Repurposing old Gaming PC as Home Server

[elliotcz97]

Thankfully the GPU shortage has almost ended and I was able to get an NVIDIA 3060 Ti, but to avoid some bottlenecks and upgrade my system I’m planning to buy a new motherboard and an Intel i5 12500 (or 12400). Because of these upgrades I will end up with an old GPU ( GTX 1060 ) and CPU ( i5 7500 ) so I was thinking I could turn these old parts into a home server.

 

I have an old case lying around so I only have to buy a new PSU and RAM.

But the operating system and the storage raised some questions in me.

First of all I want to use TrueNas Scale because it’s super for data storage plus it can host Apps and Docker containers, but then I saw and read that Proxmox is also great and you can run TrueNas in a VM and it will work just as good. So that is my first question.

The second one is the RAM since my old motherboard does not support ECC I can only use standard non-ECC RAM, will it cause problems? ( I know ECC is the way to go, but I don’t want to buy a new motherboard and cpu just to get that).

And lastly how much RAM would you recommend? I was thinking about 16GB. I mainly want to use it as a NAS + Plex server, and run some smaller apps like Homebridge, Pi Hole and maybe run a Linux VM for small programs.

 

I hope you have some good advice!

 

Thanks for all the replies in advance!

 

[Deeya]

ECC is strongly recommended for any TrueNAS deployment. Memory sizing is depending on how much storage you are looking at having.

 

https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/gettingstarted/scalehardwareguide/#memory-sizing

 

I personally use unRAID using old gaming PC hardware.

 

I run 16GB of RAM in my unRAID server.

 

I only have a single VM, as well as docker containers for sabnzbd, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, ombi, tautilli, deluge, and pihole without running into any utilization issues.

 

 

 

[PorkishPig]

43 minutes ago, elliotcz97 said:

Because of these upgrades I will end up with an old GPU ( GTX 1060 ) and CPU ( i5 7500 ) so I was thinking I could turn these old parts into a home server.

You might be able to get away with just using QuickSync on your iGPU if you're planning on hardware transcoding with your 1060.

43 minutes ago, elliotcz97 said:

First of all I want to use TrueNas Scale because it’s super for data storage plus it can host Apps and Docker containers, but then I saw and read that Proxmox is also great and you can run TrueNas in a VM and it will work just as good. So that is my first question.

Seems like an overkill level of complexity. I would just go Scale only.

43 minutes ago, elliotcz97 said:

The second one is the RAM since my old mother board does not support ECC I can only use standard non-ECC RAM, will it cause problems? ( I know ECC is the way to go, but I don’t want to buy a new motherboard and cpu just to get that).

While it is ideal to have ECC, it is not a deal-breaker. You'd have to get pretty unlucky to have non-ECC memory be the cause of your demise.

 

I personally don't have ECC on my latest Scale build, but this was the tradeoff I had to accept if I wanted modern QuickSync. As a precaution, I take weekly offsite backups using Duplicati, though this is mostly to protect against drive failure.

43 minutes ago, elliotcz97 said:

And lastly how much RAM would you recommend? I was thinking about 16GB. I mainly want to use it as a NAS + Plex server, and run some smaller apps like Homebridge, Pi Hole and maybe host a website.

General rule of thumb is 8GB for Scale + 1GB per 1TB of storage.

[m9x3mos]

On 6/12/2022 at 1:06 PM, Deeya said:

ECC is stronely recommended for any TrueNAS deployment. Memory sizing is depending on how much storage you are looking at having.

I am sort of curious why people keep saying this. Although this has been the most polite way of saying it. I see a lot of people taking as if it is required. Yes ECC does provide benefits of data correction in the case is a bit flip. In most cases in a personal environment it will most likely never be an issue and unlikely to cause a problem. 

[LIGISTX]

20 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

I am sort of curious why people keep saying this. Although this has been the most polite way of saying it. I see a lot of people taking as if it is required. Yes ECC does provide benefits of data correction in the case is a bit flip. In most cases in a personal environment it will most likely never be an issue and unlikely to cause a problem. 

ECC isn’t required, and the “scrub of death” has been mostly debunked. As such ECC is more of a “nice to have”. 
 

That said, I was able to get 64 GB or ddr4 2133 ECC for 90 bucks on eBay…. So really it’s not all that expensive, but I also was planning my build around a Supermicro board and Xeon, mobo being the most expensive - even on the used market. But if I run a server 24/7/365 that I use as a backup of ALL my data, multiple VM host, home automation machine, et etc, a few extra bucks averaged over the life of the machine… it’s almost meaningless up cost to go ECC and I’d rather have the safety net in case I do get unlucky and a few neutrinos decide to flip some bits on me. 
 

