Does this NAS setup make sense

[LunarisElysium]

Budget (including currency): >3000 RMB (Around 400 USD)

Country:  Mainland China

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

NAS, media server, virtual machines and maybe some game server hosting

Other details: 

I am currently hoping to get a used Dell PowerEdge R720xd for 1530RMB (~225USD) with:

-Dual E5-2670 V2 CPUs (10 core, 20 thread, 2.5GHz base, 3.3GHz boost each)

-64GB of DDR3 RAM

-A H710 raid card that I'm going to cross flash to IT mode

 

In addition, I'm going to get a four 16GB optane ssds (hopefully new) , two for RAID1 boot, two for L2 a read and write cache

 

For hard drives I'm getting two 4TB Seagate Skyhawk hard drives that seem to be used for 215RMB each (~30USD).

 

Questions:

1. I have the option to get 3*3TB generic SAS drives for an extra 450RMB(~70USD), should I take it and not buy the Seagate drives?

2. Is there enough compute to handle a couple of game severs? I'm pretty sure raid will run just fine, but I kind of want to rent out game servers as my internet connection well, not great, but still reasonably good (100Mbps up, 30Mbps down)

3. What sort of RAID should I run? Four hard drives of this capacity is going blow my budget. RAID0 is not an option, cause I don't trust the drives.

4. With the above question in mind, should I instead buy cheaper, smaller capacity 500GB drives that add up to the same capacity?

5. What should I sacrifice on now(that I can hopefully upgrade later) to improve something else?

6. What else do you guys suggest? (Software I should use, stuff like that)

 

 

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, RayZ297 said:

Budget (including currency): >3000 RMB (Around 400 USD)

Country:  Mainland China

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

NAS, media server, virtual machines and maybe some game server hosting

Other details: 

I am currently hoping to get a used Dell PowerEdge R720xd for 1530RMB (~225USD) with:

-Dual E5-2670 V2 CPUs (10 core, 20 thread, 2.5GHz base, 3.3GHz boost each)

-64GB of DDR3 RAM

-A H710 raid card that I'm going to cross flash to IT mode

 

In addition, I'm going to get a four 16GB optane ssds (hopefully new) , two for RAID1 boot, two for L2 a read and write cache

 

For hard drives I'm getting two 4TB Seagate Skyhawk hard drives that seem to be used for 215RMB each (~30USD).

 

Questions:

1. I have the option to get 3*3TB generic SAS drives for an extra 450RMB(~70USD), should I take it and not buy the Seagate drives?

2. Is there enough compute to handle a couple of game severs? I'm pretty sure raid will run just fine, but I kind of want to rent out game servers as my internet connection well, not great, but still reasonably good (100Mbps up, 30Mbps down)

3. What sort of RAID should I run? Four hard drives of this capacity is going blow my budget. RAID0 is not an option, cause I don't trust the drives.

4. With the above question in mind, should I instead buy cheaper, smaller capacity 500GB drives that add up to the same capacity?

5. What should I sacrifice on now(that I can hopefully upgrade later) to improve something else?

6. What else do you guys suggest? (Software I should use, stuff like that)

 

 

Thanks in advance for your advice!

It's a good thing that power is cheap in the mainland, that server is going to suck back a fair bit compared to something newer. Do you really need dual CPU's? Your workload doesn't seem like it.

 

As for the questions...

1) Skip sas, stick with the SATA, I've bought HGST used from taobao and have had good success.

2) These are pretty slow overall for single threaded use, and I'd really be careful running game servers in Mainland. I am not sure if you are an expat or local, but it's alomst positive that running a server is frowned upon unless you have gone through the government.

3) With only two drives, you only have two options. 0 or 1. And you don't want 0 so that leaves one option.

4) Don't buy smaller drives, they are going to be much older at this point and have even less reliability.

5)Sacrifice meals.

6) Depends if you plan on adding drive later or are you going to stick with 2 drives. But if you are going for an L2 cache, that means that you are going ZFS, that means TrueNAS unless you are going to just run Linux.

