Finally upgrading after 10 years, advice on motherboard and CPU choices

TrueNAS General
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Hi guys,

So after a recent drive failure I need to build a backup server. Something I’ve been putting off for the longest time.

My current server is about to be 10 years old and it’s:

Super Micro MBD-X11SSM-F-O
Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 quad core 3.40 GHz

Its served me well, but since I haven’t paid attention to hardware requirements in 10 years I was hoping I could get some quick advice on building a new server.

Basically, my new server will be my main one (used for storing important data - that’s all) and the old server will be used to backup critical files so I have a duplicate onsite.

The new pool I’m planning will be around 8x or 10x 26TB drives, so around 150-200 TB (really depends on how much the motherboard/CPU/ram eats into my budget).

Ideally I’d like a motherboard with onboard 10gb NIC but if the cost of the motherboard greatly exceeds the cost of buying another 10GB NIC, then it’s no big deal.

Is the super Micro X12SPI-TF ATX Server a good choice? It it overkill? Looks to be available for around $600.

Any recommendations for motherboards or what kind of ballpark figure would be great.

I just don’t want to spend $600 if that much is not required.

As for the CPU, is there a sweet spot? With power in mind as costs for kwh increase, I want to keep it as efficient as possible (but at the same time I don’t want it to affect performance).

Same as motherboard I don’t mind investing in something if truenas uses it, but also don’t want to just burn money on overkill.

For RAM, is there also a sweet spot for the speed? Or just get the fastest I can afford?

Is 1GB per 1TB still the recommended advice?

Thanks for your time, and for any recommendations.

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I think it will be difficult to make recommendations without knowing more about what your server will be doing. Will it just be serving data? What protocols will you need (e.g. NFS, SMB, etc.)? Will you be running any services/VMs/containers?

If all you want is for it to serve files, I would expect a very modest hardware upgrade would suffice. You may not even really need to upgrade. I suspect your existing system, adding a 10G nic, may be sufficient.

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Hi,

Thanks. Yeah it’s just SMB shares.

Its a huge repository for important files.

As for my current hardware it has 10gb NIC. I am wanting to build a second server so I have an onsite backup of my backup (I’d use my old server as my backup, and then use the new server for my main storage).

Since my drive failed it made me realize I need to ensure I don’t lose my work even if one server goes down.

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It certainly is capable. Unless you require a large amount of RAM and/or plan to run some heavy applications/VMs on the NAS, it does look overkill.

Recent server motherboards start around $500. :frowning_face:

Then Xeon Scalable is not the most suitable choice.
What computing power do you require?

Then, few cores at high clocks. How many clients? 64 GB RAM is probably comfortable for a 200 TB array at 10Gb/s, and you could fit that in a Xeon E or EPYC 4000 platform, for lower idle power.
The constraint is then to have two PCIe slots from CPU for NIC and HBA if you have 10 drives; for 8, it might still be possible to go with chipset ports, adding some options.

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Yeah this server literally just serves out data to about 5 clients locally on a 10gb network.

I don’t think I require that much computing power tbh, all this does is serve data so it does scrubs and data transfers to and from it.

I probably will use my HBA (I have some lying around) as I run dual SSD for the boot drive + the drives in the pool.

I was looking at super micro as 10 years ago my first ever nas was a consumer ASRock board and it died within a year.

I then went with my current super micro x11 board and it’s been rock solid for a decade and still chugging along.

Any recommendations for motherboard options? I’m so out of touch on hardware I have no clue right now.

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Looking only at not-too-old sever variants of consumers platforms (low idle power, but UDIMM rather than RDIMM):
Xeon E-2300
Supermicro X12STH-F, AsRockRack E3C256D4U-2L2T (AsRockRack != AsRock)
Xeon E-2400 / 6300P
Supermicro X13SCL-F, Asus P13R-E or P13R-E/10G-2T, AsRockRack EC266D4U-2L2T
EPYC 4000
Gigabyte MC13-LE0 or -LE1, AsRockRack EPYC4000D4U or B650D4U variants, Supermicro H13SAE-MF

(bold points to on-board 10G)