Poasters

Computers and Technology => System Builds & Upgrades => Topic started by: carskick on February 18, 2020, 00:56 hrs

Title: Built my own home server
Post by: carskick on February 18, 2020, 00:56 hrs
Hey guys (Scuzzy & Bill)

Just thought I'd share my latest venture; I decided to build a home server. Originally, I was considering a true rack mount system, and researched all the options going that way. But instead, I decided on a desktop server case with 8 hot swap bays behind a lockable front door. To maximize energy efficiency, I decided to limit the number of active hard drives. Here's the basic build

https://photos.app.goo.gl/RcD59VZ48DEJBdmN8

Initial build
Case: SilverStone Technology SST-CS380B
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3600
Motherboard: MSI Gaming Plus X470 (More power efficient than X570, and has 3x large PCIe slots)
RAM: 2x16GB 3200Mhz 17-20-20-38
Storage: ADATA 8200 Pro 512GB NVMe
PSU: Seasonic 650 Watt Focus Platinum

To start with, I just messed about with drives I had. I decided to go all SSD in my desktop to keep NVH down and put the Toshiba X300 5TB as the main server drive. Temporarily...

I decided to try my hand shucking external hard drives. Score 4x 12TB Western Digital My Books on the WD Store for about $200 each shipped. I took them apart, and got 7200RPM White Label Enterprise grade drives (Equivalent to Golds, I believe)

I put them in the server... I was blown away by the capacity and single drive performance, but underwhelmed by the MoBo and Software RAID options. With the help of a buddy a made on Reddit, I decided on a Dell MegaRAID LSI 9265 8i. This has 1GB of DDR3 Cache, & a dual core CPU to run the SAS controllers. With standard dongles, it allows you to use 8 SATA drives, but my buddy says you can buy hardware to expand to 128 drives off of this one card! I also have the internal Cache Backup battery and will be getting a UPS to be safe. My Read speeds scaled pretty much dead on 4x for sequential and random in a RAID 10 environments. Writes doubled. Fantastic! You'll see the final result in the pictures, but I'm happy with 860MB/s // 520MB/s out of 4 shucked USB 3.0 12TB hard drives!

I'm currently waiting for the nearly full 5TB drive to copy over to to the array, while my desktop transfers it my photos/videos over gigabit. And it's still not saturated! :)

Just thought I'd share.
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: Bill on February 18, 2020, 09:47 hrs
That's quite the home build, nicely done.  Looks great too.
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: scuzzy on February 18, 2020, 13:31 hrs
Sweet! Good work, Cars. It looks like quite the build and with plenty of storage. The 32GB of RAM is more than enough to get the job done, and it should serve you well for years to come.

What operating system did you decide on?
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: carskick on February 23, 2020, 20:13 hrs
Thanks guys!

I was originally going to use the latest Server edition, but it would have been expensive and harder to use. For my purposes, Windows 10 Pro works great. Yeah, 32GB is technically overkill, but if it were hosting several game servers at once, several plex transcodes, and some other misc tasks, I think 16GB would start to be a limitation. I also may create a RAM disk and use it as the buffer for the Plex system. It improves performance and puts fewer writes on the NVMe drive. But in reality, that'll only be necessary if I start getting into a LOT of transcoding with a lot of people logging into my PLEX server simultaneously on a regular basis.

I also have a GTX 1060 I have on order from ebay and a fan ready to install on the RAID card. The raid card is running at 79C to 83C, which is a bit warmer than I'd like. The case itself is only 35-45C according to all the other temp monitors, so I have a 40mm Noctua ready to install on the RAID card. When I do this upgrade, I'll be moving the RAID card from the bottom to where the video card is. Then I'll use MSI afterburner to keep the video card fan on all the time as well, which should help cool the card. The RAID card is low profile, and the videocard isn't, so it should help circulate pretty well.

I'll post new photos once I get everything in, finalized, and cable managed.
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: scuzzy on February 24, 2020, 09:53 hrs
Sure looks like you've put a lot of thought into this, and Noctua is certainly a good choice for cooling. Installing my Noctua CPU cooler was a bit of work (2 total on 2 systems), but they have performed flawlessly over the years.

I look forward to your final report.
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: carskick on February 25, 2020, 09:11 hrs
I plan to keep this server configuration over the next 5 years or so at least, so I wanted to get a good one without spending crazy money.