 

And Skip the optane, there is no benefit over a regular SSD, unless lack of drive space is a benefit...

[LunarisElysium]

6 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

I am not sure if you are an expat or local, but it's alomst positive that running a server is frowned upon unless you have gone through the government.

I'm a local, what does "go through the government" mean? I looked it up before and there seems to be no reference for if I need to have some sort of license (either a ICP or IDC). If anyone knows, please tell me.

 

For storage, I'm probably okay with ~10TB of hard disk space, I currently only use 1 external hard drive and it has like 500 megabytes of data that I do not have a copy of. If I need more space, I will just add more drives.

 

As for the high core count, I wanted to be able to do virtualization. You see, the computers I have are all reasonably modern laptops(most can run windows 10, not sure about 11 though), but only one doesn't struggle from opening word and powerpoint at the same time, so hopefully in the future(notably with the addition of some GPU's), I would be able to create VM's that are powerful enough that it makes sense to remote into them from the laptops, though I suspect that would be a very low bar to hit.

 

Four more questions:

1. Should I use a single E5-2620 V3 with a dell R730 instead of the above config? They're somehow nearly the exact same price, but the R730 config only comes with 16GB of ram (though it's DDR4)

 

2. What would make a drive "new enough"? I have found a seller who is selling 1TB seagate drives (that he claims) are from 2021. I can by 4 of them so I can make a RAID 5 array and buy more drives in the future to expand the array.

 

3. Does anyone have an approximation for how much noise this will make? I'm not exactly going to try to sleep beside it, but the most I can do is but it in a closet or something. I can probably jerry rig something that powers the thing down automatically every night, but that is suboptimal, to say the least.

 

4. How much power will this thing consume? I can't really find the power usage for anything other than the CPU.

 

BTW, what does HGST mean?

[Blue4130]

9 hours ago, RayZ297 said:

I'm a local, what does "go through the government" mean? I looked it up before and there seems to be no reference for if I need to have some sort of license (either a ICP or IDC). If anyone knows, please tell me.

Ok, I am not sure of the specifics, I just figured that there would be some rule about running servers that others log into. I am an expat here and there seems to be no end of red tape and paperwork to do simple things...

 

10 hours ago, RayZ297 said:

As for the high core count, I wanted to be able to do virtualization. You see, the computers I have are all reasonably modern laptops(most can run windows 10, not sure about 11 though), but only one doesn't struggle from opening word and powerpoint at the same time, so hopefully in the future(notably with the addition of some GPU's), I would be able to create VM's that are powerful enough that it makes sense to remote into them from the laptops, though I suspect that would be a very low bar to hit.

 

Is this going to have multiple people/laptops trying to use it at the same time? Is this a business use case like a bunch of office workers using virtual desktops? That would change my recommendations.

 

10 hours ago, RayZ297 said:

1. Should I use a single E5-2620 V3 with a dell R730 instead of the above config? They're somehow nearly the exact same price, but the R730 config only comes with 16GB of ram (though it's DDR4)

 

2. What would make a drive "new enough"? I have found a seller who is selling 1TB seagate drives (that he claims) are from 2021. I can by 4 of them so I can make a RAID 5 array and buy more drives in the future to expand the array.

 

3. Does anyone have an approximation for how much noise this will make? I'm not exactly going to try to sleep beside it, but the most I can do is but it in a closet or something. I can probably jerry rig something that powers the thing down automatically every night, but that is suboptimal, to say the least.

 

4. How much power will this thing consume? I can't really find the power usage for anything other than the CPU.

 

BTW, what does HGST mean?

I can't comment on the noise, but the power use, storagereview.com had a review and they don't list specifically, but show that at 20% use, they were at about 250W.

 

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/dell-r730-vs-r720-power-usage.31985/

This forum post backs up the numbers.

 

HGST is hitachi harddrives. They are now part of WD, but many people think that they are more reliable than seagate. I will not comment either way, I have both in my system currently and both work fine. As for age, I go by power on hours, not by date. And I really don't trust sellers who claim to have "new" drives and sell as used. It's possible, but it's also possible that they are selling used drives with SMART data wiped. Buying used is a risk, so have proper backups.

