FAWKES | A DS416j Upgrade


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FAWKES

I've spent the last year or two lurking here, thinking about an upgrade for my trusty Synology DS416j which is currently rocking two 4TB WD Red drives in SHR mode. I haven't included drives yet, as I'm still deciding if I want to go the shucking route, or buy retail/OEM. My plan is to get two drives in the 8-14TB range for the initial Unraid setup with a single parity drive, then move over the 4TB drives after migrating my data.

 

Purpose

After owning a DS416j for 4+ years, and having it serve me well for local network storage, and Plex, as my experience has grown, so have my demands, and it quickly became evident that I needed to upgrade to something that will better serve me on a daily basis.

 

My plans for the server include:

  • Running Plex with hardware transcoding for 3-4 simulaneous users.
  • Archiving YouTube and other web content with an automated transcode pipeline using something like tdarr.
  • Running various Docker containers for downloading and managing content.
  • Offloading some workloads from my desktop to either a VM or docker container.
  • Running Kiwix to self-host Wikipedia and Stack Exchange.

 

Components

  • Silverstone SST-CS380 V2 Midi-Tower
  • AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6 Core (Socket AM4) CPU
  • Kingston 16GB DDR4 2666MHz ECC DIMM Memory KSM26ED8/16ME
  • Kingston 16GB DDR4 2666MHz ECC DIMM Memory KSM26ED8/16ME
  • ASRock AMD Ryzen X570 Pro4 AM4 PCIe 4.0 ATX Motherboard
  • Crucial P1 1TB NVMe M.2 PCIe Performance 3D SSD/Solid State Drive
  • be quiet! Straight Power 11 Platinum 550 Watt 80+ Platinum Full Modular PSU/Power Supply
  • NVIDIA Quadro P2000 5GB Graphics Card

 

Cooling

  • Noctua NH-L9a Chromax Pure Black CPU Cooler - 92mm
  • Noctua NF-F12 PWM Chromax Premium Grade Fan - 120mm
  • Noctua NF-F12 PWM Chromax Premium Grade Fan - 120mm
  • Noctua NF-F12 PWM Chromax Premium Grade Fan - 120mm
  • Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut High Performance Thermal Paste - 1 Gram

 

Accessories

  • Supermicro CBL-0186L SATA Cable Set (4)
  • Supermicro CBL-0186L SATA Cable Set (4)
  • SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive

 

Build Log

I've started receiving the bulk of my parts, after a long wait due to delays related to Covid-19.

 

It's one of the first computers I've built where I've strictly adhered to the motherboard's manufacturer QVL, with Kingston ECC DDR4 and Crucial P1 1TB being the most logical choice for RAM and Cache. The Ryzen 5 1600 AF model is a Pinnacle Ridge-based refresh of the original 1600, so running on the Zen+ architecture, being roughly equivalent to the Ryzen 5 2600. In my mind it's one of the best value CPUs right now, and even though I was very close to going with an i3-9100, I opted to go AMD for the following reasons:

 

  • The AMD combo was significantly cheaper than an i3-9100 and an equivalent, modern server motherboard for ECC support.
  • 10th Generation Core CPUs will definitely be moving to a new socket/chipset. 4th Generation Ryzen is more likely to run on existing AM4/X570 motherboards. This gives me more upgrade options in the future, as well as potential PCIe 4.0 support if I decide to upgrade my cache disk in the future.
  • The 1600 runs about 4% slower than the i3-9100 in single-threaded workloads, but has 200% more threads that make it three times faster in multi-threaded workloads.

 

IMG_20200419_143033.thumb.jpg.83e2658974e0d6353cd8fde9f3ee51c5.jpg

 

I'm really happy about the Quadro P2000, I grabbed it off eBay and the listing described it as a fresh pull from a brand new workstation, definitely brand new, and a steal at 250 GBP. As I mentioned previously,  I was originally considering the i3-9100, but opted for the 1600 AF, which means I lost out on an iGPU and QuickSync support so I needed something to enable video output, and hardware trandscoding with Plex. I was thinking of just getting a Quadro P400, but at 130 GBP, and seeing the P2000 going for the price I got it for, I decided to take the leap.

 

I've never used a be quiet! power supply before, but it was one of the A+ recommended PSUs on the latest version of the Tier List over on the LinusTechTips forum here.

