Parts recommendations for a home rackmount nas

[1re]

Hi,

I'm planning to build a home server some time in the coming months, and started to look at parts. But this has been really frustrating as I really don't know what will be compatible or what is reasonably powerful in regards to cpu/ram etc.

 

Any recommendations would be appreciated, also looking for a noise dampening solution (home rack, parent's won't be happy with fan noise at night). Looking for something around 2u with about 12 bays.

 

Thanks, ire

[Copie]

Anything 2RU isnt going to be quiet due to the fans being ultizied in that space.

 

All depends on what exactly you want to run off it, if its just plex etc then any 5th gen i3 onwards would be suitable or if you plan to be transcoding multiple streams you can upgrade to an e3 xeon.

 

So would look something like this

 

Intel i3/Xeon e3 1230v6

Intel S1200 Board

16gb ECC DDR4 Ram

Supermicro SC829

 

Huge fan of the supermicro chassis as they are incredibly robust and suprisingly decently priced 2nd hand, and they come with a redundant PSU

[1re]

2 hours ago, Copie said:

Anything 2RU isnt going to be quiet due to the fans being ultizied in that space.

 

All depends on what exactly you want to run off it, if its just plex etc then any 5th gen i3 onwards would be suitable or if you plan to be transcoding multiple streams you can upgrade to an e3 xeon.

 

So would look something like this

 

Intel i3/Xeon e3 1230v6

Intel S1200 Board

16gb ECC DDR4 Ram

Supermicro SC829

 

Huge fan of the supermicro chassis as they are incredibly robust and suprisingly decently priced 2nd hand, and they come with a redundant PSU

Cool, although what do you mean when you say transcoding multiple streams?

(sorry if this seems fairly obvious, i'm new to all of this)

[Copie]

Plex has the ability to transcode media to allow playback on a vast array of devices (that have the app) it basically converts the media from its standard format/container to one that is capable on the device you are watching it on (ie such as a smart tv or ios device)

 

This ability requires a resonable amount of cpu processing power, and the more streams you have going (ie the amount of people watching content off the server at the same time) the more cpu power you will require.

[1re]

2 hours ago, Copie said:

Plex has the ability to transcode media to allow playback on a vast array of devices (that have the app) it basically converts the media from its standard format/container to one that is capable on the device you are watching it on (ie such as a smart tv or ios device)

 

This ability requires a resonable amount of cpu processing power, and the more streams you have going (ie the amount of people watching content off the server at the same time) the more cpu power you will require.

okay cool, probably won't need this as I'm going to be using it as a long term storage nas for my setup

[Oxydoreduction]

On 31/10/2017 at 2:34 AM, Copie said:

Anything 2RU isnt going to be quiet due to the fans being ultizied in that space.

 

All depends on what exactly you want to run off it, if its just plex etc then any 5th gen i3 onwards would be suitable or if you plan to be transcoding multiple streams you can upgrade to an e3 xeon.

 

So would look something like this

 

Intel i3/Xeon e3 1230v6

Intel S1200 Board

16gb ECC DDR4 Ram

Supermicro SC829

 

Huge fan of the supermicro chassis as they are incredibly robust and suprisingly decently priced 2nd hand, and they come with a redundant PSU

If you equip a 2u chassis with quiet fans, you'll end up having something decently silent (I did it and had a quite suprising result, even tried in a 1u chassis). It'll be extra costs however.

The supermicro chassis you told about is great but you'll have to work a bit to fit the back i/o.

 

On 01/11/2017 at 6:25 AM, 1re said:

okay cool, probably won't need this as I'm going to be using it as a long term storage nas for my setup

For a long term storage nas, a pentium or celeron is usually enough, if you are sure never wanting to do more than that, I would go that route.

[NelizMastr]

On 31-10-2017 at 2:34 AM, Copie said:

Intel i3/Xeon e3 1230v6

Intel S1200 Board

16gb ECC DDR4 Ram

Supermicro SC829

 

Huge fan of the supermicro chassis as they are incredibly robust and suprisingly decently priced 2nd hand, and they come with a redundant PSU

i3 and Xeon E3 aren't even comparable, especially the one you recommend. That's a 4C/8T CPU whereas the i3 is 2C/4T with lower power consumption. Considering the following:

 

On 1-11-2017 at 6:25 AM, 1re said:

okay cool, probably won't need this as I'm going to be using it as a long term storage nas for my setup

Even a Pentium would suffice. Yes, they support ECC also

 

If @1re will really exclusively use it for storage and nothing else, not now and not in the future, you might want to look into motherboards with embedded CPUs. Won't need a lot of cooling to keep it cool, so most airflow can be utilised for cooling the drives. You'll lose ECC, but a typical SoHo NAS doesn't have ECC either.

 

 

 

[paddy-stone]

You definitely shouldn't be looking at rackmount systems IMO for your purposes ATM. An old desktop PC would be fine, or get a microserver from HP maybe, look at hp proliant microservers gen 8 (edited: gen 9 are not available as micro apparently), they can be picked up fairly cheaply and all you have to do is add HDDs for your storage, I would look at using either freenas, unraid, or openmediavault as the OS, or some easier GUI linux builds maybe... you will have to learn some stuff to do this, but there are usually guides you can follow to get a basic setup done.

[Oxydoreduction]

9 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

You definitely shouldn't be looking at rackmount systems IMO for your purposes ATM. An old desktop PC would be fine, or get a microserver from HP maybe, look at hp proliant microservers gen 8 (edited: gen 9 are not available as micro apparently), they can be picked up fairly cheaply and all you have to do is add HDDs for your storage, I would look at using either freenas, unraid, or openmediavault as the OS, or some easier GUI linux builds maybe... you will have to learn some stuff to do this, but there are usually guides you can follow to get a basic setup done.

Microservers gen8 are very suitable for that and the base model is really cheap.

Gen 10 microserver is still very hard to find and is more expensive.

Now building a racked server is fine imo but of course it takes more place.

Open Media Vault is very user friendly if looking for an easy to setup solution.

[1re]

Cool, thank you all for the advice!