Hey there, ended up ordering one of the combo 4’s with 32gb ram. Picking up some hard drives and I pretty much have everything else I’ll need. Looking for a decent hot swap option for the N400 case to jam into the 2x5.25 bays and expand it out a bit (and of course, who doesn’t love some hotswap). Thanks a ton in advance, great info and support on here.
p.s. Also, any recommendations between FreeNAS and UnRaid… I’m currently considering a setup on unraid running ZFS.
1 Like
Unraid, drop the ZFS!
2 Likes
Alright, which FS should I go with on Unraid then? My understanding was that ZFS was way overkill and pretty much unbreakable in terms of corruption and data loss (not that I REALLY need that but it’s fun to play with fancy things). Any ideas on drive cages or hotswap bays for that N400 case or any recommendation on cases or bays that don’t cost my rent? Trying to shoot for 8+ bays. Thanks a ton in advance.
Use Unraid’s built in FS and disk management.
I’ll look into drive cage recommendations.
2 Likes
Sweet, thanks a ton man. I scoured everywhere I could think of looking for something. Best I came up with was a 2x5.25 to 3x3.25 and it was over 60 bucks. I took a look at all the NAS Killer 4.0 recommended cases, but pretty much everything but the N400 was sold out. Really wish I could get my hands on the hot swap Rosewill server chassis or the 15 bay one. Too bad their totally gone everywhere.
N400 is selling out too.
1 Like
I know they aren’t as good as they used to be, but it looks like NewEgg and NewEgg Business still have the N400 in stock.
1 Like
I’ve noticed. Ended up just choosing to salvage one of my old cases. NZXT Lexa S. Unfortunately, there’s not really any ATX cases in my flavor, and I’m trying to keep the budget down (that’s the idea at least). So might as well salvage this old thing.
Great thread! I’d actually found these on Ebay first and found this thread afterward while searching for more information.
For the folks who transplanted their board in a new case…did you get the BMC alarm going off when you used fans plugged into the 4 Pin PWM headers (and not the 8 Pin headers)? Did you just disable the BMC alarm, or is there another setting I’m just not finding?
My motherboard’s BIOS is from 2014, so not much newer than the most recent “stock” BIOS on the Tyan site. If anyone has successfully installed a stock Tyan BIOS on their board to address the fan issue, I might try that rather than simply silence the BMC alarm.
I’ve already got other gear in a rack in my home office, so was hoping to keep this in the 1U chassis. I had a plan to tame the fan noise by minimizing power consumption:
-
use an E3-1220L CPU with a 1U active Heat Sink/Fan, which won’t do better than any other E3 at idle, but with a 20W TDP, it won’t generate much heat to dissipate when its working.
-
Put a small fan on top of the the LSI 2008 heatsink
-
Use low RPM fans in the midplane fan wall
-
Use the giant stack of low hour 1TB laptop drives I have left over from Laptop SSD upgrades. I’ve got access to a laser cutter, so was going to cut some 3.5" to 2.5" adapters. An upside to this is that I can use common cheap screws and rubber washers that won’t cost much.
I had the heatsink and fans already in the “spare parts box”, but wanted to check how other people dealt with the BMC alarm (if they got a BMC alarm) before proceeding.
Thanks!
Most just turned it off.
Can someone point me to the cables I’ll need to hookup 3 SAS drives to this motherboard? I’m totally confused. Thanks in advance.
Also a link on how to flash the controller in IT mode would be really appreciated
There are certain cables that you can use, but you can actually just use one of these per drive and use SATA cables to the SAS ports on the motherboard.
Here is the onboard LSI flash tutorial.
1 Like
Thank you for pointing me in the right direction, this is my first experience with enterprise grade hardware.
My goal is to install Unraid and mainly use the machine for PLEX, would I benefit from installing a GPU? Maybe when I start messing around with VMs down the road?
Impatiently waiting for my combo to arrive, meanwhile looking at CPU fan and other options. Any thoughts on a good fan? I know there are couple of options up there but my main concern is the noise. I have the Thermaltake Gravity i2 on order but not sure if its better to get an Arctic one or look for something else?
1 Like
The Arctic Alpine 12 will definitely be quieter.
1 Like
So, stated before I bought combo 4, it arrived today and everything is in working order with one exception… The TYAN board came with a backplate for the stock passive cooler. I have a huge old noctua cooler I planned on using, which has it’s own back plate. But there’s a back plate already on the board that I can’t seem to remove. They are incompatible with each other, any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Oh and with the stock heatsink just sitting in bios the cpu is reading 55C. Probably going to get much hotter under load.
Do not attempt to remove the Xeon backplate.
You can use this list to choose an appropriate cooler.
Yeah, once I realized it was fixed I didn’t touch it, sighed, reinstalled the stock heatsink and pressed on. Thanks a ton man. So current values are:
CPU DTS: 55 C
CPU below Tmax: 49 C
Would I be alright to press on with setting up unraid, or should I just wait for a new heatsink?
Those temps are OK for basic setup and whatnot, you can lay it flat and just put a fan on it for now. It’ll drop the temps quite a bit.