New build questions! Did my research (noob though)

[poeterdebier]

He Guys wondering if I could get some feedback on the following:

 

I would like to replace my current NAS. First thought was to just replace my current NAS (a DS410j) and be done with it. But seeing the current prices of Synology boxes and similar (Qnap) I decided to “look around” a bit more. So, I discovered unRAID. So unRAID can do more than just being a NAS! That is nice because I am running a bunch of programs on 2 Raspberry Pi’s and also some more “demanding” stuff on my laptop. When possible, I would like to run all these programs on the to be build NAS. Here is a list what I current use and on which computer:

 

My old MacBook Pro 15” from 2009 is still going strong and is running Windows 7. I would like to make a VM with Window 7 to be able to run some old stuff which is not always running on the newer software. Side question: possible to just clone my complete bootcamp to a VM?

 

- VM: Windows 7 (Running Allen-Bradley RsLogix, Siemens Simatic etc)

 

My Raspberry Pi 3B+ is running some home server software (Home Assistant) and various add ons (Grafana, Influxdata TICK stack, Node-red, Mosquitto). At the moment these programs are not running in containers but I would like to try to use Docker only. I quite like the idea of separate containers because I have experienced some trouble with programs requiring different Java’s. Docker would solve that problem.

 

- Use UnRAID docker management to run previously mention programs

- VM: Linux (When docker is not working as expected) But honestly, I would just try to run a VM of Linux just because I can!

 

My current laptop (MacBook Pro 13” from 2017) when switched on is running the usual media server stuff like Plex Media Server, SABnzbd, Tranmission, Jacket, Sonarr and Radarr.

 

- Use UnRAID docker management to run previously mentioned programs

 

Answers to Rajahal questions:

 

• Around €500 budget
• 4 Drives for now is enough. Expansion can always be realized with an extra SATA card.
• 4 TB capacity will be more than enough for the moment. But budget wise I will be fine with 2 TB (with parity).
• Addons will be installed. Dockers will be installed. Cannot be specific but I like to test stuff even if I don’t need it. Some things must be done just because it is possible.
• What hard drives. First I use the old drives I have in my Synology. When everything is running to my satisfaction I will consider buying quality drives. Current drives are 4x 10 year old collection of 4 different brands.
• I don’t have any spare parts at the moment. Also in the Netherlands it seems that it is more difficult to get my hand on some old motherboards used in some of this pre-builds.

 

Thoughts:

 

Motherboard: A320M-HDV R4.0

 

o   Has 4 SATA

o   Integrated AMD RadeonTM Vega Series Graphics in Ryzen Series APU

o   AMD-V supported for VM’s

o   Supports IOMMU

o   1x PCIE x1 (extra ethernet card pfSense maybe)

o   1x PCIE x16* (GPU if necessary, maybe PCI express card with extra SATA connections if necessary)

 

* actually with Ryzen series CPUs (Raven Ridge) this is only x8 and with Athlon 2xxGE series APUs it is 4x. Is this AMD Athlon 200GE considered Raven Ridge?! I’m a little confused about this part.

 

Went for the 4 SATA thinking that should be enough for me. 4TB with a 4TB parity with 2 spaces left for expansion in the future. I did find a 6 SATA 970M Pro3 for around 50 bucks with a AM3+ socket but somehow I had trouble finding the right CPU. Probably because of my inexperience. So I went with the A320 instead.

 

According to the ASRock CPU support list the Athlon 200GE (Raven Ridge) should be supported on the A320M-HDV R4.0. The Sku number did not exactly match. YD200GC6FBBOX is what I want to buy instead of the YD200GC6M2OFB in the list. Should I be worried about this?

 

The numbers are both mentioned on the product specs on: https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-athlon-200ge though.

 

Also, all BIOS versions are supported so I guess it is not necessary to update the BIOS. But if necessary is this a problem? General impression I get that people are buying another MB’s just to avoid doing a upgrade. Never done this before though so I would not know.

 

CPU: AMD Athlon 200GE

 

The CPU has Vega Graphics so a dedicated GPU is not necessary. Right? Or do I need a little bit more power when using VM’s? As mentioned before this CPU should be compatible with the MB.

 

Memory

 

According to ASRock the MB only supports DDR4 3200+(OC) / 2933 / 2667 / 2400 / 2133 non-ECC, un-buffered memory because I am using a AMD Ryzen series CPUs (Raven Ridge).

