I don’t think I would necessarily recommend the Xeon over the i3 for a server being used purely as a NAS. That use case is not very CPU intensive and whatever CPU you use will probably be idle most of the time.
Both CPUs do support ECC, but to be clear ECC will only work on a server motherboard (C246 chipset). Intel consumer chipsets don’t support ECC no matter what CPU you use.
The main difference between the E-2124G and the i3-9100T is that the T series CPUs are intended for embedded servers and laptops so they have a low max TDP. This means that the Xeon will boost to a higher speed and provide greater performance when under load, but will draw more power and produce more heat doing it. At idle they should exhibit similar power draw.
Not knowing anything else about your use case I would say if the Xeon is cheaper or the same price then get the Xeon. If the i3-9100T is cheaper or you don’t have adequate cooling then go for the i3.
They will likely preform identically for your use case.
Server motherboards in general and Supermicro mother boards in particular do tend to be pretty efficient and often have nice quality of life features like ECC support and IPMI.
However if power efficiency is your main concern I wouldn’t sweat it too much. The consumer boards have more stuff on them and will draw more power at idle but you are probably realistically only talking about a few watts. If you plug everything into a power cost calculator you may find that you would need to run the server 24 / 7 for many years just to break even on the more expensive components.
For instance if the Supermicro motherboard costs an extra $40 and you would save $5 / year in energy costs it would take you 8 years just to break even and probably isn’t worth it purely from a power cost perspective.
Took me a very long time to read thru this, but there are very good ideas here! And it sparked in me the need of building a new NAS! LOL
A little history, I started using UnRaid 4-5 years ago and at that point I used a i7-2600K that I had laying around with like 24GB of DDR3 ram. As of drives, (2) 8TB, (1) 5TB, (1) 4TB and (1) 2TB, pretty much anything that I had laying around. This worked without issues, but last year I was thinking on upgrading and I made the mistake or not mistake, of buying a N5105 with quad 2.5G intel nics, mainly because I wanted to have a direct connection to the NAS at 2.5G, which it worked, but I found the CPU to be not enough, I had jellyfin streaming to 3-4 devices at same time (as a test only) and it crashed/rebooted the server, for 1-2 streams I found no issues at all. This board will get repurpose as a Pfsense/Opensense router, so no waste there.
Now I am in the market to replace this “mistake” I made and I found your NK6 a really good option.
I have a couple of question:
Why intel? or better question why not AMD? I was looking a Ryazen 5/7 gen with G (iGPU) for relatively low price (taking in consideration it is new).
Would it be possible to update the drive links with new discounts? some of them are not available anymore.
Again, thank you for putting the time and effort to write this up, it is very helpful and great source of information! I appreciate it!
Why not keep the storage on the 2600k, if you’ve still got it?
What were you doing with the N5105? Did you actually make it the server?
NK6 revolves around 8th and 9th gen Intel CPUs primarily for cost reasons vs being enough for most people who want to DIY a NAS plus come with the significant bonus of being QuickSync capable.
The Ryzens will cost well over twice the money and don’t support QS.
The drives go out of stock too frequently to keep updating. Refer to the Vendor and see what they have that you might be interested in and consult with us and see if we are aware of incentive pricing available.
I still got it! I wanted to upgrade to being able to utilize 10G card, and NVME for cache (because I found a great deal on gen3 during black friday), and this gen motherboards have PCI 2.0 which is too old for the 10g card and a NVME pcie card.
Yes I did! and for the most part it works great! with 32G of ram and (2) 1 TB NVME drives, Pretty good setup and affordable.
OK, make sense! Thanks!
OK, I don’t see any 8TBs at the moment but I will keep my eye on it!
If it was just that the CPU was under-powered for the task I would expect the streams to not load or have a lot of lag, The fact that the entire server crashes and reboots suggests that the CPU or some other component is most likely overheating or possibly drawing more power than can be cleanly supplied.
Are you able to monitor temps while the server is running? It is possible that pulling off the cooler, cleaning the heatsink and the cpu, and applying fresh thermal paste will reduce your temps significantly.
Additionally even though the N5105 is a low power / low performance CPU the iGPU it has is fairly modern and should be able to handle transcending multiple streams without issue. I’m guessing that you may be doing software (CPU) transcoding instead of hardware (GPU) transcoding which would be a challenge for the processor.
As for your questions:
The main reason that these builds are mostly Intel because of Intel Quick Sync Video which offer better transcoding performance and support more video formats than AMD iGPUs and even most discreet add-in cards. The 3D gaming performance of the AMD G series Ryzens is actually not bad, but video transcoding is AMDs Achilles heel.
The Ryzen processors are a newer product line and for a long time there wasn’t much of a used market for them, but that has changed and today the AM4 platform is quite attractive in terms of performance / price as well as performance / watt. If you were considering using an external Quick Sync box or are planning on using a discreet GPU anyway then an AM4 based Ryzen server could be a good choice. If you want everything converged into a single system and you want transcoding you will want to go with Intel.
The ebay seller RTG is a member on these forums and does occasionally post new deals in the Marketplace Section but it has been a while. You might be able to reach out to the seller and see if they would be interested in posting some new deals.
Pretty sure a 10 Gbit card will do ok on PCIe 2.0 x4 but I haven’t tested it.
Likewise, an nvme device should be accessible just not bootable on PCIe 2.0, and you’ll want to mind the speeds even though it shouldn’t present as any significant shortcoming.
The reviews on the N5105 board seem to indicate the cooler is utter garbage and your problem could have just been a bit of overheating.
