Pri

It'll be used for storing media, running virtual machines, running docker containers. The VM's will consist of stuff for my work, a mirror cluster of our live infrastructure made up of multiple VM's. That's mainly why it has so much memory and CPU cores. I'll of course also be running things like Plex. It'll be our home server running Homebridge and all our home automation stuff, CCTV recording and so on. The 1080 Ti will be used for machine learning applications with software that I write. I also have an RTX 3090 which is in my desktop system but I may put that into the server when I upgrade my desktop GPU. I really like the 24GB of VRAM for machine learning. The HBA comes already flashed in IT mode, I did flash it again to upgrade the firmware as mine came with v14 and v23 was out. It was very easy to flash, just download the file, one command in Windows from the StorCLI software and it was up to date. I'm very happy with the card, it runs very cool and low energy (5.9 Watts peak vs 11 Watts for the previous generation card for instance). The only downside apart from the price of the card is the availability of compatible cables. I had to use a 1 meter long SAS cable because I literally couldn't acquire a 0.5-0.6m one which would have fit better. This is due to it using the newer SlimSAS x8 port instead of MiniSAS HD so the cable choices are a bit more limited.

In early June I started acquiring hardware for this build and I only just completed it this week with many parts taking an extremely long time to arrive. Now that it's complete I'm excited to share it with you after having enjoyed looking at your systems here on the forum and on the Unraid discord. Full Specifications CPU: AMD EPYC Milan 7443p 24 Core / 48 Thread 2.85 GHz base, 4 GHz boost (Removed early 2025) CPU: AMD EPYC Milan-X 7773X 64 Core / 128 Thread 2.2GHz base, 3.5GHz boost (Added early 2025) Heatsink: SuperMicro 4U Active SP3 cooler (Removed early 2024) Heatsink: Arctic 4U-M SP3 cooler (Added early 2024) RAM: Samsung 256GB (8x32GB) DDR4 RDIMM ECC 3200MHz CL22 (Removed early 2025) RAM: Samsung 1TB (8x128GB) DDR4 LRDIMM ECC 3200MHz CL22 (Added early 2025) MOBO: SuperMicro H12SSL-NT EPYC 7002/7003 support with dual 10Gb PSU: Corsair HX1200 Platinum 1200 Watt (Platinum Rated) HBA: Broadcom 9500-8i HBA (PCIe 4.0 NVMe/SAS/SATA) M.2 Card: Generic PH44 4 x M.2 PCIe 4.0 card M.2 Card2: Asus Hyper M.2 PCIe 4.0 card (Added Mid 2023) SSD1: Samsung PCIe 3.0 2TB 970 Evo Plus NVMe Drive SSD2 and 3: Western Digital PCIe 4.0 2TB SN850 NVMe Drive (Heatsink Sku) SSD4, 5, 6 and 7: Samsung PCIe 4.0 2TB 980 Pro NVMe Drives (Heatsink Sku) (Added Early 2023) SSD8, 9, 10 and 11: Kioxia CD6 U.3 PCIe 4.0 7.68TB NVMe Drives (Added Mid 2024) NIC: Intel PCIe 2.1 X550-T2 2x10Gb/s Ethernet Network Card (Added Mid 2023) NIC: Intel PCIe 2.1 X710-DA4 4x10Gb/s SFP+ Ethernet Network Card (Added Mid 2023) GPU: NVIDIA RTX A4000 (Added Feb 2024) HDD1: Western Digital 4x18TB SATA Hard Drives (Shucks) HDD2: Seagate 7x10TB SATA Hard Drives (NAS Editions) CASE: Gooxi 24-bay Chassis with 12Gb SAS3 Expander chip by PMC-Sierra CABLES: Custom Molex Cables from CableMod (Backplane<->PSU) FANS: Noctua, 3 x 120mm (A12x25), 2 x 60mm (A6x25) UPS: APC BR1600SI (960 Watts / 1.6kVA, Pure Sinewave) Early 2023 Edit: A few months later some changes have happened with the build. 4 x 2TB 980 Pro SSD's were added. You can view photos and information about that in this update post. Early 2024 Edit: Some more changes, new network cards, new graphics card and new CPU heatsink. You can view more about those things including photos in this update post. Mid 2024 Edit: Yet more changes, 4 x 7.68TB Kioxia SSD's were added. You can view photos and information about that in this update post. Early 2025 Edit: The RAM was swapped for 8 x 128GB 3200MHz LR-DIMM's from Samsung. You can view photos and information in this update post. The CPU was also swapped for a 64-core 7773X. You can view photos and info in this update post. Originally some of this hardware was different, for instance the motherboard was going to be the Asrock ROMED8-T2, the 18TB hard drives were