A few months ago, I built an Unraid box following the NKv1(2019) guide. I was able to get a decent deal on ebay for a supermicro x8sil-f with 32gb ddr3 ecc RAM, an x3470, and a heat sink. I put that into the suggested Rosewill Micro-ATX mini case with 400W PSU along with 3 shucked WDs for the array (2x10TB and 1x8TB), 240g sunbow msata in an msata to sata enclosure as cache, and a 1tb silicon power ssd as unassigned for app data. Everything seemed to set up well until I started moving media to the new server. The server will crash and reboot itself randomly while transferring data. It does not seem to correlate to a certain file size or volume of information moving over. Sometimes I can transfer two or three files after another, other times the system will reboot on back to back file copies. I thought it might be due to the janky sunbow setup, so I made the share skip the cache when writing and go directly to the array; it still crashed. I ran a memtest on the memory for 48 hours which resulted in 5 passes with 0 errors. Recently the board has started to make an alarm sound randomly that will last a few minutes, or until the box is rebooted.
Two main questions here.
First, any suggestions to fix my current build issues? It would be nice to be able to use my NAS as a NAS and actually write data to it without it crashing. Is the included 400W PSU powerful enough for the server or could that be causing my issues? Has anyone else experienced the alarm? I found this post on the Unraid forums that seemed to describe the same sounds but does not offer any solution other than removing the speaker jumper on the board.
Second, if I were to abandon this build, what would be a cost effective next step. I would like to reuse as many of the components as possible to save my wallet a bit of stress. The intended uses for the server are a Plex media stack (plex, sonarr, radarr, etc), Unifi controller, and a Home Assistant server.
Can you describe the alarm, is it a constant beeeeeeep, or a high-low-high-low siren, or a monotone beep-beep-beep? You mention heat sink, is that a passive heat sink (rather than an active tower cooler)? Those are designed for server chassis with very high airflow from a bank of 40mm high-rpm fans. Your CPU might simply be overheating.
One upgrade path to consider is NK4.0. There are mATX options that fit your case, e.g., X9SCM/SCL. The downside is you will have to get new RAM, assuming you currently have RDIMM – socket 1155 requires either ECC UDIMM (e.g., 10600E) or non-ECC UDIMM (e.g., 10600U), depending on the board. UDIMM is not as cheap as RDIMM, unfortunately.
The alarm is more like a siren, high-low-high-low. I am using the active heat sink that came with the board from the seller, it is Intel branded iirc. Unraid reports the CPU temp in the range of 22C - 26C when I’ve been monitoring it, even during the alarms and data transfers. I’m assuming that is reporting correctly. I will try to crack the box open this weekend and get more information (part numbers, pictures, etc).
This is my second attempt at a NK. The first was a NK4.0 mini ITX build with a DQ77KB. For some reason, I got 2 bad boards that would not boot. After the second DQ77KB I saw a good deal on the supermicro and decided to jump to the NK1. I was able to repurpose or return many of the parts from the NK4 (except for the Node case). At this point, I’m beyond the return window on any of the parts for the NK1; so I’m looking to for the easiest options to upgrade without shelling out too much more money.