4U Chenbro RM42300, AsRock Rack E3C246D4U, 96GB, 8700k UNRAID build


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Case: Chenbro RM42300 4U Rackmountable

CPU: Intel i7 8700k

Motherboard: AsRock Rack E3C246D4U

Memory: 96GB of mixed bag..

  • G.SKILL Value Series 64GB 32x2GB Kit

  • G.Skill RipJaws 32GB 16GBx2 Kit

Cooling:

  • NoctuaNH-L12S Low Profile Multi Socket CPU Cooler
  • 2x 80mm Noctua PWM Fans (for rear of case)
  • 1x 120mm Noctua PWM Fan (for front of case)

Power Supply: Silverstone ST65F-GS 650W Modular Powersupply - a bit overkill for todays needs.

Additions:

  • IcyBox IB-565SK 5x Hot-Swappable Bays
  • (Coming soon) 1x 80mm Noctua non-PWM for replacement fan for Icy Box

 

On part the old parts..

I had the 8700k already lying around (and it's more than enough for my needs), with the G.Skill RAM kit and the low profile cooler. Over time the RAM kit will disappear and potentially the low profile cooler if it causes any issues.

 

On motherboard selection..

I had a couple of requirements for my motherboard selection; I wanted IPMI, needed to support the consumer class 8700k to avoid having to buy a CPU, and needed to have quite a lot of SATA ports. The E3C246D4U was perfect..

 

Positives:

  • ASRock Rack's out of band management is amazing. The interface is crisp/clean/modern and built on HTML5.
  • 8x SATA ports - however, 1 is coloured RED which I (assume) means is shared with the on-board M.2 port (which I don't plan on using, but may one day convert the M.2 to more SATA ports)
  • Dual gigabit, which is great as I run Unifi kit, so plan on doing 802.3ad link aggregation. Maybe could have gone for a 10gb model, but I don't have 10gb ports in my network (yet).
  • Is mATX, which considering the limited space in the Chenbro case, works well for me.
     

Negatives:

  • None that i've seen so far, but maybe lack of 10gbps networking
  • TBC how difficult pass-through of the in-built video is.

 

The case..

I spent (ages) looking for cases to fit a specific space in my house, which had limited height clearance, and specific depth requirements. I could not find a conventional computer case to fit the area, so decided to opt to go for a rack mountable server case. Depth was a concern with server cases, which is why I opted for the Chenbro..

 

Positives:

  • The depth! It's only 465.2mm deep, which for me is perfect
  • Lots of room for drives. I've put the ICY Box in to convert one of the front 5.25" bays to 5x hot swappable drive bays. You can convert the left-side too for an additional 5 drives ( sacrificing the 120mm fan ), and there is room for 4 3-inch drives in the case too ( I will be using these for two cache drives in the future )
  • CPU Cooler clearance at ~165mm is more than enough for me

 

Negatives:

  • Well, because of the depth (which I needed) you have limited space to operate in. I suspect airflow may be an issue which is why I opted to go hard on the Noctua's and purchased a big 120mm for the front and two 80mm for the rear. The jury is out on whether this will be a problem, Australian summers can regularly exceed 40C, so will see if the case turns in to an oven towards the end of the year.
  • This isn't as much of a negative as it is a wish - I wish the case was all black, instead of the uncoated silver of the metal.
  • The front lights!! Unless you're shoving the case in to a cabinet never to be seen again, these lights are so bright you need protective glasses to look at them ( not quite, but they will light up the room that the case is in ) - these will remain disconnected, or maybe if i can be bothered, replaced with some dimmer LEDs.

 

 

 

Future improvements

 

I have 2x Samsung Evo 870 1TB 2.5" SSD's on order for the cache drives..

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  • Like 3
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3 hours ago, Lolight said:

An interesting build, thanks for sharing.

Wonder if you'll be able to keep the hard drives from running hot (50's Celsius).

 

At the moment I'm achieving that.. The drives hover around 38-40C.. i'm not confident in maintaining it though, as, it's winter here in Australia and the ambient temperature is pretty low..

