Aran Posted March 16 Share Posted March 16 Afther 4 years of fiddeling with unraid i now know what i really need to build a 'sit and forget-type' of server running 24h/24h. With only 5 dockers and a rclone onedrive share I think i can downsize from my current 95w i7 6700K to a humble 6w celeron j3160. The plan is to fit it a short depth 19" rack case so i bought the "Inter-Tech 1.5U-1528L". The rest of the hardware was already in my posession and collected over the years so i had enough spare parts laying around. Expect very low, entry-level hardware... Hardware used: asrock J3160DC-ITX 4GB ddr3 x1 500GB 2.5"ssd cache x1 2TB 2.5" ssd userdata x2 3TB 3.5" hdd media/backups 90w laptop-style psu 19v - 4.74amp The celeron 3160 has 4 cores at a 1.6ghz/2.2ghz boost and quicksync which is just enough to transcode one 1080p stream if needed. The cpu does sit at 100% after starting up the server. Maybe adding a container startup wait-time could help here. I'll test this later. A ram upgrade is needed and will be done when i find a not overpriced ddr3 sodimm stick. The four sata ports are enough for our needs. The hotswap bays cannot fit 2.5" drives because you have to screw them in at the bottom of the hotswap trays but the screws stick out so the hdd-tray wont fit anymore. The hotswap bays have power and activity leds but lack active cooling so don't use high performance drives. I only use them to store our media. The top drive is sitting at 36°C which is not bad but i feel there is some room for improvement here. An upgrade to 10gb ethernet is planned but then i need another motherboard, cpu, riser cable and psu and don't want to buy new parts so it will take some time. That asus aquantia card is not the best in power savings but i know it fits and it's what i have so... Unraid runs well on low spec hardware in my opinion. We will see how this goes. Quote Link to comment
Aran Posted April 7 Author Share Posted April 7 Well, this was a short trip... The motherboard shows some strange behaviour. It sometimes loses network connection, has sluggish webgui preformance, the pci-e slot doesn't work anymore and it randomly won't boot. I changed the ram but that didn't do anything. So i switched to a asrock B75M-itx with an intel G630T which is a dual core, 35W TDP cpu without HT and an antec 80w PSU. It runs surprisingly well for a dual core at 2.3Ghz and has a pci-e x16 slot albeit at 2.0 speeds but i now can use my 10gb nic when i find a compatible riser card. Copying over 10gb will stress that cpu though. Major downsides are no Quick Sync, no VT-d and no AES. I did move the server to the basement and now HDD's sit at 21c and 24c at idle and 30c to 34c at typical home-use load so that's a nice improvement. It's ok for now but i will start my quest for a new itx motherboard. Any recommendations are welcome. Quote Link to comment
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