Unraid build advice

unseen_uk · April 27, 2020

Long time viewer and lurker, first time posting so be gentle please!

So I've been using Plex for years now and my NAS has been rapidly running out of space and upgrading it is likely to be troublesome (Zyxel 540 NAS) what with numerous USB drives hanging off the main PC I decided now was the time to bite the bullet and build a base Unraid build that can take on what I'm storing now and grow as needs require it. Originally I was going to use a 2u Supermicro dual Xeon but tweaking the IPMI to try and get the fans within the wife acceptance factor basically showed I'd need to spend a fair chunk on some noctua fans, plan b fell in to my lap in the form of a Dell 730xd which was being scrapped but again WAF kicked in as in fresh air cooling mode dear god that things loud oops!!

I've come up with a rough spec...

ASUS ROG Strix B450-F

Ryzen 5 3600

16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black, PC4-24000 (3000)

500GB WD Blue M.2 - Cache/Appdata

Fractal Design Define 7

550W Seasonic PRIME Ultra, Fully Modular, 80PLUS Platinum

All the above is about £650 which isn't bad. I know I'll need add either an LSI or Dell h310 to add more than 5 drives as I think the m.2 takes one sata connection? Is there any point to adding a GPU? At the moment I've got a small i5 running my actual Plex server and that seems to cope with the occasional transcodes that I have but most connections are direct stream.

Out of the Dell there are a number of SAS 4 & 6TB drives which would be handy to use and save on some costs until I could swap them for new drives is that feasible or not? I did think about using the ECC ram from it but wasn't sure if the board and ryzen would support it?

One other possible plus is, I built myself a new Ryzen 5 2600X with the same board only a couple of months ago would it be better to swap the processors ?

Thanks!

Electronics Wizardy · April 27, 2020

38 minutes ago, unseen_uk said:

Originally I was going to use a 2u Supermicro dual Xeon but tweaking the IPMI to try and get the fans within the wife acceptance factor basically showed I'd need to spend a fair chunk on some noctua fans, plan b fell in to my lap in the form of a Dell 730xd which was being scrapped but again WAF kicked in as in fresh air cooling mode dear god that things loud oops!!

I have modded a good amount of rack servers to be quiet with reistor mods. Pretty easy, works well, gets the system pretty quiest.

39 minutes ago, unseen_uk said:

s there any point to adding a GPU?

Some systems need the gpu to post, and its really nice to have video out when you need to troubleshoot.

39 minutes ago, unseen_uk said:

Out of the Dell there are a number of SAS 4 & 6TB drives which would be handy to use and save on some costs until I could swap them for new drives is that feasible or not? I

You need the sas card, but then it will work fine.

40 minutes ago, unseen_uk said:

I did think about using the ECC ram from it but wasn't sure if the board and ryzen would support it?

Registered ecc won't work on ryzen.

unseen_uk · April 28, 2020

57 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I have modded a good amount of rack servers to be quiet with reistor mods. Pretty easy, works well, gets the system pretty quiest.

I have looked at that, the IPMI tweaks did make it quieter but at the compromise of the CPU getting a touch toastier. They're currently passive coolers on a x9DRH-iTF board. I looked for some 2u compatible coolers preferring noctua but all they do for 2011 narrow ILMs are 4u. So I'm stuck with the supermicro SNK-P0048AP4, I could change the fan on that to a 60mm Noctua for about £90 all in for the CPU.

I think the biggest noise maker after that is the 3 fan "fan wall" and a wee bit of googling has suggested I can swap these out for noctua (or similar) BUT it can cause heating issues as the replacements wouldn't create enough static pressure (could be wrong here!) about £50 for those.

The big issue for me is it's got to sit in a dining room under my home office desk No where else to move it to where airflow wouldn't then become an issue So plan C was to build a new quieter server and either put this one away for when I have room or take a bit of a hit and stick it on ebay for someone who may have the room or no wife to please!