New Home Server Build

[hellboy124124]

Budget (including currency): ~1200€ (+/- 20%)

Country: Europe/Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: NAS (mainly photography & backups), Plex, Nextcloud and Virtualization (Docker & co., web apps & scripts)

Until now, my home server was my previous PC: i3-2100, 16GB ram, 750Ti, 110GB SSD, 2x2TB in RAID 0 + 500GB HDD on Ubuntu Server, but I think that the poor thing is slowly dying, because for some reason it just turns of every few minutes and I have no idea yet what's causing the issue as it doesn't return any crash logs. Anyway, that now gives me the opportunity to finaly upgrade to something newer.
So my wanted OS: Ubuntu Server, TrueNAS Core or UnRAID? I'm leaning towards TrueNAS as of right now, but I'm open to suggestions.
Hardware: I would preffer at least 8 cores, 16G RAM, 8TB of space + additional M.2 (or SSD) for OS (also, could that same drive then be used for caching, or would I need a separate one for caching)?

Would it be viable for me to get an ok build for that budget? Would it be better to DIY or choose a prebuilt NAS/Micro Server (I was looking at HPE MicroSrv Gen10+)?

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, hellboy124124 said:

Budget (including currency): ~1200€ (+/- 20%)

Country: Europe/Germany

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: NAS (mainly photography & backups), Plex and Virtualization (Docker & co., web apps & scripts)

Until now, my home server was my previous PC: i3-2100, 16GB ram, 750Ti, 110GB SSD, 2x2TB in RAID 0 + 500GB HDD on Ubuntu Server, but I think that the poor thing is slowly dying, because for some reason it just turns of every few minutes and I have no idea yet what's causing the issue as it doesn't return any crash logs. Anyway, that now gives me the opportunity to finaly upgrade to something newer.
So my wanted OS: Ubuntu Server, TrueNAS Core or UnRAID? I'm leaning towards TrueNAS as of right now, but I'm open to suggestions.
Hardware: I would preffer at least 8 cores, 16G RAM, 8TB of space + additional M.2 (or SSD) for OS (also, could that same drive then be used for caching, or would I need a separate one for caching)?

Would it be viable for me to get an ok build for that budget? Would it be better to DIY or choose a prebuilt NAS/Micro Server (I was looking at HPE MicroSrv Gen10+)?

Cant use your boot drive for anything within Truenas, so can't do that. That said, honestly, unless you really want ZFS, unraid may be better. Reason I say that is mainly for expandability later on. To build out more space in ZFS, you need to build entire new vdevs which require their own redundancy. Its a stellar filesystem, but it isn't as well suited for home use as unraid is unless you really do understand its pluses and minuses.

 

You can look in my sig and see my homelab, I run a i3 6100, ESXi as my hypervisor, under that I have freenas, 3 ubuntu server VM's, a Windows 10 LTSC VM, and a UPS VM, and I spin up random other VM's for testing and stuff when I need to. I give my freenas 16 GB of RAM and its happy as could be, and my i3 with only 4 threads handles all of this without any issues. It isn't exactly super fast when I try and use Windows as I only give it 3 GB of RAM and 2 threads, but nothing ever hangs or crashes, freenas can easily saturate my gigabit network, and everything is always happy, including my docker containers in one of my Ubuntu server VM's. You don't need a lot of horse power to build out a homelab, I can even transcode 1080p to 720p with ease in Plex - depending on the source file, I can do 4 at a time!

 

Basically, lots of researching is ahead of you if you want to make the best choice. No one can really tell you whats best for you, but we can provide input and insight

[NTDaws]

The issue with caching is that you have basically no control over what gets stored on the SSD cache. I decided to choose two SSD's in this instance. The first one can be used for the OS, and the second one for caching. Instead of 16GB of ram, I put in 32GB, but you have room too add 64GB if you wanted. I picked 2x 4TB Hard Drives which you could Raid 0, or if you want you can either spend a little more money and do 2x 8TB drives in Raid 1 so you have redundancy. Or you can do 1 8TB Hard drive if you're just downloading movies then I wouldn't worry too much. Also 10700F will probably be enough for you're needs, if you feel you need the extra horsepower, I would go for either a 10900F, or a 10700KF. If you chose the 10700KF You need at least a Noctua D15 or a AIO Cooler. For the record, the F in the processor means no dedicated graphics. Which means you would have to use you're 750Ti.

