New Server Build

I’m Currently using a Qnap but it’s so pitifully underpowered so I have been using truenas in a hyper-v vm and it’s great. I can’t believe I never knew about it. So here is the new build list:

13900ks its cheaper than the 13900k
Asus Pro WS W680-ACE motherboard
64GB of ecc ram eventually 128GB
Define 7 XL
Seasonic Power Supply
Noctua NH-U12A
10GB Single or dual Nic
Eventually 20TB sata drives - Exos or Toshiba

I have a few questions I need advice on…

I know the 13900ks is nuts but I’m future proofing and yes it still over powered but I’m thinking it would expedite the resilvering or is it limited by the drive speed?

Any other suggestions besides the 13900ks and w680 platform?

Which hba should I run and should it be i16 or 2x i8 card?

Is a sata ssd good for the OS?

I’m actually going to do two of the same build for an offsite backup of everything.

Thanks for any ideas!

The processor listed may be a bit wonky due if it has the Performance and Efficient cores with TrueNAS.

Have you gone through the documentation for Hardware or the Resources section?

Resources List including Detailed Hardware and System Build Notes (plus new user advice / help)

Additionally there were reports from 5 to 6 months ago that both 13th and 14th Gen Intel CPUs were prematurely degrading, particularly those on the high-end. I’m not sure what the current status is, but it might well be that some of those older CPUs are still in the retail channel, hence the “cheaper” price.

At this point I wouldn’t buy an Intel consumer CPU, but then again I’ve been on AMD since the Ryzen 2700X was a thing.

No, it won’t expedite the resilvering, that’s all drive speed.

This CPU is indeed completely overpowered for a NAS, unless you are planning to run some extremely CPU-intensive apps or VMs. Look at how iXsystems configures their TrueNAS Mini-R: with a Intel Atom C3758 CPU.
And according to this comparison, the 13900ks is about 5 to 10 times faster, yet the C3758 still seems to get the job done as a NAS CPU, otherwise iXsystems wouldn’t have picked it.

Now the C3758 is probably not the CPU to run a media server app (which may require transcoding) or other CPU-intensive workloads on and I am not suggesting that you buy this thing. I am just bringing this up, because your choice might have gone from overpowered to “ludricously” overpowered (with a nod to the movie “Spaceballs:wink: ).

Hence my question is what kind of apps/VMs are you planning to run and what are you future-proofing for? I’m asking because I’m not sure that future-proofing a storage appliance is about CPU-power.

I would look more at the chassis (how many drive bays do I need now and maybe later) and whether the mainboard can handle that many drives (directly or indirectly). Also potentially about power supply, how many watts were you planning to get and how many watts might you need in the future?

And one other aspect of future-proofing: How many PCIe lanes can you free up for things like extra NVMe drives, e.g. if you decide later you want to run a separate pool for VMs/ZVOLs (or a special VDEV)? Depending on your use-case those things might benefit you more than a hyper-powered CPU, but may require a server-grade CPU and mainboard with more PCIe lanes.

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This is not really an issue.

The problem was caused by incorrect microcode that could result in too high voltage being applied to the chip. Over time, this is an issue. A new processor, OTOH, will not have degraded yet (because it wasn’t running at all, and thus couldn’t overvolt), and the microcode fix should now be part of the SCALE release, so the chip won’t overvolt itself.

Yes, that was one of the problems. Another issue (which Intel publicly admitted) was related to quality control. It is supposedly resolved, though OP would need to make sure to get a CPU with a manufacturing date outside of the affected window.

Also according to this blog post, you’re only supposed to use the “Intel Default Settings” on your mainboard. (Whatever that translates to for each mainboard, because at the time different vendors had different settings for the “Default” profile.) Since OP was looking at an ASUS MB, he needs to be careful with that, because in the past many ASUS MBs had an overclock as part of the default MB profile.