A friend and I have spent days researching our dual builds and here's what we've narrowed most components down to.

 

Fractal Design Define 7 XL

ASUS ProArt X670E-CREATOR WiFi

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core, 32-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

Intel ARC A380 GPU

NZXT Kraken 360mm - RL-KN360-B1 – AIO CPU Liquid Cooler

Western Digital 20TB WD Gold Enterprise Class SATA Internal Hard Drive WD201KRYZ (Qty 6)

 

Still need to research RAM, NNMe's, HBA SAS Card, etc.

 

Will the double wide thickness of the A380 overhang the heat sync's for the MVMe's, without touching the heat sync's? Yes I know about the A310.

 

Any other recommendations are appreciated.

For a NAS almost none of this build immediately makes sense. So let's start with intended usage. What are your plans?

 

Strongly recommend against liquid cooling in a server. Failure modes are more catastrophic for a system you mostly ignore but leave on all the time, cost is higher, and function unlikely to make any difference at all. Just no good reason, and a number of good reasons to not.

 

The rest is more reaction/thought than anything.

 

There are likely better price/TB drives to choose but that may be location dependent. I've been seeing new Exos 20tb at us$18/TB. I haven't wanted longer parity checks so sticking with 16 myself.

Do you care at all about power consumption?

Given the added GPU, why not an Intel build and use the igpu?

I don't see a reason for hba at 6 drives. Pick a board with enough SATA for the planned 6 drives.

Not up to speed on consumer boards (gaming rigs aren't up for an update and servers I want IPMI so end up with server boards) but Wi-Fi seems silly. Maybe impossible to avoid.

Not a case I'd ever use (airflow)...

 

Thanks for replying with details.

 

This will be combination Plex, various Arr's, Blue Iris in an Unraid build. Might also run Windows in a docker. Might also use for video editing.

 

- We already bought our 20TB drives a while back so too late to return.

- Is your power consumption question directed at the HDD's? Or the system overall?

- We had read or watched video at some point indicating we should use liquid cooling, but doubtful we could find link again.

- Intel CPU's don't support both QuickSync and ECC UDIMMs. Ryzen doesn't support QuickSync but does support ECC UDIMMs, which is why we selected the ARC A380 or A310. If I do use for video editing, I'll most likely add a 2nd GPU.

- Figured it would be best to start with a HBA card, since we'll definitely go beyond the initial 6 drives, with 2 of them for Dual-Parity. I think I had read a long time ago, to not split drives between on MB built-in and on HBA card.

- We were also hoping for IPMI, but can't have everything.

 

EDIT: Added reference to Blue Iris camera software.

Edited February 23, 20251 yr by CaptainKen

Workstation boards for Intel support ECC. Asus W680-ace (3 variants) just as an example. With better c-state range and more they tend to be able to tune for lower idle power consumption too. Also these boards get you into IPMI. Is a supermicro option with the same chipset.

 

I run an asm-1166 SATA expander board (more power efficient than hba) and I think plenty of others do similar. I don't recall anything about splitting the array.depending how big your array gets, and HBA may still make sense. That was just food for thought.

 

And... Water cooling adds failure modes, some of which can be catastrophic if you're not watching things. I won't even run it in my SIM rig, preferring good airflow and a giant tower cooler. Maybe I'm just a skeptic needing to learn about the latest...

Edited February 28, 20251 yr by _cjd_