going to be Toshiba enterprise drives, there was only going to be one SN850 SSD and the UPS was going to be a CyberPower model. But as prices of things changed and availability of certain things became problematic the build had to change. I wouldn't normally buy external hard drives and shuck them just due to the time and effort but they were simply too cheap to ignore at £222.99 each on Amazon Prime Day. With this pricing I was able to purchase 4 x 18TB externals from WD for less than the price of 3 x 18TB raw drives from Toshiba, WD or Seagate. An extra drive and at a lower cost? hard to pass up and as I show later they work perfectly. I linked to each individual part above in-case you want to see more information about a specific component used in the build. Individual Component Photos Almost everything was photographed but I cannot link them as small thumbnails in the thread so I'll spare you having to scroll past those and we'll begin with the completed build photos instead and I'll include a few of the more interesting component shots after those. The completed build The below photo was just after I initially built it with the stock fans, I hadn't attempted to do any cable management yet. The below photo is after the Noctua Fans have been installed and I did do a little bit of cable management. This is is why the fan cables have switched from the tomato-ketchup kind to the black fully sleeved kind. I did have to give-up the hotswap system that the case came with when changing fans but the Noctuas I purchased come with a 1cm long PWM connector from the fan and then a 30cm extension cable so it serves the same purpose. I could have cut the cables on the original fans and soldered the 30cm Noctua extensions to the hotswap PCB to maintain this functionality but I didn't want to do that preferring to keep the original fans as-is in-case the cases backplane had a fault requiring the case to be sent back to the retailer. Still the Noctuas work great in the original holders and the sliding mechanism is maintained. Individual Component Photos The case came with three of these 40mm thick industrial hotswap fans shown below that each consume 20 watts at peak output. They are extremely loud and move an incredible amount of air. I quickly swapped these out for Noctua Black Chromax A12x25's which are essentially silent and move around 40% of the air of these fans that came with the case. I'm happy to say the temperatures are still great with the slower Noctua fans. I did get two of the SN850 2TB's with Heatsink but unfortunately the Motherboards M.2 slots are too close together and only one can be installed. Thankfully I do have a 4 x NVMe PCIe card with wider spacing and so I'll be placing these two and my Samsung NVMe drive into that once the parity on my server is completed so I can power it down to add the card in. UPDATE: And the SN850's are now in their PCIe card which I've put into the server today. Below is a photo of those installed into the card. As you can see with these heatsinks the spacing is quite tight and SuperMicro unfortunately didn't take that into account when they put their slots right next to each other with only a single sheet of paper gap between. The card I'm using here is just a cheap generic model for £36, it comes with no fan or heatsink and requires Bifurcation support on your motherboard. I chose to buy this as I knew all the SSD's I'd be installing would have heatsinks on them and my server case has quite high airflow. Samsung likes to ship their memory individually wrapped. I've had this memory for about two months so I didn't open them when I took the photo in June as to keep them in pristine condition but you can see a better photo of them installed in the motherboard above. (Edit Early 2025, this RAM has since been replaced with 8 x 128GB of LRDIMM's from Samsung for 1TB of total system memory. You can view photos of that update here) The 7443p CPU below was chosen not just for its 24 Cores / 48 Threads and Zen3 Architecture but for its high clock speeds. It has a 2.85GHz base and 4GHz boost clock which is perfect for my use case. (Edit