I've actually built almost 10 Ryzen machines in the past few months, for both our household and for customers. The Ryzen 2000 and 3000 chips both are just fantastic. I've covered almost the entire range:

First I built my wife and I Ryzen 3700x machines, I built a Ryzen 2600 & a 1600AF machine, one for our guests/son to use and the other to sell, then I've build a 3900x and a 3950x for customers doing video editing and workstation use, I've built a 3200G budget build for a customer, and finally, the 3600 Server.

All of the higher end 3000 chips were stable with the Infinity Fabric at 1800 using 3600Mhz RAM, with the 3600 being the exception. It was the only one I used a x470 chipset instead of x570, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it, but I wouldn't think so. In any case, I'm just running it at 1600/3200 with tighter memory timings. Since it's the server, stability is more important than raw speed, so I'm happy to run the memory under spec with just slightly tighter timings, lower chance of RAM errors.

From 2013 to 2018, I built nothing but Intel Systems, and I'm happy to be switching back to AMD! I just wish they'd get their act together with their video card drivers.

I do have 2 qualms with Ryzen 3000 Chips: Idle/lightly threaded power consumption and CPU temperature readings.

The Ryzen chips like to boost. AMD has their mid to higher end chips setup to boost to the edge of what their architecture is capable of to keep single threaded performance high, but it causes huge spikes in voltage and power consumption. This is planned operation by them, but it makes power consumption quite high during lightly threaded use compared to an Intel CPU. That being said, in moderate and heavy use, it uses far less power than a comparable Intel while being as fast or faster. In addition to their boosting techniques, the IO chip always uses 9 to 15W (The more chiplets you have, the higher it gets), even during idle. I wish they had a way to down clock the IO chip, which would get idle power consumption closer to Intel. X570 chipsets are power hungry, too, which was why I went X470 in the server build. It saves 7 to 10 watts all the time with that difference alone.

The other issue are CPU temperature readings. The Ryzen Master doesn't have an issue, but every other temperature monitor, including what the BIOS uses, has 10 degree spikes that gradually drop ever 8 to 12 seconds. This means if you base your fan profiles off of CPU readings, your fan speeds are all over the place. Since most AM4 motherboards have MOSFET temperature monitoring, I've been basing my fan curves on this, since it's a much more gradual up/down based on sustained use.

Otherwise, I love the Ryzen platform.

And yeah, Noctua is fantastic, especially now that they have black fans instead of just brown for when aesthetics matter. They are a little pricey, but the quality and longevity seem to be worth it. I've been going higher end with my builds as of late. For low end PCs, I generally refurbish prebuilt Ivy Bridge/Haswells, because of the bang for the buck vs new.

Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: scuzzy on February 26, 2020, 13:44 hrs
It will still be awhile before my next build, as my current systems are still doing very well. I have stayed with Intel for my last couple builds or so, but you do have me thinking of the possibility of trying AMD again. One thing though, I'd rather not have a burning hot chipset that requires an active fan.

Either way, looks like you put a lot of thought into your builds and their performance. Not surprising, I suppose. :)
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: carskick on February 28, 2020, 15:49 hrs
Thanks, I obsessively keep up with the latest hardware and tech news. I have for years, as you can imagine! :)

The X570 chips only "need" the fan during excessive PCIe lane usage or if ambient temperatures are really high. My main PC keeps the Chipset fan off until 60C, and then I have it set to spin really low until 70C. Even still, it hardly ever turns on, and if it does, it's off again pretty quick. I thought the same thing, but don't let that scare you away from X570.
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: buffalo2102 on June 26, 2020, 14:01 hrs
Just to echo Carskick about the fan - it's a non-issue on my X570 Aorus Elite.  The fan very rarely even comes on and I can't hear it when it does.  I have 2 x PCIe 4 SSDs and the fan still doesn't come on even when doing large file transfers between them.

The position of the fan on the board is a consideration though.  A lot of X570 boards have the fan positioned directly under the GPU and that's obviously not ideal.
Title: Re: Built my own home server
Post by: scuzzy on June 27, 2020, 13:39 hrs
That's helpful to know. I still don't know if my next build will be AMD or Intel based, but I will likely have to start thinking about it before too long. My current builds are approaching 5 years old. They still get the job done and remain dependable, but I also know that everything has an expiration date.

Scuzzy; except Poasters, apparently.