Thanks for the responses @ChrisRJ and @bonox.
I would try to avoid a machine with 2 CPUs.
Except for entry level 1U units, most of the stuff I’ve seen is dual socket. I’ll have to check motherboard compatibility to see if any can be run with one removed and the socket blanked. I won’t be running up against the memory limits so that’s not a concern.
What max. power consumption do you consider acceptable?
I think I just need an idea of what’s achievable. I’m not going to be spending much time running at max so the concern is avoiding a large idle consumption. If my maths is any good 132W is a dollar (AUD) a day. Hoping it can be run for under that.
I’ve used a couple of IT resellers on ebay out of WA and had great experiences with them.
Would you please PM those to me, not sure on the rules around posting vendors.
As for the box specification, what are you trying to do? If you want a basic NAS and nothing else, 16GB RAM (they’ll all come with ECC) and the slowest, lowest core count CPU will nett you the lowest energy consumption. If you want high speed network (10Gb plus) you might get benefit for SMB with a higher clock speed CPU, but probably not if using other protocols.
If you want to run virtual machines, then the CPU and RAM should be allocated accordingly.
This will be for storage and maybe some containers like Jellyfin but no VMs. My needs would probably be served by a storage appliance but where’s the fun in that? Gigabit will be plenty fast in practice. 10GbE would just be handy for full machine copies which are pretty infrequent.
Aside from that, ordering one with 2 power supplies is probably a good measure (they’re pretty cheap) and decide if you want to run them all the time for redundancy or just put one on the shelf as a backup.
Most of the machines I’ve seen come with two included. My home power isn’t redundant so I’d just be running one in practice.
Lastly, if you want video cards, you’ll need to investigate what will physically fit in the chassis you want and whether special riser cards/cables are required to power it.
I won’t be adding GPUs to this. If I need video to bail me out I’ve got a single slot GT1030 I can throw in (if I get lucky and have the riser included).
PS - since you’ve not bought server hardware before, are you prepared for the noise of a 2U server?
I’ve fired up a hairdryer tower before. I was under the impression that a 2U would be audible but not loud. There seems to be plenty of people running them in open racks in the same room. I was thinking I’d be able to abate some of the noise with the cabinet too.
There has been good improvements in performance per watt of modern CPUs compared to previous generations, but there isn’t much of an idle improvement in the xeon E5 series you’ll find available for those servers.
The options would be between Xeon V4 and Scalable Gen 1. I haven’t found concrete info in terms of idle differences between them.
PPS - replacing 8 bay with 12 bay LFF can be done but is generally a really expensive headache.
… if you’re on the fence about wanting 12 drives instead of 8
Yeah, I certainly don’t want to mess with reconfiguring the chassis. I think 6 drives is enough for now. I just need to do some maths around capacity and expected growth. I need to add up all the drives my media and data’s partitioned across. It can’t be physically more than 38TB at least.
In reality I can probably get away with a 2 drive expansion capacity. It probably makes more sense to grow into a new system when I hit the space limit rather than having the extra bays.
If you want to boot from an SSD, you will probably also need a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter for the LFF caddies if the chassis doesn’t have another mounting/power option for them.
Yep, I’ll make sure there’s capacity for boot drives. I’ve just been thinking in front of chassis numbers for the array itself.
