I have made a bit of progress on the project: I have brought a case!
It’s an ANTEC P193 case with an ANTEC 620 power supply I found on marketplace for $40. I think it will work, with a bit of a clean. Funny thing is, less than a week later I found a second hand Fractal case. Not sure if I should just get that one and try and sell on the ANTEC… Decisions, decisions! I’m a little annoyed because with all my looking before the Fractal case didn’t come up but now that I’ve bought another it shows up and has apparently been online for 8 weeks? Do I just get the fractal case and assume that another NAS style build will happen in the future (build one for parents or for backup or something?) and build mine in the Fractal?
Anyway, on the topic of hard drives… Darkwingduck mentioned that it might be better to go with a 12 TB drive as these tend to be better value for money on a $/TB basis. From my trawling of the internet the option I have linked (4*18TB drives) is the cheapest I could find on a $/TB basis. I did up a spreadsheet which I have a screenshot of below and also found a website that compares all the listings on Amazon. Either way the 18TB drives do seem to be the cheapest option around at the moment.
I had ordered the same board, it came with an “engineth” sticker covering supermicro label on the board. Bios also had engineth logos but i took a chance and went ahead and updated the bios to supermicro , it seems to be running fine so far.
No idea what their goal is with the strange naming.
Unlike Abs_noobie, I did not have any mention of Engineteh, stickers or otherwise. There was some packing materials and protective sheets that had Chinese (presumably) lettering, but the board looks exactly like the pictures I pull up. Only difference is that it looks like the CPU “holder” may have been replaced. Not where the chip rests, but the metal around it.
I’ve tested my RAM (pass) and am currently testing the HDDs. TrueNas Scale is running and I should be diving into the world of NAS within the next couple days! Very excited.
The F suffix on i5-9400F indicates that the CPU does not have an integrated GPU.
This means you will need to use an add in GPU if you want to do any video transcoding for Plex or Jellyfin or just want to have video out at all in order to set up or work on the server.
That would more than wipe out any savings by going with the F CPU.
There are quite a few tower or rack mount cases that will get you to 8 drives, more than that can be difficult with cases currently in production.
The go to recommendation was the Rosewill RSV-L4500U It fits 15 3.5" drives and used to be around $120 but these days it is more like $220+ and is often out of stock. Goes on sale occasionally at the $120 price point, but not often.
Your best bet may be to look for an older full ATX tower case from back before AIO water coolers and SSD hard drives. Some of those older cases were huge and had a ton of drive bays. They are probably hard to find these days but if you do find one it will probably be very inexpensive / free.
Additionally you could get a tower case that fits 8 3.5" drives and has a couple of external 5.25" bays for optical media. There are adapters that let you put an additional 3x - 4x 3.5" drives in 2x 5.25" external bays. Even some hot swap ones.
There are also 3D-printed JBOD brackets for hacking together your own external JBOD rack. You can stack a ton of drives but it is a little hacky as you will need to run a bunch of cables out of your case to the tower of drives sitting next to the case. Not sure how physicaly secure it would be, you wouldn’t want to accidentally knock over your tower of disks while they are running.
There are also real JBOD enclosures that have built in power and can be connected with an external SAS cable. Those are probably more expensive though.
Finally if you are into 3D-Printing there are a number of projects out there that are modular NAS cases where you can print out multiple disk modules and stack them on top of each other.
Good luck finding a case / solution for your project.
I’ve been super busy with work and general life stuff and haven’t had the time to finalize my parts list. And then of course, as happens when you step away from a project for some time ebay listings have changed. Anyway! This time I am determined to order the parts by this weekend at the latest.
(Also I just figured out how to add tables )
So here is the current working parts list for everyones consideration and critique!
PART TYPE
CHOSEN PART
PRICE AUD
PRICE USD
LINK
CPU
Intel Core i5-8500T @2.10GHz 8th Gen 6 Core Desktop CPU SR3XD
Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 V2 CPU Air Cooler,4 Heat Pipes CPU Cooler, 120mm PWM Quiet Fan with 1500RPM, Desktop CPU Cooling, Computer Heatsink Cooler, for AMD:AM4/AM5&Intel 1700/1150/1151/1200
I really appreciate all the feedback I’ve gotten so far on my earlier posts, especially from @Ian and I’ve tried to incorporate all of that into my current plan. At this stage I’m planning to use the case and and PSU however I might end up getting a Fractal case (second hand). I’m not too sure how it will work out but I hope that this set up will work regardless of if I use the above case or a Fracal case. Also, as recomended I have 2 SSDs to use as cache drives.
Anyway, enough from me. If you have any thoughts, opinions, or other feedback please let me know. I’m planning to make purchases by the weekend so I can finally get on to building this and getting it set up
Hello all. I am planning in change my home server. I have an i5 8400 and I will change it for an i5 14600K. Do you know if Quicksync benefits for having more memory bandwidth? Because I can pair the i5 with DDR4 or DDR5. DDR4 is cheaper, but I could think of getting DDR5 if performance is better. Have anyone tested this? Thanks!
There’s basically no point in switching an 8400 for a 14600k if your primary concerns are quicksync. I’d go so far as to tell you to Not do it, unless you are certain of other not yet mentioned reasons why.
UHD770 is much stronger than UHD630. Also, I need more CPU power to do other things, I am out of cores in the 8400. So, with the change being inevitable, I came across the RAM question.
I don’t think the RAM speed or bandwidth will have any significant effect on almost anything a home server does. Get what makes more sense budgetarily or perhaps satisfies capacity concerns.
I already have 2x32GB now, which is more than enough (32GB was tight with ZFS). I will search for a DDR4 board then (I already have the 14600K, it was an offer that I could not refuse).
I can’t get the BIOS to update on my supermicro x11sca-f. I boot & I just see the supermicro logo with pei–sb initialization 0x01=mrcFail. I’ve updated firmware over IPMI but the BIOS needs to be loaded over USB. I’m using an 8500T cpu as discussed in this thread. Memory should be compatible (bought recommended from Supermicro’s site), but I believe the bios needs updated first. BIOS is version 1.5 currently. Any suggestions from x-11sca-f board users?
It’s possible that you have a bad DIMM, that might be preferable since the other possibility is the board is bad. Just in terms of low hanging fruit I would try clearing CMOS and checking all the jumpers on the board. I would probably start with ruling out hardware issues before moving on to updating your BIOS.
To update BIOS there is a good chance that you will need to at least be able to get into the existing BIOS far enough to configure it to boot from USB, or perhaps you will luck out and it will already be configured to boot from USB.
If you can boot from USB then you are good to go to update the BIOS. I typically boot Free DOS from a USB stick although you can also use Linux potentially from SATA or NVME drive if you are not able to boot from USB.
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