December 22, 20241 yr Hey everyone, this question gets asked a lot, and after sifting through a bunch of posts my head is now just spinning so I'd appreciate any input. I am looking for hardware to run my unraid file server. I am running Unraid and plan to continue to do so. It is currently running on old consumer hardware: An Intel 4690K with 16 GB of RAM in a Fractal Define R6 case. However, I'm beginning to be a bit unhappy about this setup. I think its power efficiency is rather poor. Electricity is expensive in my country and I want to save as much of it as I can. The mainboard has "only" 6 SATA Ports and I would like two more (I know it's possible to expand using M.2 or PCIe expansion cards, but often this prevents more energy efficient C-States on the CPU) ECC RAM would be nice. 2,5 Gbit Ethernet would be nice, but could easily be added using a USB adapter. Price is an issue, I was thinking 100-200 bucks. I don't mind buying used and there is a fairly good used market in my country. I do have some reservations about cheap Aliexpress hardware. The following are not concerns: CPU performance beyond what's needed to comfortably run a file server. I have other hardware for dockers, VM, etc. Same goes for exorbitant amounts of RAM. No need for GPU transcoding. Video output without dedicated GPU would be nice though (I don't want to have to put in a video card). I'm fairly open on whether to buy a new mainboard and put it in the old system (The Define R6 is a nice case with plenty of HDD bays) or buy some used server from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. My ideas so far: New Mainboard with an Intel N100. Super low power (around 10W idle), however no ECC. Maybe there are other options? I have access to a used Dell T330 with an Intel E3 1220v5 and 32 GB of ECC RAM. 8 HDD bays, even accessible from the outside. Looks pretty good to me, but power consumption seems a bit high (I've heard around 40W idle) mostly due to the old CPU. Use other consumer MB+CPU, however I'm unsure what would give me ECC and low power draw. I appreciate any input, have a nice Sunday everyone!
January 5, 20251 yr I'm using the ASRock J5040-ITX with an embedded CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 6 drives. Since the motherboard has only 4 SATA ports, I added a PCI Express x1 SATA controller card (picked it up on Amazon) to gain an extra 4 ports. I'm really happy with this setup. It's incredibly stable—only restarts are for Unraid updates. It's also silent, energy-efficient, and the CPU paired with 8GB of RAM easily handles multiple containers like ddclient, Nextcloud, nginx, MySQL, and AdGuard. Even with all these running, memory usage is only around 20%. Hope this helps
January 5, 20251 yr Not sure, if this is still relevant, but in case the ECC is not a dealbreaker, I can vouch for the N100. Currently running a ASRock mb Intel n100m NVME PCie to 6x SATA Ports card in the m2 slot PCIe to 2x SATA in the first PCIe slot 32 GB RAM I have one more PCIe slot over that I might use for a faster NIC one day as the MB is limited to 1Gbs but since that is all my home network can handle anyway... Setup consists of 8x HDD plus 2x SSD (cache) with a few dockers and a Linux Mint VM for good measure. Runs like a dream and still has some grunt left, that I'm not using at all. I also did run a full-blown Win11 VM for a little while. That worked "OK" but it required more of my cache drive than I was happy with and I replaced it with the Linux one. CPU and RAM could handle it but it was a bit close on the CPU side too so keep that in mind. Edited January 5, 20251 yr by Zeruel Formatting
January 5, 20251 yr I'd stay clear of the N100 boards. And N300 and so on. They only have 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes. I also run the above mentioned N100M, but in a 2-bay configuration with the option for adding an expansion card for another 2 SATA drives in the bigger PCIe slot. (The NVMe Slot and the bigger PCIe slot are only 3.0 x2). It's nice for a starter board that can do pretty much everything, but in my opinion not the best for an extensive file server board only. I'd go with an older Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 AMD EPYC 3151 embedded system. Doesn't have iGPU and so on, but a full PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe Slot, 4 Sata 3.0, an additional SliMSAS that is I think configured to fork to 4 other SATA 3.0 Ports and then theres another SFF 8654 8i that can be adapted to like Oculink, NVME Cards and so on. Unfortunately the 8i slot doesn't support Bifurication if I remember correctly. Some people got it to do funny stuff on that port by flashing another Boardfirmware, where there is an PCIe slot instead of the 8i soldered to it. (EC0 version has PCIe slot, EC1 the SFF 8i slot). The CPU is a 7nm AMD chip, that consumes less than your old system and it can run ECC RDIMM as a "file integrity" bonus on top. I thin I read about 19 - 27w of usage when active. Don't know if it is allowed to post directly links here, but i got mine used on Ram-König. The board is for sale at 60€ used and 16GB of ECC RDIMM Samsung Memory can be bought from him for another 20€. I guess theres not much more you can get cheaper for a fileserver only. The board has IPMI and dual 1G RJ45. If the 8 SATA ports (4 + SliMSAS to 4 SATA Adapter) are enough, you'd maybe want to adapt the 8i SFF to a 10G NIC of your choice. There was a - I think "serve the home" -forum post - where they discussed the board extensively, but can't find the bookmark right now. I'll add it when I find it.
