the following:
- FreeNAS VM, with an HBA passed through
- A plex VM that can do hardware transcoding
- This will require another PCI-E slot and a GTX 1050 at minimum for full-chroma 4k transcoding
- A services VM
- Monitoring services
- DNS services
- Other services as I'd like to set them up
- A general development VM for preparing for some work related automation projects and for my own learning.
With the above in mind I have selected the following parts and gotten general prices. For reference, all the prices I'm using are based around cursory Ebay searches so generally all parts will be used:
- Case - Fractal Design Define R5 or R6 ~200USD right now
- I'm willing to go with a different full or mid tower case as long as it has room for at minimum 10 total drives (8 spinning, 2 SSDs)
- Due to possible heat concerns having the ability to put a lot of fans in would be nice
- CPU - Xeon E5-2670v3 ~170-200 USD
- 12 cores should be plenty for what I'm planning but if anyone has better suggestions at a decent price point please let me know
- Will require a cooler for sure, any suggestions there?
- RAM - 64 GB total DDR4 ~500 USD
- Should be more than enough RAM based on the guidelines provided in the documentation I could find, might be a little on the low side for the other VMs depending on use.
- HDDs/SSDs
- I already have these (thanks black friday)
- HBA - LSI 9211-8i ~20-50 USD
- Is there any reason to go with a newer one of these cards? Is there a more preferred option in general for HBAs now?
- Will be flashed once I have it in hand.
- Video Card - GTX 1050 ~75 USD
- Mobo - Supermicro X10SRL-F ~250 USD
- Chosen mostly for the number of PCI-E slots available and for the number of RAM slots.
- PSU - ???
- I'm still rather unsure about the power requirements for several of the parts, my best guess comes to around 750 watts or so based on other build's calculations with comparable parts.
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