servers PowerEdge T630 - Unraid server

[Kognac]

Alright boys so Im going to go Unraid on a 18bay PowerEdge T630 I just purchased for cheap. 380$
What CPU do you guys think i should go for? It comes with a E5-2660v3 I'm debating getting another one of the same kind or going for the big juice of E5-2699AV4 was thinking a good middle ground also for budget is the E5 2667 v4 if anyone has any idea it would be appreciated.

[Electronics Wizardy]

What are you using it for?

 

Make sure it has a HBA, not a raid card.

 

I'd probably keep the current CPUs for now if it was me.

[Kognac]

24 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are you using it for?

 

Make sure it has a HBA, not a raid card.

 

I'd probably keep the current CPUs for now if it was me.

It comes with a HBA I mean the Backplane, it comes with two.



This is what they look like and they are connected to the Mobo behind the GPU/CPU cooler fans 


It only has the one cpu so im needing to purchase another and thats why im thinking about just upgrading both. Going to be 256gb of 2133mhz ECC RAM and 18x 12 TB drives with 2 NVME 1TB drives

**Edit.

Im going to use it for hosting VMs and docker containers for things like Plex, pihole and TS3, and maybe a minecraft server.

[Needfuldoer]

My home server is a PowerEdge R730, and it has two E5-2667 V4s because they're reasonably cheap and about the best balance of cores vs clocks I found for the 2011-3 socket at the time. You might have to update the BIOS to get Broadwell support, but pop your machine's Service Tag into Dell's support site and they'll give it to you.

 

Performance-wise, they're fine, no complaints. I have a Quadro P2200 installed for Plex, which is the most processor-intensive thing it does regularly.

 

If you have the H730p RAID controller, you can set it to HBA mode from its text-mode setup utility. That will effectively disable the card's RAID capabilities and pass the drives right through to your OS. This made TrueNAS happy on my machine.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Kognac said:

It comes with a HBA I mean the Backplane, it comes with two.



This is what they look like and they are connected to the Mobo behind the GPU/CPU cooler fans 


It only has the one cpu so im needing to purchase another and thats why im thinking about just upgrading both. Going to be 256gb of 2133mhz ECC RAM and 18x 12 TB drives with 2 NVME 1TB drives

The backplane and HBA/RAID card is different. Check wht model the HBA/RAID card is.

 

If your getting 18 of the same drives, I'd go truenas for the better performance and checksumming with ZFS here.

 

 

Again, what are you using this for? If its a storage server, I'd stick with one CPU to save power. You can easily do 256GB on one CPU here.

[Kognac]

15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The backplane and HBA/RAID card is different. Check wht model the HBA/RAID card is.

 

If your getting 18 of the same drives, I'd go truenas for the better performance and checksumming with ZFS here.

 

 

Again, what are you using this for? If its a storage server, I'd stick with one CPU to save power. You can easily do 256GB on one CPU here.

 

16 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

My home server is a PowerEdge R730, and it has two E5-2667 V4s because they're reasonably cheap and about the best balance of cores vs clocks I found for the 2011-3 socket at the time. You might have to update the BIOS to get Broadwell support, but pop your machine's Service Tag into Dell's support site and they'll give it to you.

 

Performance-wise, they're fine, no complaints. I have a Quadro P2200 installed for Plex, which is the most processor-intensive thing it does regularly.

 

If you have the H730p RAID controller, you can set it to HBA mode from its text-mode setup utility. That will effectively disable the card's RAID capabilities and pass the drives right through to your OS. This made TrueNAS happy on my machine.

Im going to use it for hosting VMs and docker containers for things like Plex, pihole and TS3, and maybe a minecraft server.

The T630 can use the H730p but my understanding was its way better to use software raid than hardware raid, does the RAID card just allow the drives to be seen by the system? 

I appreciate all the answers, and added that raid card to my ebay cart

EDIT** It does come with a Dell 44GNF Perc H730 12gb Pci-e 3.0 X8 Sas Sata Controller
 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Kognac said:

 

Im going to use it for hosting VMs and docker containers for things like Plex, pihole and TS3, and maybe a minecraft server.

The T630 can use the H730p but my understanding was its way better to use software raid than hardware raid, does the RAID card just allow the drives to be seen by the system? 

I appreciate all the answers, and added that raid card to my ebay cart

Depends on what those VMs are doing, but I'd probably stick with the current CPU for now as its likely more than plenty.

 

If you really want new CPUs, I'd probably get something like e5 2680 v4s. The highest end chips often have a pretty big price premium for realtivity little performance. And none of those vms needs much CPU power.

