A few years, back I was looking into building a backup / media server. I recall the Asus workstation and server boards did not implement certain features properly and might not work as expected for everything. So, which recent boards should I stick to for proper operation?
Also is a 45 drives chassis still the ideal choice for quiet storage? Getting a 30 drive chassis, and starting it off with five drives, as I figure out exactly what’s needed for my system.
Looking at the webpage of 45 drives, their preconfig servers often use the X11spl-f board from supermicro.
This is 1st/2nd gen Intel Scalable. Certainly a very capable, but not new (ca 2017-2019) CPU.
It comes with all the bells and whistles for a high powered NAS/hypervisor. IPMI/BMC, lots of PCI lanes for even NVME storage or multiple HBAs. Up to 2 TB of RAM.
BUT, i wouldnt call them quiet, like basically all Rackmount servers. And for basic file serving in a private home, overpowered if you dont use the cores for virtualisation or serving lots of users
I basically use the ASRock equivalent in my server, but it is used as an on demand cloud gaming server.
I run X11-SPI-TF with a Xeon Silver 4210T in a Fractal Design Define 7 XL with 4 enterprise HDD’s and it is quiet enough to run in my bedroom.
The key is to not use those rackmount cases that have to use small high rpm fans. My case is gigantic and heavy as hell (40 pounds), but it has plenty of room and I can put many low rpm 150mm fans. The result, whisper-quiet, powerful server that can be run in the bedroom.
Er… you have to be more specific to get any useful answer here.
Plainly: NO!
Spinners make noise. A handful of drives may still be quite enough, but a system with tens of spinning drives is never quiet and cannot be ignored. Rackmount chassis are not designed to be quiet, and anything with a high density of spinning drives cannot be quiet, as it necessarily involves fats and loud fans moving a lot of air at high static pressure.
I guess the storinator chassis with custom parts can be fairly quiet. I won’t be using their system, and instead providing my own. I’m just buying the chassis.
It was a while ago. Don’t remember what the exact issue is. If I just stick to Super Micro should everything work properly?
For now I’m just building the system with 5 drives for raidz3. Does keeping the drives at an even number still have any performance benefits? Back when I was looking at initially building the system an even number of drives was recommended. I’ll figure out what other drives I need as I go. Going to play around with this first before putting the system in production.
I’ll probably just use the included tools to figure out if I need a SLOG/ZIL/L2ARC drives. I will most likely add those, so I’ll be using a mirrored SATA Dom to not take up any M.2 slots.
This system is just a backup system and media server. I’m backing up 3 to 5 pcs, and my firewalls. For that workload would a dual cpu system be beneficial? I do plan on eventually making an IPFs system. Would that benefit from dual cpus?
It is possible to build a rack mount 24 bay server that is not obnoxiously loud.
Maybe too noisy for a living room, but fine for an office, if that make sense.
Here’s a link to my build
