Update the NAS Killer line of builds to iteration 5.0. Moving on to socket 1150, we should be able to see better performance and power usage, with only a slight increase in cost compared to the NAS Killer 4.0.
This guide will feature not only Xeon processors, but also consumer Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors.
Please carefully evaluate CPU and RAM support / requirements from the manufacturer’s spec page. Each motherboard will be different. This is not an exhaustive list of motherboards, just a handful of selections by the serverbuilds.net team. Feel free to use another make or model should you find a good deal or already have one on hand.
Review checklist:
CPU support (Xeon / Core / Pentium, etc.)
RAM support (ECC / non-ECC, etc.)
Form factor (ATX / Micro-ATX / Mini-ITX, etc.)
Onboard SATA controller and number of ports
Onboard NICs
Display output ports and requirements (iGPU), if any.
As stated in the motherboard section, make sure to find out which CPUs are compatible with your motherboard. The top half of the table are Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs, and the bottom half are Xeon CPUs.
Please note: All consumer CPUs have an iGPU, while only some Xeon models have an iGPU. Keep this in mind when picking your CPU.
Unraid is going to be the most common choice for OS. In that case, it makes sense to have a decent size SSD to store your appdata and to be used as a write cache. This improves file transfer speed to your server immensely. Typically these files will be moved off of the cache drive and onto the array daily (at minimum), so keep that in mind when selecting a size. Smaller SSDs can be used as “unassigned” drives, which are neither part of the array or part of the cache. Unassigned drives can be used as VM data stores, file unpacking drives, or whatever you want really.
With the current Unraid beta release (v6.9.0-rc2 as of writing), you can have multiple cache pools that can be assigned to different shares. Personally, I take advantage of this by using RAID1 15k RPM HDDs for my large file ingest. It can easily write at over gigabit speeds with large video files, but it not as fast as a SSD for smaller files. In that case, I use my SSD cache. Offloading unpacking and large file ingest to a hard drive cache will greatly extend your SSD’s life span.
These hard drives are external consumer HDDs removed from their outer shell. Inside is a normal enterprise-grade 3.5" HDD. Western Digital is the king of the shuckable drive market right now, offering high capacity drives at low prices.
Reference the topic below to track shuckable drive prices.
SAS Drives
If you’re using SAS drives, you must connect them to a SAS controller. SATA drives can be used with your motherboard’s onboard SATA OR a SAS controller.
Take a look at the forum post below for more information on SAS controllers.
Pricing
Always, always, always make use of the “best offer” option on ebay. Especially if you’re buying multiple. Some sellers also have quantity discounts built into the listings, but those are not shown in the table below.
Below are a list of affordable power supplies readily available on Amazon. I would highly recommend looking at power supplies on EVGA’s B-Stock Wednesday sale first. Of all the parts featured in the guide, the PSU matters the least. If you find a good deal and it’s 400W or more, I’d go with that instead.
For the internal SAS HBAs and Warp Drive/Flash Accelerator cards, you may need a full height bracket. Good thing is that they are really cheap ($1), bad thing is that they may take a week or two to arrive.
What great timing! I was just thinking about turning my old PC into a server, and it just so happens to be a LGA1150! My question is this:
Is it worth it to get a new mobo that supports ECC and IPMI?
My consumer grade mobo is the ASrock Z97 Extreme 6. And while it comes with the very good benefit of being free to me, I’m nervous about running a ZFS pool without ECC, or the hassle of hooking up KVM for maintenance or troubleshooting. (If I stick with this I may get the Pi KVM I’ve been hearing about.)
In either case, I think I will buy a new set of 4x 8Gb of RAM, since the 2x 8Gb I have now will be moving to another machine.
Also, I don’t see it listed here, probably because it’s not worth the price to a new buyer, but is there any reason why I shouldn’t use my i7-4790K in this build?
Oh, and my intentions are for running Proxmox for a few VMs. The usual Home Assistant, Plex Server, Docker stack, and possibly a Mastodon server.
Awesome to hear. And with Non-ECC going for less than ECC on ebay, that’s more good news.
I’ve considered Unraid, and I’ll consider it again, but I’ve been running a little FreeNAS (OK fine, TrueNAS) box for years on that old explody mobo (C2550D4I), and I’ve got a NUC running Proxmox now. I figured this could get me down to 1 box to do both. I bet Unraid would be a simpler setup.
It definitely would. It’s a hypervisor with an awesome storage setup, it also has a nice GUI for docker if you want to get into that. I moved from FreeNAS to unraid a couple of years ago, and I have zero plans to change back. FreeNAS has a place, but not in the home IMO.
According to this your Lenovo can only handle V1 CPUs, but probably V2 if there is an updated BIOS available. Definitely not V3, as that’s a different socket.
It’s a prebuilt, which means you will run into various issues with part compatibility, stemming from motherboard size, PSU pinout, etc.
I’d either use it, or ditch it. You can always add a DAS if you just need more storage. Your Lenovo is NAS Killer 4.0 level anyway, so it’s not exactly bad.