On 6/12/2022 at 9:50 AM, elliotcz97 said:

Thankfully the GPU shortage has almost ended and I was able to get an NVIDIA 3060 Ti, but to avoid some bottlenecks and upgrade my system I’m planning to buy a new motherboard and an Intel i5 12500 (or 12400). Because of these upgrades I will end up with an old GPU ( GTX 1060 ) and CPU ( i5 7500 ) so I was thinking I could turn these old parts into a home server.

 

I have an old case lying around so I only have to buy a new PSU and RAM.

But the operating system and the storage raised some questions in me.

First of all I want to use TrueNas Scale because it’s super for data storage plus it can host Apps and Docker containers, but then I saw and read that Proxmox is also great and you can run TrueNas in a VM and it will work just as good. So that is my first question.

The second one is the RAM since my old motherboard does not support ECC I can only use standard non-ECC RAM, will it cause problems? ( I know ECC is the way to go, but I don’t want to buy a new motherboard and cpu just to get that).

And lastly how much RAM would you recommend? I was thinking about 16GB. I mainly want to use it as a NAS + Plex server, and run some smaller apps like Homebridge, Pi Hole and maybe run a Linux VM for small programs.

 

I hope you have some good advice!

 

Thanks for all the replies in advance!

 

For context here, I ran my old homelab on 28 GB of ECC RAM, and a core i3 6100. With that I had: 50TB in Z2 under truenas (I gave truenas 16GB of ram, plenty enough for a home user especially since I only have a 1gigabit LAN… a ZFS array can easily saturate gigabit reading from the discs, so ARC is much less important; remember, we are *mostly* simple home users compared to what ZFS is really intended for in enterprise), multiple Ubuntu server VM’s, Windows LTSC VM, home assistant, and multiple docker containers inside one of the Ubuntu VM’s, and I left ~3gb of RAM free in case I wanted to spin up a random VM for testing. As you can see, RAM needs are likely not as high as some may make you think. 16 GB will be fine to start… but as you start to play with VM’s,

adding 16 more will be a solid idea. 
 

I use proxmox to virtualize everything under it. Truenas Scale can do this, but it’s very new, and I don’t think I’d trust what is really a storage appliance to also be a virtualization appliance. Can it do it, yes. Will it make things easier? Yes. Will it make more sense in 2 years when Scale is more matured? Very much yes.

 

Proxmox is great and I have enjoyed it, but it does necessitate getting a ~40 dollar LSI RAID card flashed to IT mode to operate as an HBA; with this you can pass the HBA through to yurt truenas VM so the VM has bare metal access to the harddrives (you need this for ZFS). 

[elliotcz97]

After a while I'm leaning towards unRAID because its cheaper for me right now in case of storage, and as I read it doesn't depend on ECC as much as TrueNAS Scale.

Tbh i don't want to buy an older Xeon (i know Ryzen also has ECC support) and a motherboard just to have ECC support. 

Since my old gear is not suitable for that i'm sticking with non-ECC RAM.

 

For the storage i'm planing to use:

• a new 4TB WD RED Plus for parity
• an old shucked 4TB WD Elements drive
• 2x 1TB drive from either WD or Seagate (the cheaper ones)
• an old 320GB drive as a Download cache
• and finally a 256GB SSD for the cache and the 1 Linux VM.

Usually the main differences between unRAID and TrueNAS Scale are the performance and the reliability. I know ZFS is "best in class" for storage safety and because of striping, data transfers are really fast. I don't think i need that much speed for Plex and that occasional 50GB media upload. I guess unRAID should use less power because it only spins up the drive where the file is on. This also means less stress for the other drives, it is maybe better for longevity? Because i assume that with ZFS all the drives spin up, and they are used always when i read/write.

 

And in case of drive failure with unRAID the parity drive can save the data, or in worst case, i only lose the data on the particular drive(s), not the whole array like in ZFS. I only have like 500GB of really sensitive data, so i think unRAID is safer (more suited) for my home use.

[voyager_]

Another Unraid supporter here, I have two machines running unraid. Storage expansion is much easier with unraid and works great with VM's and different dockers. Something to keep in mind with unraid is that if you are writing directly to the "array" it will not be that fast 40/60MB/s. You can get around this with a cache, I run two 500Gb SSDs in raid one to allow for potential failure. I also use the cache as the storage for any VM's, Plex directories, (anything that I want to be on the SSDs rather then the array). This also has the added benefit of better performance from plex with regards to loading libraries and thumbnails. I do not transcode to the SSD, this is set to RAM as a temp directory and uses and older quadro for transcoding. As far as hardrive failures unraid has another benefit, since data isnt stripped ive been able to recover files from a multiple drive failure after a bad storm took out the whole system by connecting them to a linux machine. I didnt need any file recovery tools either, the folder structure was gone but it was able to read and pull the files. (I bought a lottery ticket that day, didnt win but still...)   Neither machine runs ecc, both are ryzen based and have been up for years. I have my primary storage server running plex, minecraft servers, homeassistant, VPN, a couple of VMs. My second machine is a backup for the first and also runs a windows VM for Blue Iris to handle my security cameras.