SuperMicro mATX Build

[Dismayed]

I have considered buying a Supermicro barebone mini-tower, but I'm now considering a mATX Supermicro system instead because it seems like a better value. This NAS will be a file server, but, at some point, my son will want to play around with plex. So is the spec below reasonable? Are there any improvements that more experienced builders might recommend? This will be my first full build, though I've added RAM, upgraded CPU coolers, and such in the past.

SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SCH-LN4F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1151 Intel C246
Supermicro MBD-X11SCH-F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard
Xeon E-2244G 3.8GHz
Xeon E-2246G
Noctua NH-L9x65 92 x 92 x 14mm, 92 x 92 x 25mm SSO2 Low-profile Quiet CPU Cooler
2 X Supermicro (MTA18ADF2G72AZ-2G6E1) 16GB SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR4 2666
Western Digital WD Blue SN550 NVMe M.2 2280 250GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
Fractal Design Node 804
Seasonic PRIME TX-750 80+ Titanium Full Modular Power Supply

My choice of motherboard is just a guess - happy to hear of other Supermicro alternatives.

Total cost $1,250 from NewEgg, though I may be able to save a few $$$'s on the CPU by dropping from 3.8 GHz to a 3.6 GHz quad core.

 

[jayecin]

Is there a specific reason you are going with Xeon CPU? Quick math says you are going to be paying 600 dollars for the CPU and motherboard and thats not really a powerful processor or feature rich motherboard. I get that going Xeon gives you ECC ram, but for a small home NAS build i really think ECC is a waste of money. ECC provides value for error checking in enterprise environments where they are writing and erasing millions of times per second and 1 lost bit could cost them money, in your home NAS that will backup your folders and pictures once a week, its nothing. ECC memory is also primarily used to prevent crashes, not protect file integrity. You could spend a lot less on something like an i5 10600 with z390 motherboard and get a lot more features and processing power. You really will never utilize a Xeon for the way it was designed to be used in a home nas and you can get a consumer i5/i7 with way more power and 95% of the same features for way less.

 

[Dismayed]

Is there a specific reason you are going with Xeon CPU? Quick math says you are going to be paying 600 dollars for the CPU and motherboard and thats not really a powerful processor or feature rich motherboard. I get that going Xeon gives you ECC ram, but for a small home NAS build i really think ECC is a waste of money. ECC provides value for error checking in enterprise environments where they are writing and erasing millions of times per second and 1 lost bit could cost them money, in your home NAS that will backup your folders and pictures once a week, its nothing. ECC memory is also primarily used to prevent crashes, not protect file integrity. You could spend a lot less on something like an i5 10600 with z390 motherboard and get a lot more features and processing power. You really will never utilize a Xeon for the way it was designed to be used in a home nas and you can get a consumer i5/i7 with way more power and 95% of the same features for way less.

My understanding, based on the hardware guide, is that ECC RAM is highly recommended, so that's what I plan to use. As for the Xeon - the power will be needed when my son, Tim, sets up Plex. Likely it's a bit of overkill for a simple NAS, but Tim is a Math/Comp Sci major in college, so who knows what he has planned.

 

[Dismayed]

Is there a specific reason you are going with Xeon CPU? Quick math says you are going to be paying 600 dollars for the CPU and motherboard and thats not really a powerful processor or feature rich motherboard. I get that going Xeon gives you ECC ram, but for a small home NAS build i really think ECC is a waste of money. ECC provides value for error checking in enterprise environments where they are writing and erasing millions of times per second and 1 lost bit could cost them money, in your home NAS that will backup your folders and pictures once a week, its nothing. ECC memory is also primarily used to prevent crashes, not protect file integrity. You could spend a lot less on something like an i5 10600 with z390 motherboard and get a lot more features and processing power. You really will never utilize a Xeon for the way it was designed to be used in a home nas and you can get a consumer i5/i7 with way more power and 95% of the same features for way less.

I could go with an i3 processor which also support ECC RAM. I'll check performance benchmarks, but I'm not sure how well they translate into my intended uses.

 

[Constantin]

A couple of things, I'd research

• How much CPU you need. Is this thing going to transcode or will plex just serve up the content to a local CPU to transcode, if necessary? Guides have been published re: the needed CPU horsepower and your son should be easily able to scare them up.
• Yes on the ECC RAM. No point to go FreeNAS if the RAM isn't protected as well
• That's a very powerful power supply. Do you really need 750W? Is this a 36 drive install? Consider that my 8-drive tower (though using helium drives) is only consuming 90-140W. The higher number number now because I've got a BlueIris station going in a Win10 VM, as well as 4 SSDs. You don't want to greatly oversize or the efficiency of the power supply will start to suffer.
• Have a look through the recommended hardware postings in the resources area (there are at least 3) as buying used is another, usually very cost effective option vs. buying new. Servers can last a very long time.

