Happy to be back in this community after a long hiatus. Due to health problems, I wasn’t really able to build my last iteration of what would have been my dream TrueNAS Scale NAS. So I am trying this again with some new changes/additions and some extra questions.
Usage: NAS for my small business running 100/10 connection (more in the future) and will be using SMB, Docker and light VMing (and maybe some Plex/Jellyfin too). ECC Support is rather mandatory because my files are important.
Low Idle & Light Load Power Consumption: I am aiming for something like 20-25W on idle w/o drives (so around 40-50W with drives). Could go higher but I have checked around that my build would go around that as of now.
Mostly new gear (Located in Greece): Apart from the NIC and the CPU (which I have to buy used because they are either too expensive or unavailable), I want everything to be brand new. Unless I can replace something for cheap, like the motherboard, and be able to achieve my goals better.
So I have the following questions:
Could I do this better with this kind of budget (or a little bit higher)? Like going for a different AMD/ Motherboard or with Intel and achieving everything but especially the low idle power consumption with ECC?
Would those ECC Memory sticks work with the motherboard, given that they are not in the QVL? What should I look for to be sure it works so that I am able to find cheaper sticks?
Is there anything I could do to make this motherboard work with the 5 SATA devices and 2 NVME SSDs? Something like a cheap HBA like the 9400-16i?
Any other ideas on how to restructure this based on my requirements is welcome.
Probably, but the question is whether ECC is working as you hope…
If you can still find a Gigabyte MC12-LE0, go for this genuine server board (with IPMI and onboard Intel i210) and a x8x4x4 riser for the A310 and the two FireCuda.
I count five SATA, including boot. Where’s the issue?
As you’re going for low power consumption I don’t quite get why you’d want 4x4TB HDDs. I don’t know how exactly pricing is in Greece but in Germany there are quite some HDDs with 18-20€/TB ranging from 8 to 16TB.
As an example you could get 2 14TB MG09ACA (7200rpm, 512MB Cache, CMR) for 261€ each (with a coupon code) - so 522€ for 14TB, assuming a mirror 14TB usable.
The HDDs use ~8W when in use, ~4W in idle.
I assume you want to use 4xST4000VN006. Those use about 5W in use and 4W in idle.
4x96,99~=388€, yes that’s way less than 522€ but assuming you want to go with a RAIDZ1 you’d “only” have about 11TB of usable space instead of about 13TB with two 14TB HDDs while having half the idle HDD power consumption.
You’d also have two more SATA ports available if you followed my recommendation above (giving you more upgradability) but an HBA is always a good idea (although that’s some extra power consumption of course).
We can’t say for sure of course but I’d be very surprised if they don’t work.
DDR4 isn’t nearly as picky when it comes to RAM compatibility as DDR5 in my experience.
If you go looking for other RAM just look for DDR4 ECC UDIMMs basically.
3200MHz would be nice for performance of course but probably won’t really matter for your usecase (especially since you want to use a dGPU - remember to activate ASPM here and update the A310s firmware).
@etorix’s ideas regarding a MC12-LE0 (I use this board myself - it’s great, you probably won’t be able to use KVM with the dGPU though) and a riser are great as well.
As for the motherboard, sadly I can’t find it for cheap, it’s over 300 euros wherever I find it which isn’t worth it since I would like new like I said.
I corrected the post about the SATA drives but the point still stands. When the motherboard M.2 slot M2_2 (M) is used, two SATA 6 Gb/s ports are disabled. So I need one more SATA port to be able to run everything.
With a consumer Ryzen board, you cannot really know whether ECC works as ECC or whether the motherboards accepts ECC RAM… running without ECC.
The MC12-LE0 was available for about 60€ “new old stock” last year. But Piosparts eventually sold its stock. I have no doubt that the 300€ offers you see on eBay are NEW boards, but it’s now priced as “last remaining items”.
To save SATA ports, boot from a NVMe drive (use adapters/risers in PCIe slots as may be needed) or pur the boot drive on a USB adapter.
Sadly, I have already bought one of the 4 HDDs so this wouldn’t work without me going completely overboard with the budget. You would be right about the power consumption.
As for the MC12-LE0, sadly I can’t find it for cheap or I would have picked that. It’s a great board but due to my other issues, I didn’t have the right mind to buy it.
