Decto

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  1. 1) The LSI card should be fine, it's PCI-E 3.0 so even with 4 lanes should be plenty to support 8 spinning drives. Only issue may be if there is an old BIOS on the card that the motherboard doesn't like. I have my LSI cards flashed to dumb HBA so they act as SATA ports. If you are running a BIOS on the LSI card, you may need some advice as the Disk ID's from the LSI BIOS will be different than the native (SATA / dumb HBA) ports which may cause misidentification of drives in Unraid and so risk data loss if not managed. 2) I3 is fine, not the most exciting CPU but plenty of perfomance for a NAS and plenty of dockers etc. It should have a decent amount more perfomance than the old system, especially if you use an NVME or redundant pair for Plex / Jellyfin index files etc. Also the iGPU is good for decoding so this can be enabled without the discrete GPU. 3) Main risks I see are A) The config of the LSI card wrt the BIOS options as above. B) Mix up of drives between parity / data. One mitigation for thsi may be to individually mount each disk either in Unraid or Linux. If it is full of readable files, it's a data drive. If it's unreadable then it's parity (or dead).
  2. You can also get a m.2 to 6x Sata adapter for ~ $30 which significantly increases the number of drives you can add to the array, especially on mini-itx where you may want to use the only PCI-E slot for something else later and you only get 4 sata ports max. Some of the board support 2 x M.2 with the correct generation of CPU.
  3. If you don't want a dGPU I think you are set on Intel, in my experience it has better Linux support anyhow... though both gaming PC's in the house are AMD. Anything 10th Gen up is likely fine, even a 12100 will be great for unraid and to run a VM. The more important question is the motherboard. Different chipsets have different expansion capabilities, PCI-E lanes and features such as SATA ports, 2.5G Lan, M.2 slots, PCI-E slots and flexibility of these etc. Note some motherboards only support some features with specific generation of CPU such as 11th Gen has an extra X4 PCI-E for a M.2 NVME over 10th Gen. So I'd start with mapping out what you want from the server, lan speed, SATA, M.2, expansions slots etc. CPU... Unraid + a simple VM then you can pick any I3 upwards, perhaps even a pentium. If you want an more powerful VM, then you may need to step up to a better CPU. If you feel you need ECC memory then you would be looking at a more expensive workstation motherboard.
  4. 200W does seem high, can you remove one CPU? Most boards can be configured this way. Do you have a lot of high speed fans, 10G network, Raid cards, SAS drives etc? Perhaps worth installing a fresh trial of Unraid on another cheap USB stick... only a few $ for a cheal USB 2 stick for 30 days to test the power consumption once booted and the powersaving is active. At least you know what you're dealing with then. My single Xeon 2660 V3 in a supermicro workstation board idles around 50-55W with drives spun down and CPU governer set to Power Save. Approx 65-70W at the wall as the losses are relatively high through the inexpensive UPS. I also had another 2660V3 with 32GB (4 x udimm) in an X99 board (test system) and for just the board, CPU, cooler, memory + GT710 for video that was ~35W idle on an 15 year old Antec 80+ green power 380W PSU so the Xeons can be relatively efficient once tamed. If you do build new, I would suggest Intel, the iGPU quicksync is best for transcoding should you host Plex etc. and AMD are no longer the inexpensive option. Both PC's in the house have AMD CPU's but my server is likely to be intel as the linux compatibility has always seemed a little better.
  5. I'm fairly consistent at 600KWh / month as we use gas for heat and summer we only get a few hot days. Based on your electricity cost, I'd say spending on new parts is not likely to save for years unless you can resell the old parts at a good price so it's really a question of payback time vs investment. At least the waste heat is useful in winter! I'm in the same situation somewhat, I could slim down my system and save power but the payback is ~5 years based on the cost of new hardward and potential saving.... so I stick with what I have and review in a few years when I've had more use from my hardware and their may be even more efficient options on the market. I am considering changing my UPS to either a Cyberpower or better spec APC as the power wastage is supposed to be 3-5W rather than 15-20W however reviews don't seem to cover pass through loss. For £100- £150 my greatest power saving would be a new UPS, but even then payback likely to be 3+ years and the I just put a new battery in mine.