 

[Dismayed]

A couple of things, I'd research

• How much CPU you need. Is this thing going to transcode or will plex just serve up the content to a local CPU to transcode, if necessary? Guides have been published re: the needed CPU horsepower and your son should be easily able to scare them up.
• Yes on the ECC RAM. No point to go FreeNAS if the RAM isn't protected as well
• That's a very powerful power supply. Do you really need 750W? Is this a 36 drive install? Consider that my 8-drive tower (though using helium drives) is only consuming 90-140W. The higher number number now because I've got a BlueIris station going in a Win10 VM, as well as 4 SSDs. You don't want to greatly oversize or the efficiency of the power supply will start to suffer.
• Have a look through the recommended hardware postings in the resources area (there are at least 3) as buying used is another, usually very cost effective option vs. buying new. Servers can last a very long time.

I checked the Plex recommendations of CPU. he should be able to transcode 4K SDR. If he needs more, he'll have to build his own box.

Yes, the power supply is likely more than needed. For a Xeon E3 the PSU guide recommends:

• 7-8 Drives: 430W peak, 148W idle -> SeaSonic G-550

But the PSU has a 12 year warranty, so I figured that for a few $$$'s more that I could get the 750. It's 94% efficient at a 50% load. Who knows - it may go into the replacement for this server one day. All the same, I may drop it to 550W for the sake of current efficiency.

 

[jayecin]

My understanding, based on the hardware guide, is that ECC RAM is highly recommended, so that's what I plan to use. As for the Xeon - the power will be needed when my son, Tim, sets up Plex. Likely it's a bit of overkill for a simple NAS, but Tim is a Math/Comp Sci major in college, so who knows what he has planned.

Its highly recommended because people just parrot the need for it. ECC Ram protects against a single bit being flipped in the memory due to some pretty wild scenarios like a cosmic ray hitting your ram stick in the exact spot of that bit or interference caused when you put hundreds of servers stacked on top of each pulling thousands of watts in close proximity. And really what does that single bit threaten for you? For an enterprise environment a single bit could be the difference between 100,000 and 10,000, which could cost tons of money and be a huge problem. For you? That might mean a single pixel in a family picture was changed from brown to beige. Then when you look at usage, enterprise servers are running 24x7 with fully loaded RAM constantly moving massive amounts of data, your NAS is going to be moving nothing in comparison. Further more its not like a bit randomly flipping is just going to grenade your whole NAS and blow up your drives. The odds of it happening are astronomical, when was the last time you had a problem with your desktop computer due to a random bit in your ram being flipped? Even that, their a way more realistic ways to have your data actually corrupted and lost besides lack of ECC.

IS ECC ram good? Sure, if you can afford it and yes if you are an enterprise business where 1 bit can mean the difference between a system crash that cost millions or not. But for a home NAS user, where you are writing very little data, its nothing more than a false comfort of data protection. If money is no object and you like knowing that 1 song in your 10,000 song mp3 collection wont randomly develop 1ms of static because at the exact moment you were saving that song to your NAS a super nova from 2 billion years ago exploded sending cosmic rays to earth that aligned perfectly with your ram stick and the exact bits holding that specific MP3, then yes, ECC is worth it.

But if you have to choose between building a more capable and feature rich system, buying better HDDs or buying better cases, cables, power supplies or getting ECC, dont bother with ECC.

 

[Dismayed]

Its highly recommended because people just parrot the need for it. ECC Ram protects against a single bit being flipped in the memory due to some pretty wild scenarios like a cosmic ray hitting your ram stick in the exact spot of that bit or interference caused when you put hundreds of servers stacked on top of each pulling thousands of watts in close proximity. And really what does that single bit threaten for you? For an enterprise environment a single bit could be the difference between 100,000 and 10,000, which could cost tons of money and be a huge problem. For you? That might mean a single pixel in a family picture was changed from brown to beige. Then when you look at usage, enterprise servers are running 24x7 with fully loaded RAM constantly moving massive amounts of data, your NAS is going to be moving nothing in comparison. Further more its not like a bit randomly flipping is just going to grenade your whole NAS and blow up your drives. The odds of it happening are astronomical, when was the last time you had a problem with your desktop computer due to a random bit in your ram being flipped? Even that, their a way more realistic ways to have your data actually corrupted and lost besides lack of ECC.

IS ECC ram good? Sure, if you can afford it and yes if you are an enterprise business where 1 bit can mean the difference between a system crash that cost millions or not. But for a home NAS user, where you are writing very little data, its nothing more than a false comfort of data protection. If money is no object and you like knowing that 1 song in your 10,000 song mp3 collection wont randomly develop 1ms of static because at the exact moment you were saving that song to your NAS a super nova from 2 billion years ago exploded sending cosmic rays to earth that aligned perfectly with your ram stick and the exact bits holding that specific MP3, then yes, ECC is worth it.

