Assembling NAS + homeserver. Need help narrowing down options for motherboard & other questions

[ordane87]

Hello,

For a while I've been meaning to build a compact-ish NAS + homeserver, which can store all of my family's photo/video album (currently 4TB) as well as a sizeable 1080p movie collection (over 2TB so far). I'll likely be running Unraid on the server and run Immich, Jellyfin/Plex, potentially a gameserver (for a UE4 game), the *arr stack of containers & a few of my own Docker containers. So I'll need a CPU that will have a good iGPU for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding, while also being able to run everything else. I know that it would probably be less of a headache to just get a separate NAS box and then a separate homeserver box, but for simplicity's sake (and due to my lack of space in my dorm room) I'm looking to just have one box power everything. I want it to be as power-efficient as possible as well - of course, I know this will require quite a bit of fiddling around with C-states etc in the motherboard & configuring spin-down on the HDDs - a good starting point would be great though. Also, since this will be in my bedroom, I'd ideally like the quietest HDDs possible (I have a Seagate IronWolf NAS drive in my PC at the moment and I can hear it working when activity is going on, which would not be ideal when I'm sleeping).

Also, I'd ideally like to fit everything into an mATX/ATX-ish case like the Mechanic Master C34 PRO or the Slinger Cerberus X (once they finish refreshing it that is). I don't want to go mini-ITX, even though it is much more compact than mATX, it seems like a PITA expandability-wise.

I've had a think about the requirements I actually need:

• 32GB RAM at least DDR4. Flexible on ECC/non-ECC.
• Ideally Intel 12th/13th/14th gen CPU that has good performance per watt & power efficiency.
• Need iGPU for Intel QuickSync support (I could go with something like the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G but Intel seems to be the most power-efficient for transcoding)
• I’d preferably like to have a 10Gbit non-Realtek NIC so that I’m not as bottlenecked when streaming video over Jellyfin/Plex or backing up files/copying files from my server across the net. I know this is a tough ask though so I don't mind getting a 10Gbps network card to install instead.
• Storage: I’m quite flexible but I’d like to have 4+ SATA ports. Given my current storage needs are only around 6TB, I think realistically to start with I'd only need something like 24TB of storage for this build to start with, which I'll likely setup an Unraid array for.
• IPMI would be a nice to have integrated on the board, but I'm equally happy to just plug in a JetKVM and call it a day.

Based on those requirements I put together a quick pcpartpicker list here: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/pKjxWc
I'll put my justifications & thoughts for the components I've picked on this list here:

• Recently I ordered an i5-13500 off of eBay, as it seems to be a CPU that will be capable of handling the above the above tasks.
• Something else I didn't fully mention above is that I want quiet HDDs, and apparently the WD Red Plus 12TB hard drives are some of the quietest out there. Even though they are quite steep when priced per GB, this server will basically be in my bedroom - so I'm happy to pay the extra premium for the silence & large amount of storage (and I get a 15% student discount which lessens the cost per HDD quite a bit). Since I only need 24TB, would this mean I would need to get 3x 12TB HDDs if I want to have 1x of them as parity in an Unraid array?
• I've picked the Mechanic Master C34 PRO as my case of choice for now until the Cerberus refresh comes out, as it has space for 5 HDDs and some SATA SSDs too, while still being able to support ATX motherboards even in such a slim and compact case.
• From the reading I've done so far, it would also seem like it's a good idea to setup a cache pool using SSD/NVMe drives. (I'll probably get 4TB total to start, 2x NVMes most likely). Should I go for a mirrored or RAIDZ1 pool for this? I'd only really be storing app data/downloads/other files which need something faster than cold storage on these SSDs.

Other than the SSDs & RAM, the main component I'm having trouble deciding on is the motherboard. I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with the Intel motherboards and I feel like I need to be brought back to Earth at this point! I know that for ECC support the only chipset that supports this is the W680, and the only publicly available mATX/ATX boards that I could purchase are either:

• Supermicro X13SAE (cant find this variant anywhere)
• Supermicro X13SAE-F (£428.88 from ebay)
• ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE without IPMI: £318.98 from amazon
• ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE with IPMI: £407.29 from amazon
• ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE SE (mATX variant with IPMI built-in): £597.67...
• ASRock Industrial IMB-X1316-10G: £446.09 (shipping from San Jose thru mitxpc.com)

Unsurprisingly they're much more expensive - the IMB-X1316-10G is interesting for having Intel vPro and the Marvell 10GbE LAN built in, in addition to 2x Intel 2.5Gb LANs (I could probably setup opnsense with that many ports..) and lots of SATA/PCIe ports for a mATX board like this.. but equally I could just get a 10Gbps network card and JetKVM on a much cheaper motherboard. Can anyone steer me towards some motherboards I should be looking at which have at least DDR4, have excellent expandability (preferably more than 4 SATA ports) & let you tweak things like C-States, ASPM etc so I can optimise power as much as possible? Thank you

[Dutch_Master]

Drop Intel. Especially 13th and 14th gen CPU's suffer from degradation and your i5 is very likely affected.

 

If ECC support is a must, consider an Asrock Rack AM4 X470 or X570 mainboard with AMD 5700X CPU+stock cooler. Not cheap, but IPMI included. For silent drives, consider 2TB NGFF M.2 drives in a M.2 to SATA 2.5" adapter. Benefit is that throughput is higher then a classic HDD, as those rarely exceed 140-ish MB/s while SATA SSD's easily get 400+ MB/s. A 2TB NGFF/SATA M.2 drive can be had for 150-ish USD, the M.2 to SATA 2.5" adapter case is about 6-8 USD-ish so fairly cheap. Put those in RAID6 (for a 2-disk redundancy) or RAID5 (single disk redundancy) for 6 resp 8 TB effective storage (with 5 drives).

