First dab into building something server style

[Crazywizard]

Budget (TBD euro): 

Country: EU

 

 

It's about that time, your old computer is getting slow so it's time to upgrade,

A good moment to overhaul your entire network.

 

One thing I always wanted but never build was a NAS/Plex server. I also love the looks of servers in a rack so my new build will be in a server style chassis placed in a rack

Server stuff is expensive So I am looking to repurpose some materials from the second hand marker en auctions. this should provide me with some racks, chasis and components for an affordable price.

 

I first looked at disk shelves, while cheap, they are unusable they guzzle up power, and the noise. unusable for my setup where you cannot isolate it, and the "server" is part of the looks.

 

In the end I found a "disk shelf" like server chassis in which more consumer noise friendly components fit

The inter-tech 4u-4420 chassis that with some aftermarket modifications should be able to hold 8 2.5" and 20 3.3" bays. with the room for a server build using a normal PSU / ATX form factor. perfect for a server build in plain sight.

Unfortunately is't pretty expensive (to my standards, ~500 euro including aftermarket parts for just a box) but I have not found another solution yet, so I am open to suggestions.

 

For my regular PC build, (TBD) I found some second hand RM42220 servers at a bankruptcy auction for a few pennies, it also gives me some free brand power supplies that I could repurpose for the nas server build.

 

My old PC is a MSI-PC mate with a ryzen 1600  that I like to repurpose for this build, it works fine but it can't cope anymore with my daily workload and it's a waste to throw it away.

 

For connectivity I like to rewire my house using fibre optics, repurposing some SPD network cards with converter inserts to fibre optics.

A 10Gb connection is a pain in the ass to rewire as it needs new Cat6e or better connections, and has little room for upgrade paths and those nics / switches are expensive

Mellanox cards seem to be very cheap, a 10Gb converter insert is like 15 euro, SPD switches are affordable (and I might pick one up on the second hand/auction market which makes it even cheaper) and fibre cables are so much easier to rewire my house with as they fit into my cable pipes without the need to wire your own RJ-45 jacks and are not that much more expensive / cheaper than cat6e cables.

 

So this requires in my nas server the following hardware

• A mellanox card at least 10Gb
• A SAS card to drive my potential 28 drives
• A SAS expander card

For the expander card I am looking at 

https://www.spareit.nl/nl/components/pci-cards/hewlett-packard-enterprise-468406-b21-controller

Combined with a HBA

https://www.useditparts.com/home/1934-hp-lsi-sas-9217-4i4e-hba-6gbs-pci-e-30-x8-refurbished-57125052294.html

 

Another option could be to use 2 of these controllers

https://www.useditparts.com/home/2411-hp-lsi-9212-4i-6gbs4-ports-sas-hba-refurbished-5706998858436.html?utm_campaign=useditshopping&utm_source=useditparts&utm_medium=shoppingadsusedit&utm_campaign=1485489530&adgroupid=56468299894&utm_content=284238154077&utm_term=&gclid=CjwKCAiA-_L9BRBQEiwA-bm5fmG3A8tK4yw0GNzxB8uJWFJO3sPUP8CLFE8Fe0tbH1B2dHiiqqGwhhoCuR0QAvD_BwE

 

the questions:

• Which of the 2 options would be preferred and why?
• Have I picked the correct parts do all connections match?
• If there are suggestions for other parts which parts should I look for?
• Am I correct that my motherboard combined with the Ryzen 1600 can handle these cards. and there are enough PCI-e lanes,
• Is it an issue that there cannot be any graphics card in this server, as there is no integrted graphics
• would the athlon GE be an option if integrated graphics is an issue.
• What would you change in this setup.

For now these are my questions, hopefully someone could help me out settling on a final plan.

Thanks in advance.

[OddOod]

If you want to go 4U rackmount style server, you're pretty SOL when it comes to noise mitigation, at least on a budget. Best bet is tossing some primo noctuas in and a decent fan controller. If instead you want to go for quiet and pretty and still get decent price to performance, I'd recommend doing a custom built tower or an old server tower. 
If you want best of both worlds, I'd give you the ultimate advice I received: Separate your concerns.
Separation of concerns allows you to optimize for each thing you want to do. You want fuckoff storage? Disk shelf plugged into a lightweight Ubuntu box running MDADM RAID (or ZFS, whatever floats your boat, just not unraid because UR doesn't support shelf chaining, and avoid hardware raid like the plague because proprietary) which you can put online as your NAS. The upside of this is real disk shelves which just have power delivery and a couple SAS ports on the back aren't that loud, and you can aftermarket the fans to Noctua and they suddenly get way fucking quieter. Then you can build a nice lil server out of your ryzen 1600 (which honestly is kinda anemic for anything over two concurrent plex users, or one plex user and a bunch of docker stuff, but if that's within your goals, go for it) with big noctua fans spinning low and slow for that great noise reduction, and you can tear out all those drive cages in the front because you won't be storing anything major on that server, it'll all be on the NAS. This thing can run Unraid an you get to play with a bunch of dockers and mess around and maybe spin up some VMs and have lots of fun, all comfortable in the knowledge that your data is completely safe. 
But that takes money. The interesting thing about your story is that you seem to be ignoring the cost of drives. Budget 10TB HDDs (the only thing really worth buying rn except maybe 8s) are still ~200USD. Scrimping and saving on your components can really bite you in the ass later, and when the 20$ you save crashes your thousands of euros of storage disks, it can feel really silly.

[Crazywizard]

It's more of a project than a solution,

It's not that I am making money with it, I like to dab into the "experience" and learn from it, instead of going all out.

 

almost every piece of tech I never wrapped my hand around it. nor the software to support it.

So I not need 10TB drives