But if you have to choose between building a more capable and feature rich system, buying better HDDs or buying better cases, cables, power supplies or getting ECC, dont bother with ECC.

So why bother with ZFS at all if a few flipped bits don't matter? And it looks as if the frequency of RAM errors is far higher than you have represented: a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year, based on data from thousands of Google servers.

Besides - my budget isn't so tight that I need forgo the features that I need because of the cost of ECC RAM.

 

[jayecin]

So why bother with ZFS at all if a few flipped bits don't matter? And it looks as if the frequency of RAM errors is far higher than you have represented: a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year, based on data from thousands of Google servers.

Besides - my budget isn't so tight that I need forgo the features that I need because of the cost of ECC RAM.

No like i said, in an enterprise environment where you have hundreds if not thousands of servers stacked ontop of each other in a small space pulling thousands of watts, the need for ECC is far greater due to EMF. Even at that, you cant compare a google server with 64GB RAM sticks writing and reading trillions of times more per year than your home NAS ever will in its lifetime as a cause or basis for concern.

 

[Dismayed]

No like i said, in an enterprise environment where you have hundreds if not thousands of servers stacked ontop of each other in a small space pulling thousands of watts, the need for ECC is far greater due to EMF. Even at that, you cant compare a google server with 64GB RAM sticks writing and reading trillions of times more per year than your home NAS ever will in its lifetime as a cause or basis for concern.

Almost everyone on this forum recommends ECC RAM, so that's what I am buying.

So, why are you on a crusade to stamp out ECC RAM? What is your agenda? It doesn't add that much cost to the system, and people on budgets can use ECC RAM with i3 or Atom processors.

 

[jayecin]

Almost everyone on this forum recommends ECC RAM, so that's what I am buying.

So, why are you on a crusade to stamp out ECC RAM? What is your agenda? It doesn't add that much cost to the system, and people on budgets can use ECC RAM with i3 or Atom processors.

relax, you asked for feedback on your build, I dont think that build will be a very good plex server in regards to transcoding and that you are spending a lot of money on the cpu/motherboard/ram and getting relatively low performance for the money and that if you went consumer grade equipment you wouldnt be increasing your risk and would be afforded a much better performing machine. I used a Dell Power Edge R720 with Duel Xeon E5-2690s, thats dual 8 core CPUs, so 32 threads total and 3 times the total power of your current cpu and a single h265 transcode from 4k to 1080p would use ~70% of the total CPU power.

Good luck with the build

 

[Dismayed]

relax, you asked for feedback on your build, I dont think that build will be a very good plex server in regards to transcoding and that you are spending a lot of money on the cpu/motherboard/ram and getting relatively low performance for the money and that if you went consumer grade equipment you wouldnt be increasing your risk and would be afforded a much better performing machine. I used a Dell Power Edge R720 with Duel Xeon E5-2690s, thats dual 8 core CPUs, so 32 threads total and 3 times the total power of your current cpu and a single h265 transcode from 4k to 1080p would use ~70% of the total CPU power.

Good luck with the build

Then why have you focused so much attention on ECC RAM when you could have discussed other Xeon processors or motherboard choices? Change the consensus here on ECC RAM and I'll follow the recommendation.

 

[Constantin]

Let me throw some resources your way in case you need some reading.

Build advice:

• Hardware recommendation advice along with its supplement
• Chris Moores thoughts on Hardware ranging from 32GB RAM starter systems up to 512GB RAM Monster NASs
• SuperMicro X10 and X11 Motherboard FAQ
• More on SuperMicro X11 Xeon boards and SuperMicro e3 v5/6 X11 boards

Component Selection:

• All about Optane and SLOG benchmarks
• How to avoid SMR Drives and why
• Farmer Pling 2s Excellent Hard Drive selection spreadsheet
• ZFS size calculator - i.e. how much room your disks will yield based on your build
• Power Supply guidance by jgreco - beefy for sure!

Software:

• Scripted PLEX install
• Hard drive burn in scripts

 

[Inxsible]

@Dismayed,

Since you are located in Boston, you would be better off building a system using used components. You can buy the same components that you listed for far less. Or you could go 1 generation older to -- say X10 series -- and save even more.

The difference between ECC RAM and non-ECC is very less --- so I would just buy ECC. I have found that if the seller is accepting offers, then you might be able to snag ECC for non-ECC prices too. YMMV.

 

[Constantin]

The key thing is to understand the use case - what load will Plex shoulder. Once that's settled the rest is relatively straightforward and I agree that older used systems might be a good bet. The sole exception being anything related to the Intel Atom 2xxx series (like older iXSystems Minis and Mini Xls) due to the built-in self-destruct button if the board wasn't made after the safe date (was that March 2017? I can't remember).

