BUILD I started small and built things up. Now I'm going to attempt to go overboard. Good idea?

[rezin8]

Over the summer I decided I needed a better storage solution for my house. Random unlabeled hard drives scattered all over the place was getting old. Not to mention the death of a couple drives. I looked around and discovered FreeNAS, so thinking "well, I have some old hardware laying around", I decided to give it a shot.

I dug into the pile of things left over from my litecoin mining days and built a machine with the following:

• Intel G3220 Processor
• 8GB DDR3-1600
• ASUS Z87-A Motherboard
• Thermaltake Commander G42 mid-tower case
• 6x WD Red 3TB HDD in RAIDZ2
• EVGA SuperNOVA 1000G2 80+ Gold PSU

I spent some time building it up and tearing it down to learn how FreeNAS worked and to get a feel for how to manage it. Pretty quickly I learned that I needed more RAM. I found another 8GB and put it in, then shortly thereafter said "screw it" and maxed the board out with 32GB.

Once things were setup and running, I wanted to get Plex up and running on it. I used to have a Plex server a while back, but when that PC got upgraded, I never got around to setting a new one up. It didn't take very long for me to realize that the G3220 processor wasn't helping me out a whole lot. When I'd look at the reporting graphs, I'd see this thing pegged at 100% for hours at a time overnight while Plex did it's thing. The motherboard would handle an i7-4790K, and Microcenter had them on sale for $250, so I picked one up to put in. While moving things around, I bent a bunch of pins on the ASUS motherboard, so I picked up a ASRock Z97 Extreme6. Yes, I bought a gaming motherboard and processor for a server.

The i7-4790K had been running pretty well for a couple months now when that time of year I call "deduction season" was magically upon us. My 12-ish TB of storage was starting to run short now that I had moved all the random hard drives I had laying around to it, plus all the new media that was being downloaded thanks to Sonarr and Couchpotato. Since I was going to build another pool, I figured I would just go ahead and build a whole new machine that would be big enough that I wouldn't have to worry about upgrading anytime in the near future. I also wanted to consolidate two servers into one by moving the VMs off my ESXi host and onto this one using VirtualBox. Not ideal, but this is all for my house, so I should be fine (I think...).

I spent a lot of time reading the forums. I spent a fair amount of time being chastised for using gaming parts and non-ECC RAM for my server build. I started planning my build and buying parts. Hopefully, everything will finish arriving this week and I can start setting things up over the weekend. Here's the parts list as it stands today:

• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2660
• Dual Supermicro 4U Active CPU Heatsink Cooling for X9 UP/DP Systems SNK-P0050AP4
• SuperMicro X9DR3-F
• 128GB (2x 64GB kits of 4x16GB) Kingston KVR16R11D4K4/64 DDR3-1600 Registered ECC RAM
• 2x A-Data Premier Pro SP900 64GB 2.5" SSD
• 6x WD Red 3TB HDD
• 6x WD Red 6TB HDD
• LSI SAS9921-8i HBA
• 24 port expansion card for the 9921-8i (don't eBay while drunk kids)
• Rosewill RSV-L4412 4u chassis
• EVGA SuperNOVA 1000G2 PSU

I'm a firm believer in the old adage that "anything worth doing is worth overdoing", and I think this would fit the bill for "overdoing". Duty for this box, in addition to handling file storage and backup for my home network, will be serving up Plex streams, hosting a half dozen VMs, and just being a big, loud, hung of metal in my rack. From my research, I should be good from a hardware compatibility standpoint and it should have enough horsepower to last me for the foreseeable future. I can always throw more RAM at a problem or different CPUs, which is something I couldn't do with my previous build.

So, for what I'm looking to do and this hardware list, what do you guys think? Will I be as safe as I think?

 

[c32767a]

I used the X9SRL-F on my home FreeNAS. 2 CPUs seemed like overkill on overkill.

I have the 15 bay version of that Rosewill case for a GPU platform. It's a decent case, but it doesn't have any bells or whistles.

A couple thoughts:

The included 120mm and 80mm case fans were single speed, powered-from-a-drive-connector bare bones type. You'll probably want to replace them with something a little higher quality. I did. It made a huge difference on airflow.

Make sure your CPU heatsink(s) fit. I tried a couple Noctua sinks and they ended up being too tall for the case. I ended up using a Dell part I raided out of another machine. It's not optimal, but it works.

You have 14 disks in your build, You have 24 SATA ports. What are you going to do for drive bays when you want to add another disk? :)

 

[nightshade00013]

It looks interesting and will be a ton of power. I do have to say that building out that much of a server and not going with a better case and redundant power seems like dropping the ball. Not to mention that you have 12 bays and 14 disks.

 

[rezin8]

Yes, I have 14 disks. There's a lot of room in the case and I fashioned a way to mount the SSDs on the inside of the chassis.

As for power, I only have one PSU in the chassis, but the power going into that single point of failure is redundant. It'll be plugged into a Tripp-Lite PDUMH15ATNET Auto Transfer Switch, which is in turn plugged into dual APC SMX1500RM2UNC UPS systems. So, while the PSU is a single point of failure, it's also highly underutilized and plugged into redundant power sources.

I'm hoping the coolers fit. According to the measurements I got, they should, but I could be wrong. And, if I want to add more disks down the road, I'll just get a new case.