 

Expanding the array later can be a pain in the ass, I would suggest getting more storage upfront and saving the hassle. The cost difference between 1tb and 4tb is very small, from my seller, it's only 40 rmb difference per drive. Well worth the 160 rmb total for 4x the capacity in my opinion.

[LunarisElysium]

I believe if you want a custom domain than you probably need an ICP, but a simple way to get around this is to use something like https://hsk.oray.com (aka Cloudflare Tunnels on steroids). You get a free subdomain and there is no need to get an ICP. I don't know about setting up a custom domain though.

 

I'm not in a business situation, just I have a bunch of laptops that are usable but struggle to run windows 10 with heavy workloads (opening Chrome and some other apps at the same time). At most there would be 3 VM's simultaneously, and there's no reason for more. If I can't run game servers, I suppose I would set up remote access and a vpn (or just use the above mentioned hsk.oray.com, whose name literally means to "peanut shell") so I can access the VM's from anywhere, even with my mobile devices.

 

For the drives, I am settling on 8*500GB in raid z2. I just don't think it would be reasonable to spend that much on just the spinning rust up front. The reason for 8 is that I can eventually add 4*4TB drives to the remaining drive bays(there are 12 in total on the r720xd) and copy the data over. I probably will still use the smaller drives up until they start failing, at which point they're gonna get brutally ripped apart to make for some decorations.

 

For power, I've just realized it would cost me the price of the machine to power it 24/7 for a year (I messed up my calculations at first and thought the server was gonna use some 15000 kilowatt hours a year). I think I have a couple of options:

1. Rip out one of the CPUs and pray the thing gets more power efficient

2. Find something more modern and hope it has a lower power consumption 

3. Make something to have it power up/power down at set times every day, which according to my calculations, will reduce power consumption from some 2000 kilowatt hours per year to about 572 kilowatt hours per year(I only need it for a couple of hours a day). Do you guys know what this daily power cycle would do to the reliability of the drives?

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, RayZ297 said:

I believe if you want a custom domain than you probably need an ICP, but a simple way to get around this is to use something like https://hsk.oray.com (aka Cloudflare Tunnels on steroids). You get a free subdomain and there is no need to get an ICP. I don't know about setting up a custom domain though.

 

I'm not in a business situation, just I have a bunch of laptops that are usable but struggle to run windows 10 with heavy workloads (opening Chrome and some other apps at the same time). At most there would be 3 VM's simultaneously, and there's no reason for more. If I can't run game servers, I suppose I would set up remote access and a vpn (or just use the above mentioned hsk.oray.com, whose name literally means to "peanut shell") so I can access the VM's from anywhere, even with my mobile devices.

 

For the drives, I am settling on 8*500GB in raid z2. I just don't think it would be reasonable to spend that much on just the spinning rust up front. The reason for 8 is that I can eventually add 4*4TB drives to the remaining drive bays(there are 12 in total on the r720xd) and copy the data over. I probably will still use the smaller drives up until they start failing, at which point they're gonna get brutally ripped apart to make for some decorations.

 

For power, I've just realized it would cost me the price of the machine to power it 24/7 for a year (I messed up my calculations at first and thought the server was gonna use some 15000 kilowatt hours a year). I think I have a couple of options:

1. Rip out one of the CPUs and pray the thing gets more power efficient

2. Find something more modern and hope it has a lower power consumption 

3. Make something to have it power up/power down at set times every day, which according to my calculations, will reduce power consumption from some 2000 kilowatt hours per year to about 572 kilowatt hours per year(I only need it for a couple of hours a day). Do you guys know what this daily power cycle would do to the reliability of the drives?

One quick way to save power is replacing the 8 500g drives with one 4tb drive. It really makes very little sense to use so many small drives for this workload.

 

As for reliability by powering down, I have three machines that all get powered down nightly, never had an issue with the drives.