IIRC, the safe revision on the supermicro 2750DI board generation in question is 1.03 or later. However, I'd just stick to a non-embedded board for anything whose duty cycle may increase substantially, as that's just a simple CPU swap away. Embedded systems are pretty much impossible to upgrade re: the CPU (unless you're really good at extracting and replacing BGAs components).

 

[Inxsible]

The sole exception being anything related to the Intel Atom 2xxx series

If I am building a server, I usually stay away from SoC only because you can probably make the server more powerful by having socketed cpu. Although I have built a pfSense router using SoC board. The board is capable to handle what it needs to, so I don't intend to upgrade anything on there. If the board dies, for some reason, I'll just build something new based on what's available that can satisfy the requirements.

However, having said that, even when you can replace the CPU, there are limitations based on the socket type. --- so for example, if you currently have a E3-1240 v3 (say in a X10SLM+-F board).... the only upgrade possibilities are the E3-12x0 v3 or the E3-1285 v4 since you are bound by socket H3. So you are not really gaining much by upgrading the CPU other than maybe -- just maybe -- a 0.5 GHz increase in the base frequency. The cpu might perform 5-10% better but most likely you won't notice it. So then, would it be worth the upgrade assuming you have to pay $50-$60 for the newer CPU? I am not so sure....

 

[Constantin]

... good point but the bottom line is that you at least have the option to replace a CPU. When my C2750DI failed, the only option was to replace the whole board. IXsystems did a great job standing behind their system so props to them for getting me a replacement board, etc. from ASRock. I expect that issue to continue to worm its way through industry thanks to the C2xxx series being as popular as they were.

As for the socket issue, it also depends a bit on the company. For example, the little reading I've done suggests that the Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC series all tend to have fairly long-lived boards, allowing a user to retain a motherboard across more CPU transitions than over on the Intel side.

 

[Inxsible]

I don't have much experience with Ryzen or Epyc so I cannot say anything regarding them or their corresponding boards, but Intel usually switches the socket with pretty much every generation. They also usually release 2 versions of the CPU with minor improvements for the same socket but that's pretty much it.

Following the same example of the Xeon E3 series, we've had

1. socket H2/LGA1155 -- E3-12xx & E3-12xx v2
2. socket H3/LGA1150 -- E3-12xx v3 & E3-1285 v4
3. socket H4/LGA1151 -- E3-12xx v5 & E3-12xx v6

There's already LGA1200 which most likely is going to be socket H5. Obviously board manufacturers have to keep in step with Intel, so they will never release a new board that supports old processors.

Now, you can obviously use a number of CPUs for the same board -- especially if you look at the Celerons/Pentium/Core i3/i5/i7/i9 series along with the Xeon line --- but I was just giving 1 example for E3-1240v3 -- if you already have that CPU --- an upgrade wouldn't give you anything more.

Now if you had a Pentium G4400 when you first built your server -- then yes, you would have a few options for upgrading. It all depends on where you have started and how much an upgrade will cost you vs the added benefit it will provide for the cost.

 

[Dismayed]

The key thing is to understand the use case - what load will Plex shoulder. Once that's settled the rest is relatively straightforward and I agree that older used systems might be a good bet. The sole exception being anything related to the Intel Atom 2xxx series (like older iXSystems Minis and Mini Xls) due to the built-in self-destruct button if the board wasn't made after the safe date (was that March 2017? I can't remember).

IIRC, the safe revision on the supermicro 2750DI board generation in question is 1.03 or later. However, I'd just stick to a non-embedded board for anything whose duty cycle may increase substantially, as that's just a simple CPU swap away. Embedded systems are pretty much impossible to upgrade re: the CPU (unless you're really good at extracting and replacing BGAs components).

Thank you for the advice.

The Xeon E-2246 should be plenty powerful enough for Plex - based on recommendations on the Plex site. So now I'll just need to select a Supermicro motherboard that supports that chip. More than I need for a NAS, but plenty powerful for my son's Plex explorations.

 

[Dismayed]

Let me throw some resources your way in case you need some reading.

Build advice:

• Hardware recommendation advice along with its supplement
• Chris Moores thoughts on Hardware ranging from 32GB RAM starter systems up to 512GB RAM Monster NASs
• SuperMicro X10 and X11 Motherboard FAQ
• More on SuperMicro X11 Xeon boards and SuperMicro e3 v5/6 X11 boards

Component Selection:

• All about Optane and SLOG benchmarks
• How to avoid SMR Drives and why
• Farmer Pling 2s Excellent Hard Drive selection spreadsheet
• ZFS size calculator - i.e. how much room your disks will yield based on your build
• Power Supply guidance by jgreco - beefy for sure!

Software:

• Scripted PLEX install
• Hard drive burn in scripts

Thank you for the references. I had stumbled across some of them, but not all. Motherboard selection is my next task.