 

IMG_20200419_143233.thumb.jpg.df0c940d3369e3362befb12adf3ad80f.jpg

 

Obviously the most crucial part of the build, a Sandisk Cruzer Fit USB 2.0 drive 👏

 

IMG_20200419_143628.thumb.jpg.46b99f33c21c382c2be803a591508146.jpg

 

I'll update this thread as I make progress. I'm currently just waiting on my cooling stuff to arrive. I have the case in my posession already, but I haven't taken it out of it's shipping box yet, so I'll post some images of that in due time.

 

Thanks for reading 🙇‍♂️

Edited by coughlanio
  • Like 1
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Hi,

 

I am in the same situation as you but I plan on going down the Intel Xeon road. If i may ask some questions:

 

  • Do you plan to use you NAS with a screen attached all the time or will it be "stored" somewhere?
  • I guess that the M.2 drive is for cache, why did you choose to have only one?
  • What kind of hard drives are you considering?
  • Why the P2000 over a "standard" GPU card?

 

Anyways, looks like a cool build. I do not know about you but a plan to recycle my old synology as a remote backup devices hosted at another location.

 

Regards

  • Like 1
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2 minutes ago, AL_Fonce said:

Hi,

 

I am in the same situation as you but I plan on going down the Intel Xeon road. If i may ask some questions:

 

  • Do you plan to use you NAS with a screen attached all the time or will it be "stored" somewhere?
  • I guess that the M.2 drive is for cache, why did you choose to have only one?
  • What kind of hard drives are you considering?
  • Why the P2000 over a "standard" GPU card?

 

Anyways, looks like a cool build. I do not know about you but a plan to recycle my old synology as a remote backup devices hosted at another location.

 

Regards

 

  • I live in a one-bedroom apartment currently, so it'll be right beside my current desktop, but I haven't decided if I'm going to have it hooked up to my monitor or not. Possibly in the future if I install a second GPU and do some sort of GPU passthrough to a VM. If I don't want to hook it up to my monitor full-time it should be fine, but there's a chance I would need to get a dummy displayport adapter to do that.
  • It'll be for cache. I just went with one for now due to a self-imposed budgetary constraint, but I do have plans to buy a second for redundancy in the future. It's just a tradeoff I had to make, and I've accepted that I could possibly lose up to a days worth of data/appdata if it has an issue.
  • I'm considering shucking a pair of 14TB WD Element external drives, or opting for 8TB NAS drives (either Ironwolf, WD Red or Toshiba N/MG series, all seem pretty comparable in terms of reliability and warranty). The reason why 14TB shuckables are in consideration, is that I'm a firm believer in as much storage, with as few disks as possible. I'm waiting to see if the 14TB Element drives come down to 180/190 GBP again before I make a final call.
  • I contemplated picking up something like the GTX 1650 Super, but it came down to power requirements, and doing as few unsupported things as possible as part of this build. I need more than 2 simultaneous transcodes, and I wanted to avoid patching drivers on boot if possible. Like I said, I originally was looking at the P400, but at that time I believed the P2000 was out of my price range. I also wanted to avoid a GPU that required additional PCIe power.

Like you mentioned, I have plans to put some cheap/older disks in my Synology and relocate it back to my family home as a remote backup target, but I haven't put much thought into it beyond that.

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being a person that has had MANY HD failures under his belt... I would recommend WD Black drives... 

 

most of of HDD failed drives were 5tb HDDs made by WD. 90% of my drives are WD

 

I still have some 5tb wd drives in my setup of 9 HDDs... but 8tb drives seem to be very reliable... 

 

my WD green drives dies within 20 months... and I have had a few reds die over time as well... I have yet to have a black die

 

just my 10 cents

Edited by mathomas3
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On 4/20/2020 at 12:38 AM, mathomas3 said:

being a person that has had MANY HD failures under his belt... I would recommend WD Black drives... 

 

most of of HDD failed drives were 5tb HDDs made by WD. 90% of my drives are WD

 

I still have some 5tb wd drives in my setup of 9 HDDs... but 8tb drives seem to be very reliable... 

 

my WD green drives dies within 20 months... and I have had a few reds die over time as well... I have yet to have a black die

 

just my 10 cents

Thanks for the tips. I'll probably stick with NAS-grade drives, as they generally have a good balance between MTBF, rotational speed, and cache size that's ideal for a NAS environment. They've also been binned for running in multi-drive array environments, where consumer drives generally have not.

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