Home Server

[Napper198]

Ok, so I was looking at NAS and got turned off by their prices so thought to myself "Hm, what would it cost me to build a PC?"
Turns out not much more than a 6-bay NAS would so I kinda started researching and picking parts and I think I'm at a point where I would consider building it even though I completely wrecked my previous budget because of all the extras. So I hoped you guys could point some stuff out.
 
So the intention is to have a centralized storage that will also handle a Plex media server, an ownCloud server, maybe some torrents and nightly backups to CrashPlan.

Budget is flexible but it needs a very good reason to exceed 1500€
 

What I came up with:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor (€261.33 @ Mindfactory)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! PURE ROCK 51.4 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (€33.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Kingston 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (€63.49 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Sandisk X300S 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€97.16 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Sandisk X300S 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€97.16 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Western Digital Red 6TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive (€254.46 @ Mindfactory)
Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 1 ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: SeaSonic 360W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply (€67.04 @ Mindfactory)
UPS: APC BK650EI UPS (€109.94 @ Mindfactory)
Other: unRAID (€54.33)
Other: 10TB worth of random disks (Purchased For €0.00)
Other: Asus P9D-M (€171.42)
Other: Asus ASMB7-IKVM Management Upgrade Kit (€26.86)
Total: €1237.09
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-01-17 02:26 CET+0100

 

 

 

 

Rationale:

 

At first I had an i3 planned but had to get a Xeon to get VT-D support. I'm still considering the 1230L for 16€ more but I'm not sure if the reduced power bill will justify an unplanned upgrade because of it's limited clockspeeds. I don't plan to go 10GBit/s on it because of the way unraid handles hard drives so it should be fine, but maybe someone can give me more insight on this.

 

For cooling I picked a reasonably cheap and silent one with a good MTBF.

 

I'm using ECC RAM here because I can and it's not that much more expensive than standard RAM. single stick because it's cheaper and leaves more room for upgrades, but I'm still considering 2 sticks just for redundancy. Maybe I'll just bite the bullet and buy 2x8GB sticks. Also I'd love to use DDR3L but I couldn't find one that's certified.

 

As for motherboard there is not much choice in that sector as a serverboard is actually cheaper than a consumer board with 2 nice Intel NICs and the Intel boards get really expensive once you decided against the base S1200RPS. The P9D-M over the P9D-MV since it's only 10€ more to get 4xSATA3 which is good for the SSD cache of unraid. The iKVM Module is probably not needed but I'm lazy so what the heck.

 

Now you could argue that if I'm spending that much on a server why not go all in and buy a server enclosure with a redundant PSU? Because those are more expensive than the rest of the build so I just got me a good 80+ Gold PSU and a UPS to deal with power and a reasonably priced case I can get in white and can hold a butt ton of hard drives. The dampening material in the Nanoxia should also deal with the noise from the HDDs. 360W on the PSU seems low but considering that a HDD array of 12 drives (MB + 2 port HBA - 2SSDs) would draw 250W max at spinup and it's probably going to take a while until I need 12 drives I'm fine with that.

 

Picking out the OS was a tough decision. At first I needed it to be able to virtualize so I could run pfSense on it as well but I later discarded that idea because of security concerns. So I was looking for something with double parity but I kinda liked the possibility for cheap storage upgrades on unraid and after discarding the idea of that server being highly available I stuck with it.

 

This is also the reason for the hard drives. A nice, big, reliable 6TB WD Red as a parity drive and 2x256GB SSDs with power loss protection for cache. I want to skimp here a little on the SSDs as I doubt that I will ever write that much on the server per day + I can just set it up to flush them more often than once a day, but I probably need that size as soon as I'm starting to use VMs.

Same for the HDD. I don't really need to buy it now and could just use one of my cheap 3TB Seagate drive for parity, but 1. it's a cheap Seagate drive and 2. replacing the parity drive on unraid looks like a pain to do. With the 4 drives (2x2TB and 2x3TB) I already have laying around I'll have 7TB usable and a 3TB cold spare to get me over until 2 drives die or I need more storage. In that case I could still buy bigger drives and replacing old ones before buying a HBM card.

 

Lastly, since unraid has no double parity right now and because I skimped on the PSU I need a backup solution so I'm going to use the money I saved on a CrashPlan subscription and giving my ISP the finger.

 

 

 

I know that's a lot of text, but I'd appreciate some thoughts, comments, suggestions on that. 

[RuLeZ]

This CPU doesnt have IGP, you need to get some GPU.

[Vivilacqua1]

Why not go with an i3 ####?

+1 for Pure Rock.

 

EDIT- Ignore i3 post, finished reading op.

[suchamoneypit]

have you looked into going the used CPU route? you can get seriously more powerful processors for cheap. I plan on doing a build with 2x e5 2670s (8 cores 16 T each) for only 100-110$ each.

 

Also, how do you plan on controlling the server? without integrated graphics or GPU, you are unable to get an output to a monitor to control the server.

[Napper198]

This CPU doesnt have IGP, you need to get some GPU.

 

 

have you looked into going the used CPU route? you can get seriously more powerful processors for cheap. I plan on doing a build with 2x e5 2670s (8 cores 16 T each) for only 100-110$ each.

 

Also, how do you plan on controlling the server? without integrated graphics or GPU, you are unable to get an output to a monitor to control the server.

 

A nice benefit of a server board is that it has an onboard GPU to deal with diagnostics. Most of the controls are handled trough unRAIDs web GUI or through the web interfaces of the apps used so I don't need to be physically there to control it which is kind of the idea of a server.  :lol:

 

Used parts are a possible choice even though I don't really need a more powerful CPU. I'll look into that and see if I can find something here.