Hardware recomendation for painles update?

M

Martini2

Member
Jan 28, 2022
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Hi, i have a homeserver running proxmox with the hardware reaching the limits of 32GB ram on a zfs filesystem. My idea is to buy a new board, processor and ram and swap it with my actual board. Then connect my two x4 raidcards with its ssds, the boot ssd, two big harddisks and some usb rf-dongles and reboot into a system capable of serving some files over samba, stream some movies with jellyfin and run some vms (freetz, pihole, ubuntu, homeassistant) for the next few years. A x16 slot would be nice to have for a stronger graphics card that could be shared with some vms for cad and movie streaming but is not essential. The biggest change to come in the comming years will be the expansion of diskspace.
Can you recomend some good hardware? My price limit is 'as much as needed' for the described scenario but a black sale offer would be nice too.
 
Best bang for the currency will be used enterprise servers. Specifically 13th-gen Dells. It has built-in drive controller which can used as either IR or IT mode (need IT mode for ZFS/Ceph) and a built-in rNDC (rack network daughter card) upgradable to 10GbE networking (fiber or wired or both). Can search labgopher.com for curated eBay listing. My recommendation will be the 730XD. Can use the rear drives as your mirrored OS boot drives.


If looking to build new, Supermicro has a lot of motherboard choices from mini-ITX, mATX, to ATX with built-in 10GbE and SAS controller like the X11SSH-CTF.
 
>My recommendation will be the 730XD

i you want a cheap and powersaving homeserver with lots of disk and ram slots, i would have a look at dell r620 10-bay version. have seen it for 110 euros without cpu and ram

you can populate it with a single cpu and still have 12 ram slots, and 8gb ddr3 modules are darn cheap. so is e5-2630l v2

you have onboard sas controller which can be flashed to mode and for another 40 bucks, you can get 10gbe nic module

https://www.drivecms.com/uploads/serverpronto.com//Dell_PowerEdge_R620_Spec_Sheet.pdf
 
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Sorry, forgot to mention that i am working next to the server so it should also be very quiet. But maybe the rack versions can be modified to be quiet too.
I will take a look at ebay.de for some used servers.
 
There are also some loud rackable servers that can be turned into quiet rackable or tower servers. Yesterday I for example got a Supermicro X10SRi-F with Xeon E5 2620v3, 4x 16GB RAM, 2x 2TB enterprise SATA HDD in a loud (5x 13500 RPM 40mm fans) 1U case with a 350W PSU for 220€. Will disassemble that server and only keep the RAM and Mainboard and put them into one of my silent 4U cases. As an upgrade to my existing X10SRM-F with Xeon E5-2683v4 and 64GB RAM. Supermicro boards luckily often are normal MicroATX, ATX, E-ATX or Mini-ITX boards without any proprietary connectors. So they would also fit in any silent gaming PC case and will work with a normal ATX PSU. And supermicro offers a not that loud 92mm CPU coolers as well. At least that server is more quiet than my Gaming PC with its loud GPU.
I really like that Supermicro stuff. They are most of the time more expensive than a used HP/Dell/Lenovo server but these usually got proprietary hardware or features locked by licensing, which I don't really like. If something stops working I want to be able to easily replace stuff with components that use common standards.
 
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>They are most of the time more expensive than a used HP/Dell/Lenovo server but these usually got proprietary hardware or features locked by licensing

yeah, this really sucks. for example, using 3rd party hdd's or pcie cards in HP servers will significantly increase fan speed, i.e. noise and there is nothing you can do against that.
 
Form Factor
  • E-ATX
Dimensions
  • 12" x 13" (30.5cm x 33.2cm)

12V 8-Pin Power Connectors
ATX 24-Pin Power Connector
Click to expand...
Sounds like normal E-ATX standards: https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/C606_602/MNL-1259.pdf

But you will probably have to switch both CPU coolers. One is passive and needs loud fans of the case to cool it and the other one won't be quiet.

But idle power consumption won't be cheap. ;) I bets its 140+W when idleing.
 
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Martini2 said:
How about this workstation? Workstation S 128GB RAM | Intel 8 Kerner | 2 TB NVME | NVIDIA QUADRO | OFFICE PC
Would this be more energy effective?
Do the mentioned T730 and T620 machines have a lower power consumption than the supermicro machine? Would a ryzen 5900x have a much lower idle power consumption compared to the older cpus? TDP is higher than the xeons but it is much newer and have probably better power saving modes.
Click to expand...
That one is even an generation older (10 years old CPU) as it must be using the E5 2670v1. So not sure. It's older so less power efficient but it only got 1 CPU and not two, so you only get the idle power of one CPU. And that seller doesn`'t look very reputable. Fancy graphs and big numbers everywhere (and they are useless...for example "theoretical numbers based on interface"...great to know that in theory a NVMe SSD got an interface that would allow to have a throughput that is 116 times faster than a USB 2.0 HDD...doesn't tell me anything about the performance of the NVMe SSD he is selling...might be a chinese noname DRAM-less QLC...he doesn't tell what SSD model you get...or "great gaming PC" but he isn't showing the single-threaded benchmarks which would show how bad the gaming performance would be) but he won't tell you what hardware you are buying...
 
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Looks like i will have to accept the high power consumption. When i want a low maintenance machine it has to be server grade hardware. I will look for a used supermicro machine on ebay.de. Thank you for the help.
 
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