Server Upgrades/Build Log - Ultimate Home Server

[AMD Lover]

Hey guys, this is gonna be a small build about upgrades to my home server. I had ran out of space for Plex storage since I was running just a small array of random 500GB used HDDs. I'll list my current specs and estimated specs down below, changes in BOLD. Feel free to ask some questions or make some recommendations!

 

I changed the stock cooler out for the Noctua a little while back. I will also be adding a RAID Expander to accommodate the extra drives.

 

I currently have only bought 4 of the 6 8TB Ultrastar Drives so I still have two more to purchase.

 

Current Specs: 

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2690 | GPU: NONE | Motherboard: SUPERMICRO X9SRL-F  | RAM: 64GB (8x8GB) Micron VLP DDR3-1600 ECC | PSU: SUPERMICRO 665W 80 PLUS Bronze | STORAGE: 2x Samsung 860 EVO 500GB (RAID 1) & RANDOM DRIVES (RAID 5) | COOLER: Noctua NH-U12DXi4 with 2x Noctua NF-F12 iPPC 3000  | CASE: SUPERMICRO CSE-842TQ-665B 4U | OS: vSphere 6.7 U2 | 

 

Planned Specs:

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2690 | GPU: Quadro for Plex decoding | Motherboard: SUPERMICRO X9SRL-F  | RAM: 64GB (8x8GB) Micron VLP DDR3-1600 ECC | PSU: Supermicro 500W Multi-Output Redundant Power Supply (PWS-503R-PQ) | STORAGE: 4x Samsung 860 EVO 500GB (RAID 10) & 6x 8TB WD Ultrastar Datacenter (RAID 10) | COOLER: Noctua NH-U12DXi4 with 2x Noctua NF-F12 iPPC 3000 | CASE: SUPERMICRO CSE-842TQ-665B 4U | OS: vSphere 6.7 U2 | 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mr.Humble]

Looking good! I'm just wondering why the move to RAID10 for the SSDs - are you using them to cache the array?

 

Also why did you choose the Ultrastar drives?

 

Do you use the machine just for Plex or does it do some other stuff?

[AMD Lover]

2 hours ago, Mr.Humble said:

Looking good! I'm just wondering why the move to RAID10 for the SSDs - are you using them to cache the array?

 

Also why did you choose the Ultrastar drives?

 

Do you use the machine just for Plex or does it do some other stuff?

I was going to move to a RAID 10 on the SSDs just because l plan on adding two more so I'll have four of them. I thought about RAID 5 but 10 will give me better performance all the way around. I'm using the SSD array for VM vmdks so the VM and it's storage runs off the SSDs. Plex and other bulk storage is on the HDDs . 

 

Choose the Ultrastar drives because they have better performance than a NAS drive but they are somewhat cheap compared to other datacenter drives. 

 

It gets use for other stuff as well. I'll be going back with VMware Vsphere as a hypervisor. I'll have a 2019 VM for Active Directory, DNS, DHCP. I also at one point had a pi-hole VM and might spin up a software firewall at some point. 

[AMD Lover]

Little update, I had installed a GTX 1650 however with vSphere even though you can pass the PCI device through to the VM because its consumer grade hardware its not detected by the OS. Picked me up a Quadro P2000 and tested it out, hardware decode on my plex server now works exactly like it should. You can see in the pink highlighter on the 2nd picture that if Plex cannot "Direct Stream" the content it will switch to transcode and if it can use hardware over CPU it will work like below.