 

PCPartPicker Part List: https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/jRrtGq

CPU: Intel Core i7-10700F 2.9 GHz 8-Core Processor  (€266.92 @ Mindfactory) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  (€34.94 @ Aquatuning) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME B460-PLUS ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (€110.95 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (€148.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (€67.62 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (€67.62 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  (€99.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  (€99.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Case: Corsair 270R ATX Mid Tower Case  (€58.27 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Power Supply: Corsair RM (2019) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (€104.39 @ Alza) 
Total: €1059.41
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-06-30 06:53 CEST+0200

 

Edit: The 10700 and 10700KF has 8 Cores, the 10900F is 10 Cores.

[LIGISTX]

32 minutes ago, President Dawson Wehage said:

The issue with caching is that you have basically no control over what gets stored on the SSD cache. I decided to choose two SSD's in this instance. The first one can be used for the OS, and the second one for caching. Instead of 16GB of ram, I put in 32GB, but you have room too add 64GB if you wanted. I picked 2x 4TB Hard Drives which you could Raid 0, or if you want you can either spend a little more money and do 2x 8TB drives in Raid 1 so you have redundancy. Or you can do 1 8TB Hard drive if you're just downloading movies then I wouldn't worry too much. Also 10700F will probably be enough for you're needs, if you feel you need the extra horsepower, I would go for either a 10900F, or a 10700KF. If you chose the 10700KF You need at least a Noctua D15 or a AIO Cooler. For the record, the F in the processor means no dedicated graphics. Which means you would have to use you're 750Ti.

 

PCPartPicker Part List: https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/jRrtGq

CPU: Intel Core i7-10700F 2.9 GHz 8-Core Processor  (€266.92 @ Mindfactory) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  (€34.94 @ Aquatuning) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME B460-PLUS ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (€110.95 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  (€148.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (€67.62 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (€67.62 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  (€99.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  (€99.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Case: Corsair 270R ATX Mid Tower Case  (€58.27 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Power Supply: Corsair RM (2019) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  (€104.39 @ Alza) 
Total: €1059.41
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-06-30 06:53 CEST+0200

 

Edit: The 10700 and 10700KF has 8 Cores, the 10900F is 10 Cores.

Shouldn’t be building a server and running RAID 0…. Should have some redundancy if your going to spend money on hardware - storage is cheap in comparison. 
 

Also, a 10700 is so far above and beyond what is needed. Unless your doing serious heavy lifting with your homelab, an i3 or even celeron is plenty of power… this is where AMD shines tho. Can get a 6 core AMD chip for pretty cheap, and that is massive overkill as it is. I run a relatively well set up homelab on an i3…

 

And OP, unless you have an actual need for a cache drive, you likely don’t need one. If you want to write to the array quickly over the network, a write cache can be useful. But reading, that’s easy. A single hard drive can easily saturate gigabit, multiple drives in any type of RAID easily can. But, don’t use RAID 0, go for redundancy. NAS’s almost never need performance over redundancy, and if you do, your gigabit networking will be your limitation, as well as normal SMB file shares; you would want to go iSCSI, but that takes a lot more overhead so that would require a more beefy machine.

 

Homelabs are fun, they can be as simple or complex as you want   

[NTDaws]

29 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Shouldn’t be building a server and running RAID 0…. Should have some redundancy if your going to spend money on hardware - storage is cheap in comparison. 
 

Also, a 10700 is so far above and beyond what is needed. Unless your doing serious heavy lifting with your homelab, an i3 or even celeron is plenty of power… this is where AMD shines tho. Can get a 6 core AMD chip for pretty cheap, and that is massive overkill as it is. I run a relatively well set up homelab on an i3…

 

And OP, unless you have an actual need for a cache drive, you likely don’t need one. If you want to write to the array quickly over the network, a write cache can be useful. But reading, that’s easy. A single hard drive can easily saturate gigabit, multiple drives in any type of RAID easily can. But, don’t use RAID 0, go for redundancy. NAS’s almost never need performance over redundancy, and if you do, your gigabit networking will be your limitation, as well as normal SMB file shares; you would want to go iSCSI, but that takes a lot more overhead so that would require a more beefy machine.

