Hi!

 

I'm building my first NAS system with unraid. At the moment I'm using a QNAP TS-431-P2 mostly for media storage, NVR and downloading.

So i was looking at Asrock B650D4U and ryzen 5 7600 with ECC ram. The only problem I have with this board is that it has only 4 sata connectors. So I was thinking if I can add something like M.2 to SATA3.0 adapter card, it should work right or will I have compatibility problems while using that adapter? I will also probably under-volt and under-clock the cpu.

 

That's the core I want to build around

Under-clocking the CPU is mostly to use less electricity for a system running 24/7

If anyone has any suggestions for a different mobo/cpu, please let me hear it.

 

cheers

Tora

Man nice Motherboard Choice for a AMD proc. Just kind of sucks they didnt give you more SATA ports.

I would have expected better from a ASRock Server Rack board. You should be ok to add that kind of adapter card. I think others have used the same one.

One question I have if this is going to be for a Media Server. Are you adding a Nvida GPU card for transcoding?

I know recently they just got plex to with with ATI cards in Linux. But I'm sure its no where nearly as good as Intel QuickSync.

Me personally I've been building on much older hardware spec's and using Intel CPU's with GPU.  But AMD can be really good too. It just depends on what your building.

From the sounds of things it sounded like you are looking to run low power as well. I think you might want to rethink the setup if your not planning to use a GPU card.

For me I would look at a older Intel  10 to 13th gen with similar core count like a i5 something. I wouldn't really look into 14th gen because then you get into those new weird cores. I'm not sure anyone has like developed the OS to take any benefit from those yet. The preformace cores and stuff sounds good in theory. But everyone mostly just builds apps and dockers to the OS layer and depend on the OS to handle the new hardware changes. You might try your idea on a build. And then later on see how much better the ATI Graphics gets better for Transcoding. I would expect to wait almost 1 year before it gets better. But again if adding a GPU then it doesn't matter.

 

 

On 11/26/2023 at 5:56 PM, torauma said:

Under-clocking the CPU is mostly to use less electricity for a system running 24/7

Welcome!

 

I'd advise against any of that.

Underclocking or undervolting experiments should be reserved for "play" systems.

You'd need to look into stability and simplicity in a first NAS build.

Especially with a goal to achieve good power efficiency at idle.

That means an Intel-based with QuickSync system.

Also, you don't "have" to build a home NAS around ECC RAM or a "server" motherboard .

Consumer boards are fully designed and capable of running 24/7 without any stability problems.

 

Stay away from discrete video cards and SATA expansion cards unless or until it becomes absolutely necessary.

Get a motherboard with enough of onboard SATA ports and a compatible computer case to reserve enough of room for future expansion.

If you have no need for VMs then even a cheap dual-core Intel pentium like G7400 would be more than enough.

Edited November 29, 20232 yr by Lolight

HI!

 

Sorry for the late update,

I went with the W680D4U, this board supports 8 sata3 (4 from OCuLink), for the case I got the NODE 804. I'm still torn on the CPU, either to go for 12600K or 13600T. Was leaning more for the 12600K and then limit it's power, but maybe 13600T would be better with it's 35W TDP. I want ECC memory, and even on desktop PC we should have ECC Linus Torvalds. 

In the upcoming week I will choose the CPU, and I hope I will get everything together till  the end of the year, because I ordered my parts from all over the EU.

On 11/27/2023 at 11:34 PM, Bizquick said:

 Are you adding a Nvida GPU card for transcoding?

 

No I will not have a GPU in there

 

Thank you Bizquick and Lolight for the imput.

 

Will update this when I start building

 