  6. I have some experience of this, but around 12 months out of date as I sold a lot of my GPU's in the crypto mining boom as even basic GPUs were selling for great prices and there were no longer used that much. My main server is E5 2660 V3 10C/20T which has similar base/boost freq to your system. At one point I had GTX1650, Quadro 2000 (GTX 1060) and Quadro 1000(GTX 1050) installed and running for simultanious x3 remote gaming and it worked fine. I had a lot of issues (random black screen, VM won't boot etc.) with AMD cards, but I was using RX550, RX580 so more modern cards may be better, I have no experience of these though so personally would stick with Nvidia which seem better supported for pass through. To have an encoder on the GPU you generally need either a GTX /RTX card or a quadro. I had the quadros for plex initially, they perform slower than the equivlent GTX card as drivers are not optimised but were both single slot which was ideal in a tight case and multi GPU. I did need to use a fake HDMI / DVI dongle ($5-10) otherwise the cards will often not power on properly in the VM. Stick to 1080p dongles if you can, nothing worse than desktop defaulting back to 4k and you have tiny unreadable icons. You can look here to see which cards supported encoding. Nvidia encoding cards. Ideally you want a reasonable card that can support the games you want to play comfortably, the encoding shouldn't be a significant hit but if you underspec the card you may have the double problem of game latency + remote play latency. I did use steam steaming, but mainly used Parsec (free for personal) as that gave a full remote desktop at 60FPS which meant the kids Roblox and other game stores were available as well. You can config Parsec to enable you to start from the unlock screen but always setup Remote Desktop as a backup. Windows updates can throw a curve ball. I was able to play a variaty of games even FPS such as left4dead (single player) etc without any issue, no real noticable lag but it was obvious that there was video compression so in some dark areas it was a little hard to see detail as a result of this, but over lan and even over decent wifi, I had a very playable experience, much better than my aged X230 laptop would manage alone. I don't see what you have to lose, as long as you don't overpay for a GPU, you would get a chunk of the cash back if it doesn't work out as you hope. So depends on budget, a GTX 1650 used is likely the minimum I'd aim for and be aware that some base cards + the super may need additional power above the 75W PCI-E slot with the PCI-E 6/8 plug so you need to check what cabling you have from your PSU. I think the 1660 up had a better encoder version, but the price of the card also increases. -- Forgot the PCI-E bus width. With PCI 3.0 there is barely any notable bottleneck at x8 vs x16 even with 2080TI / 3070 which are £400-£500+ GPU's. No issue running in a X8 slot and for the lower end cards X4 is not likely to make that much difference. Only other observation would be that your server is best if all memory channels are populated as bandwidth is king, not clear if that is the case.
  7. You'll likely save a few watts replacing the LSI card but in the UK (33p, 0.4$ KWH) 10W is ~ £30 a year so ROI could be 12 months or more depending on saving and cost. The chips on these LSI cards are old so use relatively high power even on idle, though they are great for bandwidth. PSU again is likely to be marginal gains, really hard to find a 400W platinum and even then assuming you save 10W (very optomistic) then you'd still be looking at 3+ years for payback. Same with the CPU, likely very little difference in idle power consumption between 12400 and 12700 as the cores will all be in sleep mode when idle. One of the issue is the high end boards have a lot of individual VRM stages which are great for high power loads but it kills the efficiency at low power and idle. Removing RGB if possible, case fan management, each fan can be 2-5W so it all adds up.
  8. 70W seems about right for your setup if measured at the socket. My XEON E5 idles ~50W with drives spun down, but with an APC BX700 UPS inline it's more like 70W due to losses of 15-20W through the UPS. If you have similar losses, then 50-55W idle power is likley in the ball park. Can you test idle power with the UPS bypassed? Z690 is a fully featured PCI-E 5.0 board so has a higher consumption than a basic board. You have an LSI HBA (7-12W) + 2 ASMEDIA cards, so thats 10 - 15 watts 12HDD + ~6 SSD will be another 10-15 watts in sleep Assume 20W for the CPU, motherboard, memory, network etc. 40-50W base, with PSU likely at <80% efficiency as it's such a low % of output and you'll be right in the 50-60W range before UPS losses. HDD use 7-10W each when spinning or in read/write so spin up 12 of those and you easily add 80-100W.