 

Homelabs are fun, they can be as simple or complex as you want   

OP said he will be using the system for virtualization as well. I recommend more than 6 cores for that occasion. It's upon him to choose what raid array to use, i recommend raid 1 as well but nas drives aren't cheap. i3 and Celeron ain't gonna make the audition, maybe an i5. 

[hellboy124124]

Thank you both for the insights!

 

It's been a while since I actually built a PC and the last one I actually built, I did mess up - bought an older MOBO that didn't support the newer CPU, so I needed to buy an additional CPU to upgrade the firmware. Anyway, yes, I think that redundancy would be useful, so RAID 5? Because at the moment, I also have an additional 4TB WD NAS to backup all my important stuff from the server, in case anything goes wrong there (sorry, forgot to mention that!).

Regarding the cache, I was thinking it could maybe be better, because I also do photography and edit directly off the server, altough I can't say that I really reached any bottlenecks on the current server. It may also be, that I'm used for it being "slow".

 

So in that case: 4x4TB on RAID 5 + 500GB M.2 for storage, 32GB RAM, but I'm still on the edge with choosing the OS and if for the CPU I should go with Intel or AMD. Right now, I maybe don't use the current server that much for virtualisation, but I would still like it to be a bit more future-proof, so 4 cores would rather be the absolute minimum, preferrably 6 I think. I can salvage the 750Ti, as I think it's probably still "good enough" - altough I used to do so ML stuff on there, I don't think that I'll be able to get one of those (for a normal price) in the forseeable future. The current budget is more of a guideline, so if something would make the server more future proof, I could think of stretching it a bit.

[LIGISTX]

8 hours ago, President Dawson Wehage said:

OP said he will be using the system for virtualization as well. I recommend more than 6 cores for that occasion. It's upon him to choose what raid array to use, i recommend raid 1 as well but nas drives aren't cheap. i3 and Celeron ain't gonna make the audition, maybe an i5. 

I am obviously not against more power…. But I run Freenas, 3 Ubuntu VM, one with 5 docker containers under it, on an i3. AND a windows 10 LTSC VM running veeam to back up ESXi. Depending on the needs, an i3 will get it done. Especially since today’s i3’s are quad cores with HT, my i3 is a dual core with HT.  I would agree 6 cores in today’s world is a good idea since they can be had for cheap from AMD.

 

7 hours ago, hellboy124124 said:

Thank you both for the insights!

 

It's been a while since I actually built a PC and the last one I actually built, I did mess up - bought an older MOBO that didn't support the newer CPU, so I needed to buy an additional CPU to upgrade the firmware. Anyway, yes, I think that redundancy would be useful, so RAID 5? Because at the moment, I also have an additional 4TB WD NAS to backup all my important stuff from the server, in case anything goes wrong there (sorry, forgot to mention that!).

Regarding the cache, I was thinking it could maybe be better, because I also do photography and edit directly off the server, altough I can't say that I really reached any bottlenecks on the current server. It may also be, that I'm used for it being "slow".

 

So in that case: 4x4TB on RAID 5 + 500GB M.2 for storage, 32GB RAM, but I'm still on the edge with choosing the OS and if for the CPU I should go with Intel or AMD. Right now, I maybe don't use the current server that much for virtualisation, but I would still like it to be a bit more future-proof, so 4 cores would rather be the absolute minimum, preferrably 6 I think. I can salvage the 750Ti, as I think it's probably still "good enough" - altough I used to do so ML stuff on there, I don't think that I'll be able to get one of those (for a normal price) in the forseeable future. The current budget is more of a guideline, so if something would make the server more future proof, I could think of stretching it a bit.

Depending on the setup, I would say RAID 5 isn’t enough. With drives as large as they are today, rebuild times have to be considered. If an additional drive is lost during the rebuild, your SOL.  Typically RAID 6 “is the new RAID 5” in ZFS land those are called RAID Z1 and Z2. 
 