 

Link:

M.2 SATA adapter

M.2 NGFF/SATA SSD, 2TB

 

There are larger M.2 SSD's, but they tend to be NVMe rather then SATA. And cost considerably more

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

Drop Intel. Especially 13th and 14th gen CPU's suffer from degradation and your i5 is very likely affected.

 

The non-k models are listed as non effected, have you seen failures on these models, I haven't seen any data pointing to excessive failures on these models

 

One thought is what is your desktop? If its running 24/7 already, might as well add a HDD an run it on your desktop, esp if your in a dorm with limited space.

 

1 hour ago, ordane87 said:

Something else I didn't fully mention above is that I want quiet HDDs, and apparently the WD Red Plus 12TB hard drives are some of the quietest out there. Even though they are quite steep when priced per GB, this server will basically be in my bedroom - so I'm happy to pay the extra premium for the silence & large amount of storage (and I get a 15% student discount which lessens the cost per HDD quite a bit). Since I only need 24TB, would this mean I would need to get 3x 12TB HDDs if I want to have 1x of them as parity in an Unraid array?

Yup 3x12TB would work. If you want to save power might make sense to go 24TB and only 2 drives, should reduce power a good amount per TB compared to more smaller drives.

 

1 hour ago, ordane87 said:

From the reading I've done so far, it would also seem like it's a good idea to setup a cache pool using SSD/NVMe drives. (I'll probably get 4TB total to start, 2x NVMes most likely). Should I go for a mirrored or RAIDZ1 pool for this? I'd only really be storing app data/downloads/other files which need something faster than cold storage on these SSDs.

With 2x drives, raidz1 makes no sense, so go mirrored

 

1 hour ago, ordane87 said:

Other than the SSDs & RAM, the main component I'm having trouble deciding on is the motherboard. I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with the Intel motherboards and I feel like I need to be brought back to Earth at this point! I know that for ECC support the only chipset that supports this is the W680, and the only publicly available mATX/ATX boards that I could purchase are either:

•  

If ECC isn't a hard requirement, I'd get the cheaper consumer grade boards. Can probably get away with 2.5 GBe as your working with slow HDDs mostly, and Unraid's parity is known for being pretty slow and typically only using one disks worth of speeds.

 

 

[ordane87]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The non-k models are listed as non effected, have you seen failures on these models, I haven't seen any data pointing to excessive failures on these models

Yeah from what I've read the i5-13500 is effectively a rebadged Alder Lake refresh, so it doesn't seem to suffer the issues that the actual 13th/14th gen CPUs do.

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

One thought is what is your desktop? If its running 24/7 already, might as well add a HDD an run it on your desktop, esp if your in a dorm with limited space.

It's a pretty beefy workstation PC I built almost 4 years ago. I don't keep it running 24/7 though, only when I'm away (just in case I need to pull files from it for whatever reason). https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/pZvMcx

I run Windows 10 on it atm, so I could theoretically spin up Immich via Docker Desktop and stuff in a few HDDs, but honestly I'd rather just keep it separate, as I need to reorganise my files anyway (I only have ~500GB free across all of my total 7TB drives). My ISP is a bit crap in that they only let me port forward one device on my network as well, and I'd rather do that for a separate NAS/homeserver (until I can figure out how to deploy a custom router to get around that). This case is honestly bulky and a bit of a pain to open up, something like that Mechanic Master case would be great & I definitely have space where it could fit.

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yup 3x12TB would work. If you want to save power might make sense to go 24TB and only 2 drives, should reduce power a good amount per TB compared to more smaller drives.

Yeah you have a point. I'm not as concerned with saving power right now since electricity bills are included in my rent at the moment. But eventually I'll move elsewhere, so if I can achieve a good balance between having a good amount of storage & not paying as much for electricity then having 24TB and 2 drives makes sense. Part of me is still concerned about protecting against drive failure though, and a friend of mine told me he hasn't had any problems with his Unraid parity array (though, he has 4x 12TBs and 2x parity) https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/RtZvsp

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

With 2x drives, raidz1 makes no sense, so go mirrored

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If ECC isn't a hard requirement, I'd get the cheaper consumer grade boards. Can probably get away with 2.5 GBe as your working with slow HDDs mostly, and Unraid's parity is known for being pretty slow and typically only using one disks worth of speeds.

Yeah fair enough, I'll just look for a consumer grade mobo with 2.5GBe for now, and then in future if I want the higher speeds I can just expand it with a 10GBe card.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, ordane87 said:

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

 

It's a pretty beefy workstation PC I built almost 4 years ago. I don't keep it running 24/7 though, only when I'm away (just in case I need to pull files from it for whatever reason). https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/pZvMcx

I run Windows 10 on it atm, so I could theoretically spin up Immich via Docker Desktop and stuff in a few HDDs, but honestly I'd rather just keep it separate, as I need to reorganise my files anyway (I only have ~500GB free across all of my total 7TB drives). My ISP is a bit crap in that they only let me port forward one device on my network as well, and I'd rather do that for a separate NAS/homeserver (until I can figure out how to deploy a custom router to get around that). This case is honestly bulky and a bit of a pain to open up, something like that Mechanic Master case would be great & I definitely have space where it could fit.

I'd be tempted to get some bigger HDDs for that desktop and leave it running. Won't use much more power(probably about the same as it would need to be running a good amount of the time anyways. Hyper-v and storage spaces work pretty well on windows.

 

If you really want speed, local HDDs will be a good amount faster, and storage spaces or hardware raid will be much faster than Unraid's parity setup.