August 20, 20178 yr I run a small business from home and am building first UnRaid for use strictly as NextCloud server to get my data off of major cloud hosting platforms and give secure access to myself and colleagues with some shared access to clients; perhaps some ftps access. Budget conscious but not constrained. Trying to decide between building from scratch with new MOBO, CPU, RAM, Case, Power, and drives or purchase used SuperMicro server enterprise quality but last generation server and install new drives. Since new drives either way I will start with 1 x 4TB for parity and 1 x 2TB for data. Thinking WD Red. I presently have a little more than 1TB of data so I think the 2TB will last awhile and by the time I need more I expect the 4TB to be cheaper. Other threads suggest it would be safer to have more capacity on the parity drive so greater expansion is easy(er). Used SuperMicro: 1U Server with X7DBU MOBO w/ 2 x Xeon E5430 2.66 ghz and 32 gb of DDR2 ECC RAM plus redundant power supply. Pros: Cheaper than buying and assembling a scratch build and for the money I get a lot of old school horsepower with redundancy, built for enterprise specs. Cons: SATA 3 so not as fast as a new MOBO; rack mount, but I can build something to hold it; and used through lease term by unknown server farm for unknown hours. New Scratch Build: Looking at mini-ITX MOBO with 6th gen Intel CPU, 8 gb ECC RAM, hot swapable cage in mini-tower chassis. Pros: faster disk access; new hardware; smaller form factor. Cons: about 3-4 times the cost (exclusive of HDDs); no redundancy; less RAM; assembling components untested together. All comments welcome...
August 20, 20178 yr 1U Servers get very loud and are extremely limiting on options. Personally I wouldn't use anything smaller than a 2U. SuoerMicro do a 2U with up to 8 drives in the front, proper PSU redundancy etc, plus you can add a bigger amount of linecardsX7 is quite old now too, and the CPU's are 10years old. DDR2 ECC is rare now, so replacing a failed component would be expensive. I doubt the X7 has SATA3, so limited to SATA2 which isn't an issue if only using spinners, but ssd would suffer. Honestly, for what you want, I'd look at a used Dell R710 LFF. Have you checked if the X7 board can handle 64bit LBA? Ie Drives > 2.2TBJust some thoughts to consider :-)Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
August 20, 20178 yr I'm really confused honestly... Not even understanding why with such little data, you'd even bother to do anything you're proposing. My advice, go to Bestbuy and buy 2 or 3 EasyStore 8TB with the present deal, you can use 1 and then the second and third would be offsite versioned backups. On your way home with all the time and money you saved, stop and buy some beer to enjoy your victory that you're done, mission accomplished.
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