I would look at AMD, and look at unraid. Easy to add more storage, and will work fine with AMD as it’s more actively supported in this way. I am sure truenas (freenas) would work with current AMD as well, but it is “more expecting” server hardware, thankfully my i3 is fine as it’s on a server mobo (not that it matters…. But i3’s and server chipsets support ECC RAM, so I run that as well, ECC less important for unraid too!).

 

I would look at a AMD 6 core, if you think you need it, get an 8 core (doubt you do…), 16 GB would be enough to start, but may as well get 32. And then I’d look at possibly 6 drives with 2 for redundancy. With unraid, you can always add more drives later easily.

 

Also, I do photography as well, I shoot a Nikon d850. I used to edit directly from the NAS, but now I have a 1TB ssd locally on my PC where I keep my Lightroom library (don’t keep that on the NAS. You want that local) and the last ~6 month of images. That way the stuff I am actively more likely to edit is local. Going to the NAS isn’t much slower. But. SSD’s are not that expensive so I have a 1TB just for photo stuff on my desktop. 

[hellboy124124]

Thanks again!

This is what I currently have put together.

 

I did try to find AMDs equivalent previous generation, but it seems to have a slightly worse preformance (https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-10700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-3800X/4070vs4047), whereas the current generation, is a significant price jump, with not as big as a performance increase (https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-10700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-5800X/4070vs4085).

* i7 10700k - 317€ - https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B0883P8CNM

* Ryzen 7 3800X - 314€ - https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Ryzen-7-3800X-AMD-processor/dp/B07SXMZLPJ

* Ryzen 7 5800X - 439€ - https://www.amazon.de/-/en/AMD-Ryzen-5800X-Box-Processor/dp/B0815XFSGK

 

Honestly, for my CURRENT needs a i3 would probably be enough, because like I mentioned in the initial post - I've had a i3-2100 for years. Initially as my workstation and later as a server, but I do want to have it a bit more future proof in case I want to do some more heavy work on it in the future like: ML stuff and 3D rendering. Of course, once GPUs become affordable again. But again, I do agree that for the initially mentioned workloads an i3 should probably be more than enough!

EDIT:

As I now added 5 drives instead of 4, I'm not really sure anymore that the case would fit then in, would it? Would it make any sense to rather have a server case, or how else would I fit that many drives into a normal tower case?

 

EDIT2:
Just noticed that I fogot to add a PSU  Would https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B07W4PLZWH do it?

 

[LIGISTX]

11 hours ago, hellboy124124 said:

Thanks again!

This is what I currently have put together.

 

I did try to find AMDs equivalent previous generation, but it seems to have a slightly worse preformance (https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-10700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-3800X/4070vs4047), whereas the current generation, is a significant price jump, with not as big as a performance increase (https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-10700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-5800X/4070vs4085).

* i7 10700k - 317€ - https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B0883P8CNM

* Ryzen 7 3800X - 314€ - https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Ryzen-7-3800X-AMD-processor/dp/B07SXMZLPJ

* Ryzen 7 5800X - 439€ - https://www.amazon.de/-/en/AMD-Ryzen-5800X-Box-Processor/dp/B0815XFSGK

 

Honestly, for my CURRENT needs a i3 would probably be enough, because like I mentioned in the initial post - I've had a i3-2100 for years. Initially as my workstation and later as a server, but I do want to have it a bit more future proof in case I want to do some more heavy work on it in the future like: ML stuff and 3D rendering. Of course, once GPUs become affordable again. But again, I do agree that for the initially mentioned workloads an i3 should probably be more than enough!

EDIT:

As I now added 5 drives instead of 4, I'm not really sure anymore that the case would fit then in, would it? Would it make any sense to rather have a server case, or how else would I fit that many drives into a normal tower case?

 

EDIT2:
Just noticed that I fogot to add a PSU  Would https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B07W4PLZWH do it?

 

A 3000 series AMD would be plenty powerful imo. You likely wouldn’t be doing actual CAD work on your server…. I suppose you could.