Decided I would go ahead and toss my latest DIY build in here. My goal was to build something that draws less power, makes less noise, and makes less heat than my DL360e Gen8 with 8 spinning drives.
Still some work to do, need shorter SATA cables and maybe change the case fan and the fans in the 4 bay Icy Dock.
Mainboard is Topton n100 with 2.5gbps and 10gbps (n18 model)
16GB of ram
Silver Stone power supply (tight fit)
Two recycled emmc from a couple HP T740
Six old 1TB spinning drives (want to change to SSD but money makes this wait)
Truenas Electric Eel (24.10.0.2)
Only needed about 3-4TB useable for my lab so kind of a budget build. The stuff I had to buy brings this up to about $500usd. If I added nvme and SSD drives, price would go up another $300 to $400 depending on the parts selected.
Did you achieve your goal? I would imagine you are drawing less power, but what about the noise? The case rear fan looks like a high static pressure fan (spins really fast and is loud).
Good for you on reusing parts you had. It is always a good less expensive way to build something. You can replace those drives as time permits, and since they are 1TB, you could easily replace them with 2TB SSDs, one at a time. However you stated:
Which makes me thing you created a STRIPE for a pool. That means a one for one drive swap is not possible without losing the entire pool. Just something to think about if you are using a STRIPE.
I like that you took the time to tie the cabling in place, too many people just don’t care about it.
Shuttle used to make some neat products, glad I didn’t trash this years ago.
The loudest parts are the small fans in the 4 bay drive adapter, I had that around from like 15 years ago and think I could reduce the noise with modern fans. The case fan is more quiet than I thought, at least at idle. I’ll probably replace it just because it’s 24 years old and had a hard life back when I was editing video and encoding the DVD.
I don’t have a plug in power meter, but even with the spinning drives, it has to be under 100 watts. The idle heat output suggests significantly under 100 watts.
I built a RAIDz1 pool with all 6 drives (1TB each) which gave me a little over 4TB to use. I may go back and wipe everything and go up to RAIDz2, those drives spent about 7 years in a NAS at work before I replaced them, chances are good that I’ll have failures.
Well, logged into a VM on the network and used it to copy some ISO from old storage to new storage. I was getting around 2.5gbps which is pretty good considering how fast the VM normally works with the storage.
I’ll get some NFS set up and move the VMs over to it and do more benchmarks. I have many tests done from the VM “c:” drive over NFS as I was trying to find some magic settings to faster storage. This is over on the XCP-NG forums.
Much nicer with the slim and shorter cables. Bought a cheap watt meter, 46 watts while booting, sitting at 33 watts idle, a third of what the rack mount server is running at idle. I wonder how much of a drop I’d get from SSD, idle might not be much, but I’d guess that running could be lower.
Need to get some shares made and my hypervisors connected and give this a benchmark to compare with my other benchmarks.
One more update. Migrated a VM over to this storage to run some benchmarks. The good news is that I haven’t lost any performance going from 8 drives to 6 drives. During the benchmark and hitting 5-7gbps speeds, I was under 50% processor, under 60 degrees C, and also around or under 40 watts. Lots of goals were hit with this build.
Still fighting some XCP-NG storage migration speeds, several threads on their forums including one where I’ve been testing every configuration I can find. But the benchmark shows that there is potential available to the whole system.
I think I’m going to burn this down, pull the drives, and replace with a bunch of 256GB SSD that I have sitting here. Each drive should be about double the overall speed, so this could tell me if buying a bunch of new SSD is even worth doing right now. If the storage to storage migration speed increased to above 500mbps, then it might be worth doing.
The low and ten minute long lines are the migration of the VM from old NAS to mini-NAS. The benchmarks are next in a queue depth of 4, 8, and 16 respectively. The first two benchmarks only ran to 8MB, decided to run the last one all the way out to 64MB
I guess I never updated this, I dropped 10watts at idle with the SATA SSD installed, and between 10 to 15 watts when doing the same benchmark as above. Speeds were basically the same with these old SSD (about 6 years old and nothing special about them).
I went back to the spinning drives for now because the pool size with those little SSD just wasn’t enough for long term use. Tracking prices on some 960GB to 1TB SSD that I can put in there “permanently”.
Spending too much money on this lab lately, receiving or waiting for another $1000 worth of upgrade, which when you list it out, is too much money. This is only a network switch “upgrade” and another host for virtualization.