 

What card does this server have? You want a HBA for unraid/trueNAS and others so you either have to flash the 730p, or get a HBA in the slot. The server you showed pictures of already has a HBA or RAID card installed, so it should list the model it has.

 

I'd be tempted to go Proxmox here if it was me as I find it does vms much better than unraid or Truenas, and has the same ZFS under the hood for storage.

[Kognac]

8 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Depends on what those VMs are doing, but I'd probably stick with the current CPU for now as its likely more than plenty.

 

If you really want new CPUs, I'd probably get something like e5 2680 v4s. The highest end chips often have a pretty big price premium for realtivity little performance. And none of those vms needs much CPU power.

 

What card does this server have? You want a HBA for unraid/trueNAS and others so you either have to flash the 730p, or get a HBA in the slot. The server you showed pictures of already has a HBA or RAID card installed, so it should list the model it has.

 

I'd be tempted to go Proxmox here if it was me as I find it does vms much better than unraid or Truenas, and has the same ZFS under the hood for storage.

Well the main driving force behind unraid is im going to be slowly adding storage to it and I cant do that with Proxmox, I'm starting off with 10 HDs and will add the next 8 in the next month or two and I don't want to deal with that headache

[Kognac]

29 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

My home server is a PowerEdge R730, and it has two E5-2667 V4s because they're reasonably cheap and about the best balance of cores vs clocks I found for the 2011-3 socket at the time. You might have to update the BIOS to get Broadwell support, but pop your machine's Service Tag into Dell's support site and they'll give it to you.

 

Performance-wise, they're fine, no complaints. I have a Quadro P2200 installed for Plex, which is the most processor-intensive thing it does regularly.

 

If you have the H730p RAID controller, you can set it to HBA mode from its text-mode setup utility. That will effectively disable the card's RAID capabilities and pass the drives right through to your OS. This made TrueNAS happy on my machine.

Thanks for the tip on setting it to HBA mode and yeah Im going to put a 1080ti in it for plex. 

Ive been leaning towards the E5-2667 V4s for the same reason, they are a good bang for the buck and a newer generation than the 2660v3 that is currently in it.

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, Kognac said:

The T630 can use the H730p but my understanding was its way better to use software raid than hardware raid, does the RAID card just allow the drives to be seen by the system? 

Setting the RAID card to HBA mode effectively makes it a SAS HBA. It won't do any hardware RAID, it will just pass the drives through to the host OS just like a regular HBA. If you already have one of those cards, you don't need to buy anything.

 

Like I said, my R730 has the mezzanine version of that card. (Same chipset, different form factor that doesn't take a PCIe slot.) HBA mode gave TrueNAS full hardware access to the drives, so ZFS can work its magic.

 

1 hour ago, Kognac said:

Thanks for the tip on setting it to HBA mode and yeah Im going to put a 1080ti in it for plex. 

Ive been leaning towards the E5-2667 V4s for the same reason, they are a good bang for the buck and a newer generation than the 2660v3 that is currently in it.

You might have to update the BIOS to do that. At least Dell gives unfettered access to all the old BIOS versions, drivers, and documentation, unlike HP and sometimes Cisco.

[Kognac]

5 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Setting the RAID card to HBA mode effectively makes it a SAS HBA. It won't do any hardware RAID, it will just pass the drives through to the host OS just like a regular HBA. If you already have one of those cards, you don't need to buy anything.

 

Like I said, my R730 has the mezzanine version of that card. (Same chipset, different form factor that doesn't take a PCIe slot.) HBA mode gave TrueNAS full hardware access to the drives, so ZFS can work its magic.

 

Like I said, you might have to update the BIOS to do that. At least Dell gives unfettered access to all the old BIOS versions, drivers, and documentation, unlike HP and sometimes Cisco.

Yeah i edited one of my messages earlier, "44GNF Perc H730 12gb Pci-e" it comes with this card and it should work fine for the passthrough.

Luckily the T630 has almost unlimited PCIe slots.

[Electronics Wizardy]

15 minutes ago, Kognac said:

Well the main driving force behind unraid is im going to be slowly adding storage to it and I cant do that with Proxmox, I'm starting off with 10 HDs and will add the next 8 in the next month or two and I don't want to deal with that headache

I'd be tempted to just wait a month untill you have all the drives.

 

But with ZFS and Proxmox/TrueNAS you can have a pool with 2x 9 drive raid z2s, and add the second set of 9 drives later on.

 

 

[Kognac]

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I'd be tempted to just wait a month untill you have all the drives.

Waiting, Oof that's a hard game to play.