Planning home NAS / Server upgrade

[Rawxor]

Hey guys.  I'm planning to upgrade my current home NAS server.  I currently have a rack mount supermicro with hot swapable drives, dual intel processors and ~128gb ram.  It's nothing special but i'm running FreeNAS on it and have the following running in jails:

• Plex
• Radarr
• Sonarr
• Sabnzbd
• Unifi Controller
• Minecraft (in a virtualbox VM)
• and some other crap that i can't think of.
• I currently have ~6 6TB drives raided in a ZFS pool.

Here are some random scratch notes of what I'm thinking:

• AMD EPYC based system, 32 or 24 core potentially dual proc (i want to leave room for upgrading these later)
• 512GB ram minimum
• room for ~12 sata drives, i'll start with ~6 8TB drives though (platter drives are fine)
• Hot swapable would be preferred
• II want to run all of the above software on it, but i'd also like to add a GPU to the system and run some game servers as well (GPU would be for accelerated encoding/decoding and /machine learning stuff that i do... not for the game servers)
• I plan on trying Unraid for PCI-e and GPU pass-through... also i'm just more experienced with Linux than FreeBSD

I'm having trouble picking out the parts for all of the above and was hoping that some kind souls on this forum may be able to help.  I wish there was a PC part picker for servers like this.  I'm also looking for a decent ~30U rack for my server room in the garage.  My budget is ~$20k, but i would like to come closer to ~$10k

[Nano Adam]

You might want to add some ssd cache! 

[dogwitch]

with plex. 2k,4k which you doing and how many users?

[Rawxor]

2 minutes ago, dogwitch said:

with plex. 2k,4k which you doing and how many users?

both, more non 4k though... but that'll change over time.  I have about 5 plex clients in the house, never more than 2 running at once, usually only one.  Externally there are ~20 or so users but really there are never more than ~4 concurrent users using it at once and rarely does that happen... it's currently going just fine on my current server for the record.

[The_Ellimist]

For a rack I like grabbing them from auctions second hand. They go for like $50 AUD over here for something the size you are after.

 

For the platform are you aiming for Zen 2 or Zen 3 cores? I've been thinking about this for my next server upgrade as well and I am thinking of waiting another year or two before grabbing something Zen 3 instead for a longer usability and upgrade path.

 

Is the ram requirement a now thing or are you up for starting off lower and adding ram as you go?

 

Chassis wise I like something like this for 12 bays http://www.tgcipc.com/product.php?mod=detail&id=17 but thats just my 2c

[Rawxor]

I don't know on zen2 or 3 - I'm ok starting with 128gb of ram.

[The_Ellimist]

Supermicro's 2U Rome based option using the revision 2 board might be something to look at for an idea https://www.supermicro.com/en/Aplus/system/2U/2023/AS-2023US-TR4.cfm

[Rawxor]

1 hour ago, The_Ellimist said:

Supermicro's 2U Rome based option using the revision 2 board might be something to look at for an idea https://www.supermicro.com/en/Aplus/system/2U/2023/AS-2023US-TR4.cfm

that's an interesting board - but i'm hoping i can just get a standard gaming GPU like an RTX or something.

[Pixel5]

what exactly is the reason for the upgrade, its not like the current system couldnt handle it or is it already too slow for you?

 

overall for future proofing you certainly would want to go for EPYC or Threadripper in order to have the massive amount of PCI-e lanes for what every you want to do with it.

[The_Ellimist]

1 hour ago, Pixel5 said:

what exactly is the reason for the upgrade, its not like the current system couldnt handle it or is it already too slow for you?

 

overall for future proofing you certainly would want to go for EPYC or Threadripper in order to have the massive amount of PCI-e lanes for what every you want to do with it.

I would think if you are looking long term PCIe 4.0 would be key as well at this time.

[Rawxor]

8 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

what exactly is the reason for the upgrade, its not like the current system couldnt handle it or is it already too slow for you?

 

overall for future proofing you certainly would want to go for EPYC or Threadripper in order to have the massive amount of PCI-e lanes for what every you want to do with it.

• More computing power to do things like the game servers (specifically thinking Empyrion here)
• Because it's fun
• I want to try Unraid
• currency CPU is: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz X 2.
• I want to move off of ZFS onto something LVM based so that growing existing filesystems is easier.

[Rawxor]

Thinking this for mobo: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=ROMED6U-2L2T

[Rawxor]

39 minutes ago, Rawxor said:

Thinking this for mobo: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=ROMED6U-2L2T

nevermind, it doesn't even look like it's available

[The_Ellimist]

6 hours ago, Rawxor said:

nevermind, it doesn't even look like it's available

Its not avaliable yet. I only first saw that board maybe 2 weeks ago. I was thinking about looking into using it for a HEDT system since threadripper doesn't have an mATX board for a really tight build.

[Rawxor]

I'm thinking this: https://www.thinkmate.com/system/rax-qs12-12e2/440878