 

I have a little bit trouble finding the right memory. Not knowing if 8 Gb or 16 Gb is necessary, I started searching for 16 Gb. Not expecting the price to go over 60 bucks. While it is nog so difficult to find two sticks of 8 Gb (non-ECC, un-buffered at 2133. I cannot match this up with the memory support list. Also, it looks that according to the MB specs if I want to use two sticks SD I need to run at 2933? This is a little confusing for me. Appreciate some input for this. Wanted to go as cheap as possible and not buy two sticks of RAM that are more expensive that the MB and CPU together.   

 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A320M-HDV%20R4.0/index.nl.asp#MemoryRR

https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/A320M-HDV%20R4.0/index.nl.asp#Specification

 

Currently I have this in the shopping basket:

 

AMD Athlon 200GE - Processor                                           €48

Asrock A320M-HDV R4.0 - Moederbord                                €51

Be quiet! PURE POWER 11 500W CM - Voeding (intern)          €78 (expensive???)

Cooler Master MasterBox NR400 met ODD - Midtowermodel €58

 

Still to add a M.2 NMVE disk. And later maybe a SSD as cache drive.

 

So some input would be appreciated. I did try to do the research but as I said I’m inexperienced. My general impression is that it can be cheaper. But is should not be so underpowered that I cannot use it for VM’s any more.  Probably could save some money on the power supply but to be honest I did not research so much about that at the moment. And I’m sure that the number of Dockers will increase in time.­­

 

Thanks anyway,

 

regards Piet

 

[trurl]

1 hour ago, poeterdebier said:

What hard drives. First I use the old drives I have in my Synology. When everything is running to my satisfaction I will consider buying quality drives. Current drives are 4x 10 year old collection of 4 different brands.

Old drives that you already have may be OK, but you need to understand that in order to reliably rebuild a missing drive, every bit of all other disks must be reliably read.

 

You should test old drives before trusting them. Unraid will monitor SMART of your disks and if any don't look good will warn you. Pay attention to those warnings.

[d-Z1R3D]

i would be looking at a B450 board at least, you will have better ram, cpu compatibility for future proofing, maybe look at a Ryzen 3 3200G processor instead if you can, the improvement over the athlon would make a difference when running VM's as one is a true 4 core processor and the other is a 2core with SMT.

 

my current server is

AMD Ryzen 5 2600

16Gb Kingston DDR4 3200Mhz CL16

Asus B450 Prime MB

2 x 250Gb Crucial MX500 Cache Drives

4 x 6Tb WD Red drives with 1 in parity

Corsair AX850 PSU(yes this is overkill but it was lying around not in use)

Antec P101 Case 

 

This gives me the ability to add more drives in the future with a SAS Card and all my drives will run off that except the cache drives.

 

Currently running no VM's as a I dont have a need for them, but i run a plex server for family and friends, Folding@home with 6 threads and consistantly get good 1Gb transfer speeds from my main rigs.

[poeterdebier]

6 hours ago, trurl said:

Old drives that you already have may be OK, but you need to understand that in order to reliably rebuild a missing drive, every bit of all other disks must be reliably read.

 

You should test old drives before trusting them. Unraid will monitor SMART of your disks and if any don't look good will warn you. Pay attention to those warnings.

Thanks for the tip. If I have a server running I will definitely pay attention.

 

Quote

maybe look at a Ryzen 3 3200G processor instead if you can

Will consider this. Thanks for the info appreciate it. My most cpu demanding tasks will be (I guess) Plex and running a  Windows 7 VM. Can I do this with a Athlon 200G? With the motherboard and cpu you suggest I will double the price (cpu + mobo). 

[Decto]

I expect you will have a poor experience with a dual core CPU once you want to run one or two VM's and the early AMD CPU's have some stability issues which require bios work arounds etc. So you may burn some time during setup.

 

Intel iGPU is far easier to use for transcoding in Plex so I'd buy B360/B365 and Pentium g5400 at the budget end.

 

For VM use, an I3 8100 quad core or better would help.

 

Any Intel quad core from Sandy Bridge 2500 up with matching motherboard would also provide reasonable performance so there probably more options out there.

 

If you want to stick with AMD then aim for a quad core part.

[poeterdebier]

So taking the advise of d-Z1R3D and Decto (thanks guys) and instead of the A320 and the 200GE a better/faster solution would be:

 

Mobo: Asrock B450M Pro4

Cpu: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 

 

The B450 will give me more upgrade possibilities in the future according to d-Z1R3D. I was thinking about the 2200G cpu (tried cheaper) but noticed that there was almost no prices difference between the 3200 and the 2200 so.. went with the 3200. Depending which review you read the differences where also not so much.