  9. Hi, Does seem to be a lack of ITX boards, just before Christmas sorted a collegue with a couple of ITX LGA1200 boards for the kids budget builds... perhaps everyone had the same idea! Looks like a nice motherboard, just need to watch compatibility as it seems the topside M.2 is only active with an 11th Gen CPU, those are more expensive and the T series low wattage 11th Gen likely to remain rare until business PC's with those in start to hit the refresh cycle. The back side expansion would usually only be good for an M.2 drive due clearacnes but in that case you may get away with M.2. to SATA. You could use a 10 series CPU for now, and add an ASMEDIA SATA X2 or X6 card to the x16 slot, then have the option to upgrade CPU when available to utilise the second M.2 later as cache or to replace the SATA card and free the slot for something else. As the LGA1200 boards are rare, the next option would be LGA1700 which are in free supply + I3 13100T Based on cost, I think I'd go the 10100T / 10400T with a cheap ASMEDIA for the extra ports, 2 ports is £10
  10. For transcode it needs to be either a GTX or a Quadro Quadro P400 / P600/ P620/ P1000 Quadro T400 (more recent) Decode / Encode capabilities Note there are tabs for Geforce / Quadro which may not be immediately obvious. All of these cards support 3 streams which is enough for most users as a lot of content is direct play. Also worth checking for both encode and decode support as both are now supported in Plex and other media software. 1 steam gets you both the encode and decode.
  11. Hi, Really depends on your budget. Your old system consumption seems quite high, I have a old Xeon E5 V3 10 core with P2000 (GTX 1060) class GPU and 8 drives idling just over 50W. Is the GTX 1080 going to idle properly? should be in power state P8 with only a few watts consumption. On the new setup, it really depends on your budget. The ASRock is a nice board, but quite limited with 4 SATA and a PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot. 5 drives and 1 SATA SSD max without performance impact assuming native SATA for the SSD and a 2 port SATA board in the PCI-E slot. A more expensive option would be an Mini-ITX socketed CPU such as LGA1200 which would get you a board with 4 SATA, 1 or 2 M.2 for an SSD and a X16 PCI-E slot for expansion. Power consumption shouldn't be signficantly more, though you may need to consider the T or S versions of the intel CPU's to limit the maximum thermal power in a small case. I'd have no hesitation in buying a used CPU with a new motherboard to balance the cost and a CPU such as the I3 10100T is available used from CEX with warranty in the UK for just £45 , or £65 for the 10400T. Both are 35W parts but will idle at a fraction of that and include HD630 graphics which is great for transcoding. My money would be there... for the high speed M.2 cache slot, CPU flexibility and x16 expansion. Add in a low wattage Gold or better PSU from a good brand, Corsair RM550X V2 is well rated but you main need a SFX PSU in that case.
  12. You don't say what hardware you have, but a couple of thoughts. The Xeon E3's ending in 5 have the iGPU, e.g E3-1245 so if the motherboard supports you could do some transcoding, though Sandy Bridge is quite old these days with limited format support so 4k decode not likely an option. If you have a spare slot, a Quadro T400 is fairly efficient, supports latests standards and will only use a few watts at idle when configured. Fairly inexpensive as a server pull on ebay. I have a P1000 (spare) and P2000 (installed) which are earlier versions and work super with my Xeon E5. No Need to replace the full array, you can upgrade the parity drive to 12GB, then add the old parity drive in for more storage, or upgrade any of the other drives. Parity just needs to be the same size or larger than all other drives so no reason to replace unless you are concerned about the age of the remaining discs. Is there a specific reason you didn't update, I'm running a couple of old systems which upgraded fine, though always take a backup so you can revert.
  13. Hi, on a side note that the specific model of 3TB drive is somewhat notorious for a very high failure rate, around 32% for Backblaze. Given the age of the drives you may want to consider replacing or ensuring you have an independant backup of anything irreplaceable. Wiki ST3000DM001 ExtremeTech
  14. AFAIK you can't use SSDs in the normal array as the TRIM function would break parity. I'd agree with above, likely something to do with hardware config but without any hardware details is difficult to offer any suggestions. The other issue may just be the open number of reads / writes on the array if you are torrenting directly folders you are also trying to view content from. I have newsgroups which download to a cache drive and then populate the array overnight so never an issue. One option may be a large SSD cache pool where you keep any active (torrent) files with the folder set to cache only. You could then use the existing array for long term storage / archive.
  15. The ASM1166 controller itself is fine, it's just that card you linked has port multipliers as well. The ASM1166 is PCI-E X2 electical (so best in at least a X4 slot) and natively supports 6 drives so one of the alternatives listings (6 port PCI-E x4) would be fine.