January 5, 20251 yr 2 hours ago, Bijuuka said: Don't know if it is allowed to post directly links here, but i got mine used on Ram-König. The board is for sale at 60€ used and 16GB of ECC RDIMM Samsung Memory can be bought from him for another 20€. I guess theres not much more you can get cheaper for a fileserver only. The board has IPMI and dual 1G RJ45. If the 8 SATA ports (4 + SliMSAS to 4 SATA Adapter) are enough, you'd maybe want to adapt the 8i SFF to a 10G NIC of your choice. Thanks, I was looking for exactly something like this and ordered the board and RAM. 🙏 Regarding the SliMSAS to 4 SATA Adapter. I found CBL-SAST-1234-100 from Supermicro, which costs around 30 EUR. Did you find any cheaper version that could be used?
January 6, 20251 yr Glad to be of help. beneath you can find the link to the 20+ pages of the servethehome topic about that board. They discussed and tested many configurations for the 8i slot and so on. Unfortunately, the topic got a bit extensive and I can't remember what was discussed on which page so you have to do the digging yourself. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/gigabyte-mj11-ec1-epyc-3151-mystery.41395/ Regarding the SlimSAS to SATA cable, in this post https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/gigabyte-mj11-ec1-epyc-3151-mystery.41395/post-395334 somebody linked an Aliexpress one. Don't know how that went for him, but I don't trust those cheapo ones too much. The SlimSAS to 4x SATA is already configured in the BIOS and should work out of box though. Here is another one talking about a 4i to 4x SATA cable and saying it's working. For me it's one from Amazon for around 16€. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/gigabyte-mj11-ec1-epyc-3151-mystery.41395/post-398958 Additional Info while quickly digging through the thread on serve the home: Someone made a 3d print file for an I/O-shield. Maybe you can find someone, who can print it out for you in your area, or that offer delivery. The Hyperthreading is usually disabled in the BIOS. You have to turn it on in the BIOS yourself. The 8i uses half the electrical bandwith of the PCIe x16 Slot on the EC0 version of the board. SFF 8i to PCIe Adapter for an 3.0 x8 Port should work. YOu have to tune the fan profile otherwise that thing is going to slaughter your hearing. You can fit a 92mm Noctua over it by using only the single screw the original fan was mounted with, maybe ven a 120mm to cool the RAM too. Hope the board runs for you well. Have fun digging the thread, there are a shitton more usefull information in there. Just fyi, another bookmark i found in my dump folder was this: OEM Gigabyte MB10-DS4 Intel Xeon D-1521 - IThaehnlein sells it for 230€ used and 300€ new. Has a built in dual 10G NIC (2x Intel X557-T2 LAN 10GB) and a full 3.0 x16 Slot. Only 6 SATA ports base compared to the above. @vsmt Edited January 9, 20251 yr by Bijuuka Tagged OP so he sees the response.
January 10, 20251 yr @Bijuuka, thank you very much. I ordered most of the things. The I/O shield and a 120mm fan adapter were 3D printed by a colleague. I ordered the following 4i to 4x SATA on Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B073GRZJ7X
January 20, 20251 yr On 1/5/2025 at 12:01 PM, Zeruel said: Not sure, if this is still relevant, but in case the ECC is not a dealbreaker, I can vouch for the N100. Currently running a ASRock mb Intel n100m NVME PCie to 6x SATA Ports card in the m2 slot PCIe to 2x SATA in the first PCIe slot 32 GB RAM I have one more PCIe slot over that I might use for a faster NIC one day as the MB is limited to 1Gbs but since that is all my home network can handle anyway... Setup consists of 8x HDD plus 2x SSD (cache) with a few dockers and a Linux Mint VM for good measure. Runs like a dream and still has some grunt left, that I'm not using at all. I also did run a full-blown Win11 VM for a little while. That worked "OK" but it required more of my cache drive than I was happy with and I replaced it with the Linux one. CPU and RAM could handle it but it was a bit close on the CPU side too so keep that in mind. I have just upgraded my old board to the same as you. I'm looking doe decent SATA expansion that is low power and doesn't hobble the c states. Can you share what models you've used? thanks
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