First Server Build! Ryzen 7 3700X + ASRock Rack X570D4U

[eggman9713]

I first heard about Unraid about a year ago and have been experimenting for a while now. I'm a home power user that likes tinkering with things and keeping my fleet of devices running, but I'm definitely not a developer or a deep knowledge user. I finally got together the time and budget to build my first proper server. This will enable a lot of my archiving and deduplication projects that have been on hold for months. My original budget was USD$1,500, but due to some parts I wanted being unavailable, forcing me to either wait or buy up a tier of part, and parts that were commanding higher than normal prices, the total build was approximately USD$1,800 not including the UPS, Unraid license, or the rolling cart I got for the tower. It was a great opportunity to slap on my Unraid case badge I won during the 100,000 forum member giveaway! I'm now experimenting with lots of apps, docker containers, VMs, etc. to figure out what I want this server to do in the long term.

OS at time of building: UNRAID 6.9.2 
CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core 16-thread

Motherboard: ASRock Rack X570D4U
RAM: 32GB NEMIX RAM 3200MHz DDR4 ECC Unbuffered (2x16GB) (not on the motherboard QVL but worked out of the box)
Case: Silverstone CS380
Power Supply: be quiet! Straight Power 11 750W 80plus Platinum Fully Modular ATX
SATA Expansion Card(s): None
Cables: Monoprice SATA cables
Fans: Stock case fans (1x120mm exhaust at rear and 2x120mm on drive cage), stock CPU fan (AMD Wraith Prism)
UPS: APC Back-UPS 1000

Parity Drive: Seagate Ironwolf Pro 4TB (new)
Data Drives: Seagate Ironwolf 4TB (new), 2x Western Digital Red 1TB (from inventory and retired NAS)
Cache Drives: Crucial MX500 SATA SSD 500GB (new), Corsair Force MP510 NVMe SSD 480GB (new)
Total Drive Capacity: ~10.98 TB minus parity and overhead

Primary Use: Multipurpose/Experimental Server
Likes: ECC memory support, hot swappable drive bays, IPMI functionality on motherboard including remote control and console view, easy UPS integration.
Dislikes: BIOS has an overwhelming (to me) number of options and the onscreen explanations aren't always great. Drive sleds have a "light pipe" that brings light from the activity LED on the backplane to the front. These are not very bright and are not easily visible when the case door is closed. Case filters are not easy to remove or re-install, especially the bottom one. Case includes PCIe slot covers that have openings in them and are unfiltered. No USB 2.0 header on motherboard for internal USB devices (like the CPU cooler, see below). Drive backplane has a lot of exposed capacitors on it that I'm afraid I will break off accidentally. Case construction is acceptable, but not fantastic.
Add Ons Used: Unassigned Devices (and plus), CA Mover Tuning, Dynamix Active Streams, Dynamix Local Master, My Servers, Nerd Tools, Parity Check Tuning, Preclear Disks, User Notes.
Future Plans: Upgrade to 2.5gb or 10gb networking (my whole network is 1gb right now). Add SSD cages to the 5-1/4" bays. Plex media server, consolidate documents, photos, videos, etc. that are spread across multiple devices, network services host (DNS, NTP, email, etc.).

Boot (peak): 85W
Idle (avg): 45W
Active (avg): 130W (Folding@Home + Parity Check running)
Light use (avg): 60W (a few Dockers and a Plex music stream running)

 

 

Other notes:
My cable management isn't fantastic, especially the backplane SATA cables. It looks like a rat's nest but the way I did it, I installed them and let them naturally figure out where they seemed to want to go, and tied them together somewhat.
The AMD Wraith Prism cooler comes from the factory set to a rainbow pattern. It comes with an addressable RGB cable and a USB 2.0 cable to control it. Neither of which this motherboard has. So, if you really want to turn off the RGB, you will need to install the CPU cooler temporarily on a board that has a USB 2.0 header, or get a USB-A to USB 2.0 header adapter, and use the Windows utility to change it.
The motherboard has a dedicated IPMI network port, but IPMI is also presented by default on the LAN1 port if you only want to connect one network cable.
 

Edit February 2022: This server has been running stable for about 9 months. I had to make a couple of tweaks to its settings to increase how long it waits for Docker and VMs to shut down and the array to stop before it forcibly does so uncleanly, forcing an annoying parity check. Mother nature also took the liberty of testing my UPS settings in a real-world outage a while ago. Shut down cleanly and came back up when power was restored. I also made a couple of small upgrades since the original build. I added a second NVMe SSD so I could have a mirrored cache pool. With that in place I felt comfortable enabling caching for most of my shares, and setting some shares to prefer that cache pool for better read speeds as well. I also added another 1TB Seagate Ironwolf drive that came out of my other NAS that I just upgraded. I've been having some minor issues with transfer bottlenecks that I am still trying to resolve, but overall it is still running well!

Edited February 9, 2022 by eggman9713
Fix formatting and image tags.