Unraid HTPC top silent, black metal finish with 12TB

[tapodufeu]

I have built a HTPC config which is just under my TV in my living room. Very silent, low power config (less than 50w, 30W average) and very cheap.

 

First of all, when I say cheap, I mean everything is cheap except the case. I have chosen a beautiful HDplex  h5 2nd gen fanless case, metalic black finish.

Very silent, because fanless, but also built in heavy metal to prevent noise of harddrives to be listen out of the case.

The case cost 300€ because I bought extra hard drives racks. They deliver the case for 2x3.5 or 4x2.5. I installed 12x2.5....

 

For power supply, I do not need a PSU with more than 80 or 90 W. So I have chosen a picoPSU 80W, found on amazon, at 20€.

That kind of PicoPSU provides just 1 sata and 1 molex, cable... so, I let imagine the power cable extension you must add

 

 

The motherboard is a Gigabyte H110 with 8GB of ram. CPU is i5 6400T. Please not that this kind of CPU require external power supply cable.

 

 

 

I have also installed : 

1x TBS 6281 tuner DBVT card.

1x LSI 9211-8i HBA

1x NVMe PCIe card for cache with 512GB Toshiba nvme drive

 

and 12 hdd drives. just 8 were installed when I took pictures. They are all connected to the LSI card.

The 4 missing drives are connected directly to the motherboard.

 

All drives are attached on racks with Orings inn plastic to prevent vibration noises.

 

Hard drives racks are stacked vertically

 

 

 

Finally, everything is working perfectly, consume 30W with 8 drives and around 32W with 12 drives (with nextcloud and openvpn).

During parity check, I consume 52W.

DVBT recording 38 W.

Plex only 35W.

Plex + TBS: 40-42W

 

On pictures you can see a mix of Wd (CMR) and seagate (SMR) drives.

I have resell of WD drives, they underperformed compared to seagate drives.

Now I have only 12 ST1000LM035xdrives. (it took me 1 month to find  brand new or almost new seagate drives on the 2nd hand market... maximum 20€ per drive).

 

I will maybe change the motherboard to a full ATX MB with Z170 or B150 chipset in order to add more PCIe slots.

I lack ethernet router and I will surely add a Quad NIC intel network card and use it with a PfSense VM.

 

With a bit of DIY works, I can also add 4 more 2.5 drives, then I will also need a second LSI 9211-8i card (so it requires one more PCIe 2.0 x8 slot).

 

Finally I am around 600€ for the full configuration, completely silent.

Please notice that WD drives are more silent than seagate and consume less power than seagate... but they are also lot less efficient. Avoid completely to buy SMR dirves from WD (for example WD10SPZX...),

You can use WD10JPVZ, they are as efficient than ST1000LM024 drives. (35% less than LM035)

ST1000LM048 performs better (10-15% less than LM035).

The best one today in the 5400 speed is the ST1000LM035 drive !!

 

I have not tried the LM049 (7200 RPM) but you can easely find some on the 2nd hand market at the same price than 5400 RPM drives.