 

image.thumb.png.6a8a2b275f44f8166cebc55e465cc405.png

 

The one thing I dislike about the ICY Box is the FAN in it and their decisions around temperature control. The fan is noisy! Subsequently, Icy Box seems to have made a decision to turn the fan off when the drives are below 40C. Why that's annoying is you get these fluctuations of both noise and temperature. The plan is to replace the ICY Box fan with a PWM 80mm Noctua, and control it using the IPMI plugin tool based on the drives S.M.A.R.T temperature - again one of the advantages to selecting the ASRock Rack motherboard is the IPMI support.
 

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My 80mm noctuas have come today and I’ve modded the icybox to support it.

 

unfortunately the noctua is slightly thicker than the stock fans with the icybox, so I had to take the icy box apart and attack the fans so the screws come from the inside to the outside, rather than outside in.

 

the pwm fan is now always on at low rpm and I can control it using ipmi from the motherboard based on the disk temperatures. The disks are now nice and cool!

 

one annoying thing though, the icybox seems to do a fan check when it turns on, and if it detects a fan failure, the front lights will flash on one second interval between blue and red and it doesn’t appear you can disable this. The drives will still turn on though thankfully. You can fix this by attaching the stock fan at boot and then removing it, and because of that I suspect that I will be able to permanently fix it with the use of a resistor between the pins.. now I just need someone with electrical experience to help me decide what resistance I need.

 

 

87752FC9-1FDE-4359-B750-4A229B3EDDE7.jpeg

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10 hours ago, JonathanM said:

Are you sure it's only detecting power draw and not RPM pulses?

For power draw only I'd use the highest value resistor that satisfies the detector circuit. No point in producing more heat than necessary.


Yeh this is what i don't know - it's a three pin fan, so the yellow wire is used for a square wave signal tachometer.

The boot "process" for the drive is that it spins the fans up to what appears max RPM, and then turns them off if the heat is lower than the pin threshold (set on the back of the box). The more that I think about this, the more I suspect it's spinning it up and reading the tachometer response to see if the fan is actually spinning - because that would detect things like an obstruction causing the fan to not spin.

 

Research shows me I could probably create a timer circuit to emulate the square wave.. starting to become quite complex!

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7 minutes ago, ausca said:


Yeh this is what i don't know - it's a three pin fan, so the yellow wire is used for a square wave signal tachometer.

The boot "process" for the drive is that it spins the fans up to what appears max RPM, and then turns them off if the heat is lower than the pin threshold (set on the back of the box). The more that I think about this, the more I suspect it's spinning it up and reading the tachometer response to see if the fan is actually spinning - because that would detect things like an obstruction causing the fan to not spin.

 

Research shows me I could probably create a timer circuit to emulate the square wave.. starting to become quite complex!

 

Which has given me the idea to deliberately obstruct the fan from spinning to see if the warning lights come on..

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1 hour ago, ausca said:

 

Which has given me the idea to deliberately obstruct the fan from spinning to see if the warning lights come on..

I suspect that is what you will find. Whenever the driver pulls the fan ground low to spin up the fan, it looks for a certain minumum frequency on the tach lead.

 

At least that's how I would design it.

 

Why not repurpose the stock fan lead to drive one of your auxiliary fans in another location in the case? Or are all of your fan locations spoken for with other controllers?

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13 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

I suspect that is what you will find. Whenever the driver pulls the fan ground low to spin up the fan, it looks for a certain minumum frequency on the tach lead.

 

At least that's how I would design it.

 

Why not repurpose the stock fan lead to drive one of your auxiliary fans in another location in the case? Or are all of your fan locations spoken for with other controllers?

 

Because the Icy Box controls that fan plug using a thermostat which only switches on at high disk temperatures. I could theoretically replace the stock fan with a non-PWM three pin fan and use the Icy Box controller, but I want the fans always spinning at low RPM to keep disk temperature low. The Icy Box fan control design seems to be built around the concept of cooling drives down, rather than keeping them steady at a certain temperature. This is partly the reason why I replaced the fan with one controlled using the onboard PWM plugs - I can now control the temperature using ipmi on the motherboard.

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