I think we’ve seen 12 TB as low as 70 but I do not think they’re quite that low right now.
Not more of what UnRaid can provide, I am using the stock cooler so maybe as you and @ stuffwhy are mentioning, the CPU overheated and a new cooler might do the trick. Even though that could be a solution, I prefer to use this board as a router and build a low power nk6 to use as my NAS and media streamer.
In Unraid open up a terminal window and type the command:
# watch sensors
That should allow you to monitor the CPU and Chipset (PCH) temps as and possibly your drives and RAM if you are lucky.
While the cooler is likely trash the N5105 has a TDP of like 9 or 10 watts so the bar is pretty low. I often see that CPU used in passively cooled setups with no fan at all. A frequent issue with these Chinese low power firewall boards is that the cooler, while low quality, is adequate, but has not had thermal paste properly applied and all you need to do is clean it up and apply fresh paste. I have experienced this personally.
A new cooler will of course also address the issue, but make sure before you buy anything that the board doesn’t use some sort of non-standard mounting setup for the cooler.
The N5105 boards with the quad 2.5Gbps nics make great stand alone firewall / routers with pfsense. I think that is a fine plan for the board.
I’ve been running the NSFW build with GA-7PESH2 and Xeon 2690’s for the past 4-5years. Lately, the big 4k files transcodes are starting to slow her down some so I started researching upgrades.
I’d like something that can run all the “arrs”, Plex, and Shinobi and handle several simultaneous 4K transcodes. Thanks for the recommendations.
Looks like you are posting on the right thread. The NK6.0 should cover your transcoding needs.
It might be a slight step down in terms of total cores, threads, and max compute in multithreaded workloads, but will be a big step up in single threaded performance for general responsiveness and you will get a reasonably modern iGPU for QSV video transcoding.
Generally yes, although don’t limit yourself to the T version. So long as you have adequate cooling the i5 8500 / 9500 Non-T versions have similar pricing but since they are not TDP limited they can boost to higher clock speeds providing better single threaded performance. So your best bang for the buck is probably i5-8500.
The i5 should be plenty for the apps you mentioned, although I’m not familiar with Shinobi. If the main concern is transcoding that mostly relays on the QSV accelerator in the iGPU and will be pretty much the same for all the CPUs in a given generation.
An Arc GPU will have a modern implementation of Intel QSV and should trancode 4K like a champ. If transcoding was the only reason for the upgrade the dropping an ARC GPU is probably the fastest / cheapest solution.
Building the NK 6.0. Going to be running Unraid with the following disks:
3x HGST 8TB SAS Drives (HUH728080AL5201) as the array disks
1x HGST 10TB SAS Drive (as a parity drive)
Will also be using the following:
1 SSD (500GB SATA) as Cache (system/appdata)
1 SSD (500GB SATA) as a Media unpack drive
2TB WD Green drive as a Media share cache drive (write cache)
1TB NVMe (M2) drive as an unassigned cache (for containers/VMs)
My question: Since I’m mixing SAS and SATA Drives (which from what I have read about unraid, is supported), would there be advantage or disadvantage in running all of the drives (with the exception of my NVMe drive of course) through the SAS controller (LSI-9201-8i), or should I keep the SAS drives on the LSI and run the cache SSD drives and the media share HDD through the onboard SATA controllers?
Here’s a bit of the rest of the build:
Motherboard: SuperMicro X11SSV-Q
CPU: i7-7700
Network: mPCIe to 2.5gbe card
SAS Controller: LSI-9201-8i
Case: Fractal Node 304
I know…I’m going against all advice and trying to build a “everything in one box” solution (and a small box, at that). Going to be maxing out almost everything on this build: 5 3.5in Hard drives + 2 2.5 SSDs (combined in a dual 2.5 to 3.5in mounting bracket) which should occupy all the Node 304’s drive containers, plus filling the M.2 port (NVMe drive) and the mPCIe slot (occupying the 2nd expansion slot in the Node 304). Took a careful look at the SuperMicro MB manual and it seems like it’s all supported. Fingers crossed.
I think you should be good with all those components on that board. Sometimes a board will share PCIe lanes between, say, a PCIe slot and an M.2 slot, but this is a small enough board with few enough connectors that I think everything gets its own dedicated PCIe lanes. At least the Super Micro product page doesn’t mention any shared slots.
I second stuffwhy, connect the SATA SSDs to the SATA ports on the motherboard and use the SAS HBA for the SAS Array Drives.
Good luck with your build and enjoy your new server!
an ITX board is unlikely to share PCIe resources in a way that would disable any given device mostly because there aren’t all that many slots or devices on the board. Without researching it more closely, it seems like it should be ok in that respect just on assumption.
however, you should probably seriously consider a larger format build. we rarely recommend going itx/reduced footprint case because it’s more expensive in certain areas and leaves little to no room for potential expansion but doubly so since you’re building this from the start and it’s already completely maxed out.
also it’s not an NK6, NK6 is based around 1151-2, 8th and 9th gen, but, we’re here already and this far in.
Those cards should be functionally identical for you since you will be using them as straight HBAs in IT mode anyway.
I think one is a Raid card that was flashed to IT mode and the other was just an HBA from the Factory with no Raid capabilities. They both have the same controller (LSI 2008).
Physically one card has the SAS connectors oriented out of the top of the card and the other has them coming out of the back of the card. Check your case layout and see if one orientation would be better for you in terms of building the server or cable management. If not then just get the one that costs less.
