Noob Build upgrade from an LGA1155

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1

Hello there, I used this forum as a guide for my first build and now I am itching for more, and I have a few on-hand parts to make things work.

So first off, my current server is only being utilized as storage and running a pihole docker. I would like to expand its capabilities as economically as possible to handle multiple Plex 1080p transcodes off a ram drive(4 simultaneous at peak, 2 concurrent happens frequently). 10gb transfer speed, Pfsense, radar, sonarr and some light remote gaming. I anticipate mainly roms (SNES/PS1/N64) for the next few years. There are probably many other useful things I am unaware of.
I am not opposed to leaving one tower as is, and making another piggy back, but it is not ideal
I have a gaming PC already with a 9600K and a 3080ti that also handles my plex, but id prefer to keep this PC powered down more.
For the remote gaming client I am planning on an Nvidia Shield for ease of use (6 year old will be playing the games). I had batocera on a tower and ultimately shut it down because it was a bit buggy and was a semi-headache. AFAIK the shield OS can’t be flashed onto PC.

Current build:
Case - HAF-912 (missing removable hdd cage)
Mobo - X9SCL-F
CPU - E3 - 1230
Cooler - CM hyper 212 evo
RAM - 16gb 1333 ECC
Array Drives - 2x10TB + 2x8TB WD white label drives.
Cache - OCZ vertex 460 SSD (I think this drive is obsolete, I am getting checksum errors with media files that are transferred over).

Spare parts/towers (whatever is not used here will be sold):
Dell 5810 Tower with an E5 2687w V4. 64gb 2400 ECC ram.
64gb 2133 ECC ram
X58 Pro motherboard with an i7 970 extreme, 12gb 256mx64 ddr3 ram
Quadro K2000
GTX 1050 2gb
Samsung 870 evo 500gb SSD

Option 1:
Buy an X10 SRL-F, use 64gb ram, and transfer over the drives. Then set up a VM to run plex/games off of the 1050. I understand it will be running off an x8 lane, which I don’t think will matter too much for me. Other option is the X10-SRA, but from searches it looks like that mobo is more prone to failure.

Option 2:
Upgrade the ram on the X9SCL-F to 32GB, and set up a VM with the 1050 and just give it a go to see what it will be able to handle. Sell the rest of the gear to upgrade case/drives. (11.7TB free with 1 parity drive currently) Possibly upgrade to E3-1275 v2? Seems like I would be in the land of diminishing returns here though.

Option 3:
Turn the 5810 into a secondary Semi-server to run plex/games off of, and leave the current build as the storage center.

I am leaning option 1 because I don’t know if my current setup will have the power to handle everything, and it should leave me in a really good place to not have to touch the server (outside of drives/case) for the next 5-10 years. Is there anything I’m not taking into account that i should be?

2

The Dell CPU is pretty powerful.

Consider trying it more of less as is (with the gtx1050) to see how performance is.

Then you can decide if you want to keep it in it’s current chassis or start relocating parts.

3

That’s kind of what I decided on. Run the Dell as is, convert old tower to a DAS to store the drives.

But now I have a new headache… I am remembering why I have this tower. It wouldn’t boot for some reason. So I got my spare HD (batocera flashed) and it is still not booting.

Reset bios options, tried turning options on/off with no luck. Dropped it down to one stick of ram and the same issue. Ran a Dell ePSA test, which is supposed to do a thurough hardware test, and of course it passed with flying colors.

So now I’m at a crossroads with no spare CPU/Mobo to test this system before purchasing anything.

4

So it gets to bios? Does it recognize the drive?

Maybe it’s a uefi can got mbr problem

Can you bit off a DVD or USB?

5

Yeah, bios works just fine, I can do anything I need to in there.

It recognizes the drive correctly and registers. The screen pauses on “Booting Batocera” So it does an initial read from the drive correctly, it just won’t boot. Ive tried 3 different sata cables on 3 different sata ports. Even ran a different sata power cable to the drive.

And now for some reason I keep getting a checksum error when trying to write batocera to a USB from my main PC. Highly frustrating.

6

Alright, after more and more trial and error, I think you are right with the mbr problem. I am completely out of my element here, but my understanding is that most programs that create bootable flash drives default to an MBR format because it is more likely to be accepted, BUT Dell in their infinite wisdom only allows an MBR formatted drive to be booted from USB, not sata.

SO; when my batocera disk was created it was formatted with an MBR format. I switched from Balena to Rufus and got batocera and memtext to boot from USB on the Dell. The next step was to clone my windows partition from my main drive and overwrite batocera on the SSD. And thus, windows was able to boot perfectly fine without any issues.

Another notch on the belt I suppose. Since I don’t have a spare setup, this has made me appreciate IPMI that much more and I am leaning more towards a supermicro build.

As a novice user, is there a futureproofing reason why I might want to consider 128gb of 2133 ECC over 64gb of 2400 ECC? Checking ebay listings it looks like I can sell the excess for 100-200, which looks like enough to fund a standalone pfsense build which sounds much more better than integrated with unraid.

7

well, if you are heavy virtualizing, you usually run out of ram before anything else.
One specific quirk was when I was chia crypto plotting, if you had 128gb of ram you could do most of it in ram, and save wear on your SSD.
But on my own system, I have several VM’s for home stuff and 72GB of ram and i’m not even using half of it.

Does the dell board even have enough dimm slots to fit in all the ram? If so, it’s probably possible to mix in both the 2400 and and they would just all operate at 2133. 2133 is a little slower but it’s minimal.