 

That would make the build:

 

Asrock B450 Pro4 - €86 - (6 SATA, and need BIOS update, but the company where I would order can do that for me)

AMD Ryzen 3 3200G - €93 - (Picasso Core)

Samsung PM961 128GB - €43 - (to be used as a cache disk, but would a SSD 2.5" not be an easier/cheaper choice? Is 128GB enough?)*

Cooler Master CM Force 500 - €57 - (8 x 2.5" bays)

Cooler Master MasterWatt 450 - €57 - (because Cooler Master)

RAM - (G.Skill Ripjaws V 16GB - F4-3200C16D-16GVKB, Any recommendations?) - €88,-

 

total €425 (possible other cache disk) possible < €500,-

 

* a normal SSD would at least be easier to buy cause the M.2 needs to be compatible with the mobo. (right? or is this just gibberish!)

 

What are your thoughts? 

 

gr Piet

Edited April 1, 2020 by poeterdebier

[poeterdebier]

Just wondering if somebody can give me a hint if there are big advantages over using a SATA SSD or a M.2 SSD. Only thing I can think of is that with the SATA one you don't have compatibility issues. The M.2 should be supported by the motherboard right?! This one I linked is not in the asrock compatible list. You think this will give issues or does this in general is not so critical?

 

Both SSD are 500GB, pricewise not much difference but the TBW of the M.2 is TWICE as much though.

 

regards Piet

 

https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/587285/adata-ultimate-su800-512gb/specificaties/

https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1320538/pny-xlr8-cs3030-500gb/specificaties/

[testdasi]

36 minutes ago, poeterdebier said:

Just wondering if somebody can give me a hint if there are big advantages over using a SATA SSD or a M.2 SSD. Only thing I can think of is that with the SATA one you don't have compatibility issues. The M.2 should be supported by the motherboard right?! This one I linked is not in the asrock compatible list. You think this will give issues or does this in general is not so critical?

 

Both SSD are 500GB, pricewise not much difference but the TBW of the M.2 is TWICE as much though.

(Assuming both have DRAM and are 3D TLC), M.2 NVMe SSD is ALWAYS faster than a SATA SSD.

It's less about advantage and more about noticeability. You will tend to notice it more often if your workload is where NVME matters e.g.

• High IO load (especially simultaneous / parallel IO)
• Large sequential
• Random Read
• Random Write in rapid succession (infrequent random write is cache in RAM and thus is always super fast).

 

One thing nobody seems to mention when talking about SATA vs NVMe is that NVMe is built around parallelism.

The biggest implication is that under heavy IO, an NVMe drive is less likely to freeze your system (due to high IO wait).

 

In terms of compatibility, those mobo compatibility lists are never updated and thus would never have any device that come out afterwards.

Theoretically, any normal NVMe M.2 will be compatible with any PCIe M.2 slot.

What would be an "abnormal" M.2? The Intel H10, for example, requires special bifurcation of an x4 link into x2/x2, which basically nobody supports, even most Intel own chipsets out there.

 

The only important compatibility that you would have to pay attention to is when you want to pass through the NVMe as a PCIe device to a VM.

You then need to pay attention to the controller since some just out right won't work (e.g. Intel 660p) and some require special workaround with limitation (e.g. SM2263 controller would not work with more than 15 cores).

Note that even in those cases, you still can use the NVMe as a storage device (e.g. put a vdisk on it) and it would still perform better than a SATA SSD.

[poeterdebier]

He Guys,

 

So unRAID is running.

 

In the end I went with the following hardware:

 

AMD Ryzen 3 3200G
ASRock B450 Pro4
G.Skill Ripjaws 16GB-F4-3200C16D-16GVBK
Cooler Master CM Force 500
Cooler Master MasterWatt 450W

 

Had two old 2.5” HDD lying around but noticed some errors during the pre-clear. Some extra storage was already in the planning so I ordered two 4 TB WD Red (1 for parity).

 

Also ordered a SSD (PNY XLR8 CS3030 M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe 3x4 500GB) to function as a cache drive.

 

So far everything is running smooth. As most of you can understand I watched a lot of Space Invader YouTube movies to get most of the things working. Also the support on the forum pre-build/after-build has been superb. For me it will be new learning curve regarding docker containers but with what I have running now (Sonarr, Plex, DuckDNS, OpenVPN, Nextcloud) I start to appreciate it very much. Definitively removing containers in its entirety is much easier that just using the wget or brew I have been doing on my Raspberry. Installing using the community plugins is also very easy.

 

Next on my wish list is:

 

*Upgrade my home network to be able to get much faster speeds. As I work only from my laptop. Wireless is the limiting factor here. I wonder if working on a VM will be more smooth with some better quality wifi in the house. No I have a slight lag.
* Ordering a quad nic so I can play around with pfsense. Will need some extra hardware to make this happen (managed switch etc).

 

Anyway, thanks to everybody,

 

regards Piet