NK4.0 Planning - Need Feedback

Alright so I’m planning out an NK4, gonna pull the trigger in the next month or so, looking for some feedback.

Gonna be moving all my media over to this so I’d like some failure tolerance and ease-of-access for my server, so unRAID seems to be the right choice. I can set up an NFS and boom, see the entire share of media I set up. This’ll basically appear in my media server as one single ‘drive’ with all my media on it, but on hardware it’s spread across, right?

For fault tolerance, it would be smart to use two parity drives, right? So if I make two 10TB drives parity I’m good to go on future expansions (for the most part) even though build and sync times might be really, really long.

And finally, hardware:

  • E3-1260L on an SM X9SCL, with a NH-L9i for a cooler - I figure if this thing runs a bit hot that’s fine, and the air coming in from the chassis fan should help cool too. Might be possible to run just a heat sink instead?
  • 8GB of 1333MHz RAM because I don’t really need the RAM since I won’t be running more than sonarr & radarr on this box.
  • A 1TB cache SSD, definitely enough since I download less than 100GB/day to my server. Might prefer two 250GB SSDs instead, for some safety.
  • Rosewill RSV-L4500 because I’m aiming for a lot of storage in this machine.
  • EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W, I think that’ll be enough from the calculator I used, with a draw of like 440-460W max (which seems a little high?)

And over time I’ll add 10TB drives, I’ve got two now and I can add more as time goes on, yeah?

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Xeon E3-1260L $39.20
CPU Cooler NH-L9i $39.95
Motherboard Super Micro X9SCL $35.00
RAM 8GB ECC 1333MHZ ~28.00
Cache SSD ADATA SU635 960G $87.99
Controller LSI 9201-8i $24.95
Case Rosewill RSV-L4500 $135.00
SAS Cables Two pack! $11.99
Fans Arctic 120mm 5-pack $28.00
PCIe - SATA Adapter $14.00
SATA Cables The Usual $8.00
SATA Power The Usual $12.00
PSU EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W $74.99
UPS APC BE850M2 $87.00
$626.07

New Build after some deals:

Type Item Price
CPU Xeon E3-1225v3 $76.99
CPU Cooler Generic Cooler (above) $0
Motherboard Intel S1200V3RP (above) $0
RAM 8GB ECC 1333MHZ $0
Cache SSD ADATA SU635 960G $87.99
Controller LSI 9201-8i $24.95
Case Rosewill RSV-L4500 $131.76
SAS Cables Two pack! $11.99
Fans Arctic 120mm 5-pack $28.00
PCIe - SATA Adapter $14.00
SATA Cables The Usual $8.00
SATA Power The Usual $12.00
PSU EVGA 750W GQ $60.73
UPS APC BE850M2 $87.00
$543.41

This’ll basically appear in my media server as one single ‘drive’ with all my media on it, but on hardware it’s spread across, right?

Correct

it would be smart to use two parity drives, right?

Its entirely up to you if you want one or two, however most people don’t use two parity until they have 10+ drives, if then. You gotta weigh up for you - but remember that parity/redundancy is NOT a backup, if you have critical data you should back it up somewhere off site.

As for coolers there are cheaper, taller coolers in the guide that will fit that case fine, I would go for those personally.

EDIT: Nevermind what I said about PSUs, my head was in the wrong build - that one should be fine.

And over time I’ll add 10TB drives, I’ve got two now and I can add more as time goes on, yeah?

Yep, with unraid this is trivial

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Proof of 1 large drive on unraid:

image

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Thanks y’all!

Yeah, I’m planning on eventually having all 15 bays full. Thankfully, I don’t consider 99% of my library critical (the rest gets sent to a few off-site RPis) and I could rip it all again if needed. I figure since this array would eventually have 30 10TB drives (with a DAS once I fill this up), I’d be best off using two for parity and just planning ahead, essentially.

Thanks! I’m trying to go for a bit quiet, so I should probably just get the usual Hyper 212 and call it a day.

Thanks JDM, that’s super cool and refreshing to see!

Oh, I mentioned this in another thread - but for some reason Supermicro does not recommend using CPUs that have integrated GPUs. Look at this post for more information.

Rats, that’s disappointing to hear. Though in theory I don’t even need local terminal access to unRAID, if it all just works properly, so I don’t need the iGPU. I could go for a better value CPU in that case.

Well, they don’t recommend it because the board has it’s own GPU onboard. So you can run an E3-1270 or something that doesn’t have iGPU, and still have display output.

You know, there are those who say you should really read the whole of the specs before you buy.

They’re completely right. Thanks! Gonna edit my build plan now.

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I initially ran a 1225 v2 in my x9scl-f and did not have any problems with it. Maybe I was just lucky though.