gperpetuo Posted February 18, 2020 Share Posted February 18, 2020 Hello everyone, At the moment I have a small RPI4 4Gb with a 8Tb WD Red and a couple old 1Tb/2Tb disks from olt pc's. Running OpenMediaVault + Plex + OpenVPN + Docker (NextcloudPi, Sonarr, Radarr, Jacket, Bittorrent, RPi Monitor and a Pihole on macvlan driver). Although, some of these dockers work great, some others I think definately would benefit from working on a full OS, like Nextcloud. Aditionally, I have a laptop (Clevo 650SE) with dual boot Win10 + Linux Mint and Virtualbox also with Win10... to avoid having to restart and boot with Windows. I still use Windows mainly because of Capture One (photo editor software's)... This laptop has been working almost 24/7 lately... My objective would be to have a small server able to run Win10 for photo editing... some light gaming (I casual play GuildWars 2 on my laptop) and 2D/3D CAD software... so GPU passthrough is mandatory for this. Plus, that would fit on the TV furniture like RPI + external disks do. That's the reason for mITX case like the Node 304... or an HP MicroServer. I was thinking in a second hand HP MicroServer Gen7/8 but it seems I would have issues with the virtualization requirements I have. Also saw ASRock J5005 mobo but... this seems a No-Go for this project (issues with virtualization/GPU passthrough...) Been trying to search for some kind of base setup but having a hard time to find some kind of realiable base mITX not too expensive... Below some answers from the "Read before posting topic": -What is your budget? ~350€ (mainly thinking in used market parts) This excludes disks. If there is no solution for such tight budget I can stretch it... -How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need? 4 (having a free slot to assemble an expansion card would be a plus) -Is expandability important to you? If so, what's your long term goal? That would be asking too much from a budget system Not very important. -What do you plan to run for hard drives? (already have) -Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build? This includes drives. WD Red 8Tb "new" as parity and old 2.5/3.5'' old ones I have. -If you already have parts in mind, please oh pretty please post links to them so that we don't have to look them up. From what I have searched around, ASRock usually are the easiest for all "iommu stuff". Since I'm looking mainly at budget, old xeon based systems probably are easier to find? (on the other hand I'm a bit AMD fanboy... lol) Thank you very much for all help you can give. Quote Link to comment
gperpetuo Posted February 20, 2020 Author Share Posted February 20, 2020 Ok, From my further "research", if I understood correctly, I can make gpu passthrough with the MS Gen8 after upgrading to a Xeon cpu, and with a E1265v2 I have similar processing power to what I have on my current laptop for photo editing. I can find Gen8 for less than 200€ (yesterday one was sold for 170€ on ebay). Xeons are less than 80€ Graphics card ~60€ Until here, within budget additional upgrade: -2x8gb ddr3 unbufered ECC ram ~90€ (necessary for the heavy stuff) ~128gb SSD cache Probably there isn't anything better than this within such a tiny tiny (micro) budget!? Quote Link to comment
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