Hi all, I am looking to replace an old Dell T7610 (2x E5-2630 v2, 128GB ECC RAM) with something with more drive bays, say, 6-8 (current is 4 x 3.5" max) and is less power hungry at idle.
My current Dell T7610 idles at 140-150w (I'm familiar with setting CPU power governors and powertop)
HDD's are Hitachi HGST Ultrastar HE10 10TB drives (HUH721010AL), which according to the spec-sheet, have an idle draw of 5w each (so about 20w total).
Ideally, I'd like to be in the sub-100w range.
I'm after advice on motherboard/CPU combination
I've been doing a bunch of research on hardware but feel like I'm getting snow-blindness at this point and would really appreciate some input!
My requirements are:
As you can see I want the proverbial moon-on-a-stick!
The current primary use for the machine is as a storage server with light VMs but I'd quite like to consolidate some more VM workloads onto it.
I also want spin up a number of labs to test out various infra scenarios (circa 20-30GB each)
CPU:
I'm looking at the Intel Xeon E5-2650L v4 CPU (65w TDP) (£30 refurb) as it looks like it might be a good choice? From the specs and benchmarks it looks to have similar-ish performance to my E52630 v2 for single-threaded (yes, it's somewhat less) but naturally much greater core-count (8 vs 14 cores), which is good for my workload.
I had initially looked at Intel i7-12700 and similar but my research suggests that many of the procs don't support ECC memory and that for those that do I'd likely need a motherboard with a W680 chipset; and unfortunately, the only boards I could find in the UK were in £500 territory.
Motherboard:
I am also considering whether to buy a dual-socket motherboard and populate only a single socket or to get a dual-socket board.
The dual socket would give me room to upgrade later on but will likely limit the memory slots that I can utilise while the a single-socket configuration.
For a single socket configuration I've been looking at two boards:
Gigabyte MU70-SU0 (circa £140)
Asus Z10PA-U8 (circa £100)
The Gigabyte seems like a better board (more RAM slots, more capacity on the PCIe fabric) but doesn't support fan-control, which could be a big deal if that can't be over-ridden by fan-control via the OS.
The Asus has nicer networking 1 x 1GbE for management, 2 x 1GbE for networking and 2 x 10gig SFP+ (a big plus as I might upgrade to 10gig in the very near future if the thermals allow).
However, the out of band management of both looks to require pretty ancient applications to be installed/deployed. Much rather have a web-based interface.
Other options/thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
RAM:
Aiming for about 192GB max in the mid-term.
Storage:
Aiming for 6-8 HDDs; plus 1-2 SSDs for the OS (RAID0) and a couple of enterprise SSDs for ZFS caching, ZIL etc and so I can play with stuff like dedupe.
Below is a list of the various components I'll be using for the rest of the build:
Chassis: Logic Case LC-4650-WH (£100)
Chassis fans: Noctua NF-P12 redux-1700 PWM x 4 (£52)
CPU HSF: Noctua NH-U12DX i4 (or Noctua NH-U9DX-i4) (£70)
PSU: be quiet! BN283 Straight Power 11 750W (£130)
RAM: 2 x 32GB ECC modules
I am running latest Promox and ZFS (new to Proxmox but not hypervisors and been running ZFS for years).
My current Dell T7610 idles at 140-150w (I'm familiar with setting CPU power governors and powertop)
HDD's are Hitachi HGST Ultrastar HE10 10TB drives (HUH721010AL), which according to the spec-sheet, have an idle draw of 5w each (so about 20w total).
Ideally, I'd like to be in the sub-100w range.
I'm after advice on motherboard/CPU combination
I've been doing a bunch of research on hardware but feel like I'm getting snow-blindness at this point and would really appreciate some input!
My requirements are:
- Be pretty quiet (this machine has to sit in my living room)
- Be as cheap to run as possible (UK power costs are silly): specifically, low idle-draw
- ECC RAM (please, no debates about whether it's needed or not)
- Out of Band management for the motherboard.
- Support for 8-10 SATA disks
- Budget: around £500-600 GBP
As you can see I want the proverbial moon-on-a-stick!
The current primary use for the machine is as a storage server with light VMs but I'd quite like to consolidate some more VM workloads onto it.
I also want spin up a number of labs to test out various infra scenarios (circa 20-30GB each)
CPU:
I'm looking at the Intel Xeon E5-2650L v4 CPU (65w TDP) (£30 refurb) as it looks like it might be a good choice? From the specs and benchmarks it looks to have similar-ish performance to my E52630 v2 for single-threaded (yes, it's somewhat less) but naturally much greater core-count (8 vs 14 cores), which is good for my workload.
I had initially looked at Intel i7-12700 and similar but my research suggests that many of the procs don't support ECC memory and that for those that do I'd likely need a motherboard with a W680 chipset; and unfortunately, the only boards I could find in the UK were in £500 territory.
Motherboard:
I am also considering whether to buy a dual-socket motherboard and populate only a single socket or to get a dual-socket board.
The dual socket would give me room to upgrade later on but will likely limit the memory slots that I can utilise while the a single-socket configuration.
For a single socket configuration I've been looking at two boards:
Gigabyte MU70-SU0 (circa £140)
Asus Z10PA-U8 (circa £100)
The Gigabyte seems like a better board (more RAM slots, more capacity on the PCIe fabric) but doesn't support fan-control, which could be a big deal if that can't be over-ridden by fan-control via the OS.
The Asus has nicer networking 1 x 1GbE for management, 2 x 1GbE for networking and 2 x 10gig SFP+ (a big plus as I might upgrade to 10gig in the very near future if the thermals allow).
However, the out of band management of both looks to require pretty ancient applications to be installed/deployed. Much rather have a web-based interface.
Other options/thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
RAM:
Aiming for about 192GB max in the mid-term.
Storage:
Aiming for 6-8 HDDs; plus 1-2 SSDs for the OS (RAID0) and a couple of enterprise SSDs for ZFS caching, ZIL etc and so I can play with stuff like dedupe.
Below is a list of the various components I'll be using for the rest of the build:
Chassis: Logic Case LC-4650-WH (£100)
Chassis fans: Noctua NF-P12 redux-1700 PWM x 4 (£52)
CPU HSF: Noctua NH-U12DX i4 (or Noctua NH-U9DX-i4) (£70)
PSU: be quiet! BN283 Straight Power 11 750W (£130)
RAM: 2 x 32GB ECC modules
I am running latest Promox and ZFS (new to Proxmox but not hypervisors and been running ZFS for years).