Hopefully that 'peaked' your interest.

 

I'm in the process of purchasing parts to move from my current spec in my signature, the server currently resides at my place of work but I'm intending to move it back 'home'.

 

So far I have sourced the following components: 

 

Asus TUF B450 PLUS Gaming & Ryzen 5 2600 = £161 (after £35 Asus cashback promo)

Crucial Ballistix Sport AT 2666 MHz, DDR4 16GB (8GBx2), CL16 = £47.76

Be Quiet 750W Power Zone Power Supply Unit = £63.02

 

Total spend so far (after cashback) £271.78

 

I'm re-using the drives and my Intel 760p NVME but I will need an LSI controller that does 8 drives, as the NVME will disable 2 of the 6 ports on the motherboard and I have a mixture of 10 SATA and SAS drives to connect.

 

There are currently 3 VMs that run on the server which will need to be migrated off unraid into Hyper-V but that should be fairly easy.

 

I also use a Silverstone SST-FS303B in my current case to get 3*3.5 inch drives into 2*5.25 bays, this is making my search for a new case difficult as it needs to be able to take this hotswap bay adapter, I thought I had it nailed down with the Fractal Define R5 but they have a non-standard 5.25" bay so it won't fit. My best option at the moment is the Fractal Define XL R2 as other cases like the Coolermaster Silencio 652s don't appear to be available in the UK. It will be in my living room so I don't want anything too flashy or ugly.

 

I currenlty have an old i5-2500k system sat next to my TV which I intend to use the Geforce GTX1060 3G from in the new unraid server and pass it through to a Windows 10 VM so I can easily fire it up if I want to play a game,

 

Will update as I progress with the project.

 

 

 

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by Spies

It seems like I was wrong about the Fractal R5 having non-standard 5.25 inch bays, once both blanking plates are removed you end up with one larger square bay, in the images it looked like there was a thin line between the two bays but that isn't the case, so I've purchased the case again for £93.95

 

Total spend so far £365.73

 

I still need to think about the HBA adapter, I can keep the 6 onboard SATA ports if I put my NVME into a PCIe adapter but I only have 2 full size PCIe slots, I have read that you can just use a riser cable from a 1x to 4x slot and lose minimal performance, so that might be something to look into.

Power supply arrived from Amazon with an EU kettle lead, so a quick chat and they refunded me £12.60.

 

Used that credit to get an additional 140mm fan for the front of the Define R5 which I will need when it's fully populated with drives.

 

Still waiting on Case and RAM before I can start putting anything together.

On 10/22/2019 at 11:04 PM, Spies said:

I will need an LSI controller that does 8 drives

I'd recommend a Dell PERC H310 from ebay. There are several companies offering them used, pulled from redundant servers for around £25, at which price they are a steal. You'll need to cross-flash it with LSI IT firmware but there are guides and tools for doing that on this site. I also replace the thermal compound under the heatsink as it tends to have dried out.

Can you show me where I can get one for £25? Most UK sourced ones are twice as much.

 

I crossflashed my current HBA so I'm happy doing that with another one.

 

Edit: Found them, I was searching for 9211-8i and sas2008 rather than the actual model of the card.

Edited October 27, 20196 yr by Spies

Will I need to flash my B450 board to an earlier BIOS? It has a Ryzen 3000 ready sticker on it so I guess I might have problems with graphics card passthrough if I don't?

Started the build this evening, haven't got the controller card yet and can't really move the drives over until I test stability (and any nuances with Ryzen I need to address) tempted to get a trial license for a new usb key so I don't have to take down my old server.

So I just threw a random drive in and got a trial key for a different USB, I will run it like that for a while to ensure the system is stable.

 

The only changes I made in the bios were to set idle power supply control to typical from auto and to enable SVM.

The SAS controller cable came today so I took the opportunity to move everything over, it was very painless, first boot picked up all the drives aside from one which I had knocked the power out of, really like how you can lift and shift with unraid and maintain configuration.

 

I now have an extra bay which I have immediately added another 2tb drive to, making a total of 25TB.

 

Very happy with my R5 build 😁😁😁

 

 

On 11/15/2019 at 1:07 AM, Spies said:

The SAS controller cable came today so I took the opportunity to move everything over, it was very painless, first boot picked up all the drives aside from one which I had knocked the power out of, really like how you can lift and shift with unraid and maintain configuration.

 

I now have an extra bay which I have immediately added another 2tb drive to, making a total of 25TB.

 

Very happy with my R5 build 😁😁😁

 

 

Hello! I'm looking for hardware for my future unRAID build, I want the same CPU. Do you have any issues with 2600? You still have to disable C-states?

I haven't had any issues, I didn't disable C-states but did change Power Supply Idle control to  typical current idle instead of auto.

19 minutes ago, Spies said:

I haven't had any issues, I didn't disable C-states but did change Power Supply Idle control to  typical current idle instead of auto.

Thank you for reply! What about power consumption? 

I don't have it plugged into anything I can use to monitor power, but based on my household usage, I would estimate about 40-60 watts with no HDDs spun up.

21 hours ago, Spies said:

I don't have it plugged into anything I can use to monitor power, but based on my household usage, I would estimate about 40-60 watts with no HDDs spun up.

What about server uptime? How long - days, weeks, months?

Nearly 4 days, I manually rebooted to update unraid.