 

[tvsjr]

Eek... so you have redundancy at the UPS level - but then you're going to combine it back together with an ATS so you can run a single PSU on this box? Seems like a real waste.

 

[rezin8]

Since I posted that, I've been researching dual PSU solutions that fit in a single ATX PSU slot. There's a few out there, I just need to find one with enough power for the right price.

 

[tvsjr]

Considering the amount of money you're sinking into this, why not just return or resell the Rosewill clunker and find a nice Supermicro 846 or 847 chassis on eBay? It would be a shame to build a Ferrari powertrain and drop it in a Pinto chassis.

 

[rezin8]

Considering the amount of money you're sinking into this, why not just return or resell the Rosewill clunker and find a nice Supermicro 846 or 847 chassis on eBay? It would be a shame to build a Ferrari powertrain and drop it in a Pinto chassis.

Primarily because I already have the chassis and it works fine. I don't need it to be pretty, I just need it to function, and right now, it'll do just fine. If I decide later on that I need more room for drives, I'll look into a different chassis. Or, if I find one of the ones you mentioned at a dirt cheap price, I'll probably pick one up. I'm going to setup a couple alerts to keep an eye peeled on prices.

 

[TheKiwi]

Remember, with a nicer case you can get proper SAS expander hotswap backplane, so you can connect a single cable or two from your HBA to connect a massive pile of drives instead of needing to use expanders and breakout cables. That alone would free up some amount of money, which could offset the extra case cost.

Additionally: What exactly is the "24 port expansion card" for your HBA. Please specify.

 

[rezin8]

Does anyone have a suggestion for a redundant PSU for this chassis?

 

[TheKiwi]

Does anyone have a suggestion for a redundant PSU for this chassis?

There's not a huge amount of good offerings, because people who want redundant PSUs usually get a suitable case :^)

 

[rezin8]

There's not a huge amount of good offerings, because people who want redundant PSUs usually get a suitable case :^)

Yeah, I can see I'm not going to live down that case... I'll shoot an email to Athena and see what they suggest.

 

[c32767a]

Yeah, I can see I'm not going to live down that case... I'll shoot an email to Athena and see what they suggest.

What's your use case(accidental pun intended)? If a power supply fails, can you survive being down until you can take your spare ATX PSU off the shelf and install it? Can you survive a possibility that you might lose some "in flight" data when the power goes off?
If so, why waste money on dual power supplies? PSU failures aren't all that common on quality gear. I've decided the risk is worth the cost savings, so I use the same single input ATX power supplies on my homebuilt machines and just keep a spare on the shelf.. At work we do redundant PSUs, but at home the cost benefit doesn't justify it.

Also, I wasn't dissing the case per se. Sheet metal is sheet metal.. As long as it covers the basics, it's hard to get worked up about one case over another.
I was just commenting that you've overbuilt everything else such that you can support a lot more disks, yet your case (if you have the 12 bay version, there's a 15 bay as well) will be maxed out.


anyway.. my $0.02..

 

[rezin8]

What's your use case(accidental pun intended)? If a power supply fails, can you survive being down until you can take your spare ATX PSU off the shelf and install it? Can you survive a possibility that you might lose some "in flight" data when the power goes off?
If so, why waste money on dual power supplies? PSU failures aren't all that common on quality gear. I've decided the risk is worth the cost savings, so I use the same single input ATX power supplies on my homebuilt machines and just keep a spare on the shelf.. At work we do redundant PSUs, but at home the cost benefit doesn't justify it.

Also, I wasn't dissing the case per se. Sheet metal is sheet metal.. As long as it covers the basics, it's hard to get worked up about one case over another.
I was just commenting that you've overbuilt everything else such that you can support a lot more disks, yet your case (if you have the 12 bay version, there's a 15 bay as well) will be maxed out.

It's a home server, so it can survive being down for the 15 minutes it would take me to swap out power supplies. After looking more into the price of redundant PSU's, that'll more than likely end up being the case. I don't think I can justify the $400+ for a quality redundant 600W PSU.

As far as the chassis goes, it's something I already have. While the build looks expensive, it's really not that bad. The only "new" parts I had to buy are the CPUs, coolers, mobo, and RAM. The processors are used and were $200 for the pair, the mobo is an open-box that was $350, and the RAM... well, the RAM was actually pretty painful. All told, the "new" parts were around $1,600. Everything else had already been purchased to add more storage to the old hardware. When I bought the 12 bay chassis, I only had 6 drives and my motherboard only had 10 SATA ports, so had more than enough room to expand. I bought the six 6TB drives because I only had 6 open slots on the chassis. What I may do in the future is expand the 3TB drive array by swapping in some larger drives should the need arise. I don't personally foresee me needing more than 12 bays (plus 2 internal SSDs) for my home server. If I do find myself needed more than that, then it'll probably be time to upgrade the whole thing again anyway, or I'll just use something like the HP SAS expander and get another chassis that just holds hard drives.

 

[Black Ninja]

Eek... so you have redundancy at the UPS level - but then you're going to combine it back together with an ATS so you can run a single PSU on this box? Seems like a real waste.

This will give redundancy if UPS fail, but no redundancy if PSU fail. If you remove the ATS from the picture, then you'll have no UPS redundancy and no PSU redundancy, so it's not the same - waste.