Interesting board. I'm not familiar with this new OCuLink for the other Sata ports. But that doesn't mean it wont work out fine.  As for your CPU I understand saving power is something your trying to achieve. So I'm going to give you a little bit of advice from my experience with the T CPU's. Now sense unraid run's on a linux OS. all your CPU benifits all depend mostly on what the OS Kernel has developed for. So for me even when I ran my older box with a old i7-8700T the base clock speed was 2.4Ghz and could boost to 3.4 or 3.8Ghz. The system never really used the Boosted clock range. So my 8th Gen CPU just ran at 2.4ghz on all cores. So I dont know if T CPU's are that good of a choice. At least if your going to mostly just run it all in dockers. But it might be different if say you were to run things in a VM instead. Maybe like run a windows VM to host Plex or something. Maybe it might be able to use the CPU benefits better and boost the Clock rate in there. But I couldnt say for sure. Because I didnt try that. Instead I focused on upgrading my parts to a higher base clock rate. So if you run with that 13600T I noticed it has 2 different base clock speeds 1.8ghz and 1.3ghz. So depending if the linux kernal has coded for these newer cores and base clock rates. The OS might just take the lowest base clock speed and run all cores at that rate. And 14/20 cores at 1.3ghz seams slow to me. Someone else might correct me though. Also my T CPU I couldn't overclock or do anything to get the base clock rate up. I will guess that you might have the same experience with the 13600T. So yeah saving power sounds good but I would avoid it. I think it would be nice to see if someone else can validate if I'm correct about the Linux Kernel able to add the new benefits of these newer clock rates and cores that intel CPU's are doing. I think you would be better of with the 12600K the lowest base clock on that was 2.8ghz and 10/16 cores. But I also agree with Lolight you dont have to build on server grade parts you can find lots of good quality consumer grade part options and ECC is not really as important as some might say. Put it this way If your going to setup your box to use all your spinners in the main unraid array. You dont want to use ZFS for your format because you basicly will have 3 maybe 4 or 5 Drives all using a raid 0 ZFS. And ZFS format in the main array actually runs like crap. so that leave the Pools to run ZFS where your ECC memory actually might have a little more need. Now if your like me I only use 2 Sata SSD's or NVME's on that and those pool sizes are like 2 or 4TB tops. I don't see the benefit of ECC ram for that small of an array. Because the system at default is only going to put 8gigs at most with a 2TB array. On my test build it only put 4 gigs but my test build only has 48gigs of ram. Another thing ECC ram get really expensive with consumer CPU's. Mostly because they will use UDIMM ECC. and UDIMM ECC is quite a bit more than RDIMM which all the Server Grade CPU's use. Also I noticed ASRock has not even posted 1 EEC grade memory QVL for that board. Which is a little odd but also doesn't mean that much because they don't post much and there is always way more modules that work fine. But the fact they didn't put any ECC up is not very good. I guess it means they didn't get any free samples to post. I love ASrock Rack boards because of the IPMI option. But if you dont need IPMI either. I would really take a look at more options.

 

 

On 12/10/2023 at 10:38 AM, torauma said:

Was leaning more for the 12600K and then limit it's power, but maybe 13600T would be better with it's 35W TDP. I want ECC memory, and even on desktop PC we should have ECC Linus Torvalds.

Well, yeah, it would be nice if ECC had become a standard RAM throughout the PC industry.

But the way it is now, you would need to spend a significant extra just for the "luxury" of having it in your system.

It's NOT necessary to have it in a home NAS.

It will not make much of a difference for your overall data resiliency.

What you should be concerned is with the ability to recover from the far more likely to happen events such as:

user errors (accidental deletion), lightning strikes, electrical surges, fires, floods, earthquakes etc, etc...

 

Why would you need to limit power?

To save your CPU from overheating?

Low TDP doesn't mean higher efficiency.

TDP - thermal design profile.

Your Node 804 has more than enough room for a chunky CPU cooler - no reason to limit anything.

Your CPU will fall back into its idle state as soon as it's done doing the work.

A low TDP CPU will not save electricity - might actually consume more since it will keep the rest of the system stay active for longer.

Edited December 12, 20232 yr by Lolight

On 12/12/2023 at 11:13 PM, Lolight said:

Why would you need to limit power?

To save your CPU from overheating?

Low TDP doesn't mean higher efficiency.

TDP - thermal design profile.

Your Node 804 has more than enough room for a chunky CPU cooler - no reason to limit anything.

Your CPU will fall back into its idle state as soon as it's done doing the work.

A low TDP CPU will not save electricity - might actually consume more since it will keep the rest of the system stay active for longer.

well yea my thought was that if I limit the TDP, then the CPU will not clock itself that high and kinda use less electricity. Maybe I'm just scared it will use a lot of power, but I will figure it out one way or another when I get all the parts.

 

Went with the 12600k, NH-U12S redux and DDR5 4800MT/s ECC UDIMM. Any recommendation on what USB drive to use or is it pick w/e

 

The only thing that is hard to find is the OCuLink cable that splits to 4 SATA.

1 hour ago, torauma said:

Maybe I'm just scared it will use a lot of power, but I will figure it out one way or another when I get all the parts.

Modern CPUs are super-efficient at managing their power consumption.

Just make sure to enable all power saving settings in the BIOS.

1 hour ago, torauma said:

Any recommendation on what USB drive to use

Be aware of fakes.

It's normally suggested to get a USB 2.0 drive - they tend to run cooler.