Early 2025: This processor was swapped for a 7773X 64-core, you can read more about that in this update post) It sure has a lot of pins, 4092 to be exact. If you know these EPYC chips they feature 129 PCIe 4.0 lanes (128 usually accessible to the user through slots and connectors and 1 reserved for the motherboard vendor to use with a BMC implementation). And eight memory channels which can take 3200MHz RDIMM's which is what I installed to guarantee I get the maximum infinity fabric bandwidth. The Broadcom 9500-8i below was chosen for a few reasons, I wanted to be able to use all 24 slots on my chassis at near line speed, this card can do that at 96Gb/ps (12GB/s) where each slot would have 500MB/s capability. It is a PCIe 4.0 x8 card and features signed firmware. I could have obtained a 9400-8i or even a 9300-8i on ebay for 1/3rd to 1/5th the cost of this card but I felt I wanted to get a brand new card at retail with a warranty and secure code signing for its firmware. This is thus a retail Broadcom card purchased from a reputable etailer. Below is my Intel X540-T2 ethernet card. I actually have several of these and also a X710-T4 which is a newer model with four ports. The reason I'm installing this into the server even though the motherboard already features 2 x 10Gb ethernet is because I'm going to be running pfSense in a VM on this server as a backup in the event my physical pfSense system has a hardware failure (which it did last year and it was very annoying). Early 2024 Edit: This X540-T2 card was subsequently removed from the server in mid-2023 and replaced with an X550-T2 which looks essentially identical. I did this change because the X550-T2 supports 2.5GbE and 5GbE in addition to 1GbE and 10GbE. I needed the 2.5GbE for a cable modem, thus the swap. So I'll be setting up a pfSense VM on Unraid and passing this card through just so I can have a backup since we all need internet and I work from home making it extra important. Some may be surprised that I went with an ATX power supply instead of a dual-redundant setup. This Chassis actually comes with several brackets which support single (ATX), dual and triple (server) redundant power supplies. I went with the HX1200 because while it's more power than I'll need in this server it has a 10 year warranty, platinum rated efficiency and it's silent upto 450 watts and very quiet beyond that. In-fact the main reason I even chose to build this server myself as opposed to buying a prebuilt system was because I wanted an ATX power supply so that the system could be as quiet as possible. And finally I thought I'd show the APC UPS, not really that exciting but it is a newer available model at-least in the UK. Features line interactivity and a pure sinewave which is important to me for stability. So what has been the damage for all of this. Everything listed in the spec sheet was purchased specifically for this build except for the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti, Intel X540-T2 and 7 x 10TB Hard Drives which I already had and will be moving from my previous build. So not including those parts the total cost has been £7,100 GBP or $8,604.13 USD. I imagine with those added parts included it would go to around £8,500-£9,000 making it around $11,000 USD. I did set out to build a very high end server and that certainly came with a price especially considering I wasn't prepared to compromise much by going with slower or less memory, an older generation CPU, a used chassis, an older HBA etc. If you're looking to build something similar you can probably obtain 75-80% the same capability and performance for half the cost by purchasing one generation older hardware and used parts where it makes sense and I would certainly advise you to do so! Feel free to ask any questions and I'll leave you with a couple system screenshots and benchmarks. Above: Some benchmarks ran from Windows before Unraid was installed on the system. Below: So many threads! Below: Building Parity before I insert the rest of my 7 x 10TB drives (I still need to copy files from that old server to this one before moving those drives over).

Welcome Eli, I hope you have a great time working on Unraid for all of our benefit

I think it's probably time Unraid supported more boot methods. Now that it has a lot of advanced functionality like Docker, VM's and is becoming more critical to peoples setups more redundancy should be available. I'm not suggesting that the USB method should be done away with, but it should be just one way to boot Unraid. As a new user to Unraid and someone who has built many redundant systems and writes server software (including resilient databases and cluster software) a few design choices do seem wrong to me but can be corrected. Please give me the benefit of the doubt with that statement as I don't mean to come in as the new guy and say you're doing it all wrong! I do like that Unraid runs from memory, keeps it fast and keeps developers constrained, they know it has to fit in memory and cannot be a resource hog. But the 32GB USB limit isn't great, it's becoming more difficult to get high quality name brand USB drives in this capacity, not impossible but difficult. It's also becoming harder to get USB 2.0 only drives, high quality ones anyway. These things can be mitigated by supporting USB 3.0 drives and higher capacity drives but then we move onto the USB flash quality. As the capacities have increased the NAND quality has decreased. We're in QLC territory now and even then with bargain barrel flash and at the extremely high transistor density level which lends itself to unreliability. Combined with that many of the good sticks run very hot and aren't at all intended to be left plugged into a USB port powered on for years at a time. I echo some earlier posters statements about heat and how some of the sticks are so hot even when just left idle without any read/writes occurring that you cannot pull them from the USB port without being burned or feeling that it's uncomfortably hot to the touch. Probably the final nail in the USB situation is you're performing writes to it when configuration changes are made but can't easily verify they worked and if you then later reboot or cold start the system that is when the USB drive is most likely to fail leaving you in a precarious situation. There's no RAID1 capability, we don't even have file checksums. What I'd really like is the capability to install Unraid on normal drives with RAID1 just for the added redundancy and flexibility. It will also allow those of us who are building more critically depended upon servers to spend the amount commiserate with our systems. I'm currently building a wildly expensive Unraid server and the lynch-pin is a $15 USB stick. If I had the option of using a SATA DOM with high quality SLC flash or a SATA or NVMe SSD with SLC flash then I would, and I would likely use RAID1. Also I recently discovered after using Unraid that you cannot enable or startup VM's unless the raid is started. And some on discord alluded to this being tied to the license which as you all are aware is tied to the USB sticks GUID. It seems very odd to me that anything should stop the VM's from being started independent of the Unraid disk array. They seem so separate to me, what if I have all my VM's on a pool device or a ZFS array. If I'm doing some kind of disk operation on my main array that means it has to be offline for several days then I cannot start up any VM's? - Seems like bad design to me and it's probably why some people on the forums and on Discord are running Unraid under a more full featured hypervisor. I know this issue isn't strictly USB drive related but it's all part of the same tangled mess. The licensing is tied to the USB drive, that's currently the only boot method, they're prone to failure, you can't run VM's without the array enabled which requires the USB drive for licensing etc I fully intend to build a whole bunch of Unraid servers for myself and friends and this is probably the biggest sore point, when you're building in so much redundancy, be it dual PSU's, dual Nics, dual parity protected disk arrays, dual SSD's in RAID1 for your cache and/or VM's but then it all comes down to such a unreliable booting method, that just seems to me something that needs to be corrected for the project to keep progressing and improving, just how TrueNAS is adding better VM support, offering Linux with better drivers, just how pfSense now supports ZFS booting with RAID1 disks etc - All these projects that are in the same sphere are examining things that made sense years ago and saying ya know, today that doesn't make sense, that needs to evolve so we can better serve the needs of our users. I hope my post comes across in the positive intent that I meant it, I'm definitely not saying the sky is falling I just want to express how important I feel more boot options are. This topic started in 2014, it's now 2022. I'd love to see this happen before the end of 2024 really.

I recently had this issue while trying Unraid for the first time and I found out what caused it at-least for me. When I uploaded my .iso I used the File Manager plugin of Unraid, meaning I uploaded it through my web browser into a folder on one of my storage disks and then used that to boot the VM. This always results in the error shown in this thread. However when I created a share on my Unraid which I accessed from my PC via SMB and uploaded the .iso to my Unraid server through that share it boots successfully, every single time. So I don't know why the uploader failed but I suspect it either corrupted the .iso in a non-obvious way or wiped some metadata from it I'm not sure, but uploading the boot media via a share works and uploading through the WebUI of Unraid does not. I know this is an old thread but when googling the error it's just this thread that comes up and I figure others may benefit from this answer