Building a 100% SSD Home Server - Is an Intel Xeon D a good option?

in today's video I'm going to be building myself a new Home Server if you've watched my channel for quite a while you've probably seen my previous server build which is based on the Xeon E3 CPU I think it's a hospital refresh generation four four terabyte hard drives an LSI HBA and it runs freenas and it's been working absolutely brilliantly however I found that I've never really needed more storage capacity in it it's got eight terabytes of musical capacity and I built it thinking would have to expand that over time but I've never really gone above three terabytes if that have used space and since all I really storage YouTube videos which are maybe 30 to 50 gigabytes each and I don't store my raw footage just finished files given I release a video every couple of weeks my storage isn't really going to expand that quickly so I don't really need the capacity that server has and because it's filtering mechanical hard drives there's high power consumption for spinning drives It's relatively loud because the drives just have motor running constantly that you can hear and the driver's access is really noticeable in particular because I went with high-end Enterprise drives I think they're hgst Ultra Stars they are quite loud however after time's gone on I've realized about my storage capacity requirements not being that great and ssds have massively dropped in price so this new build I'm going to be building a fully SSD based server so that's been quite a fun project we'll talk about yourself for a second later on I'm doing something a bit weird and a bit custom so we'll see I'm not fully concrete on the software side of things yet I'm probably gonna end up building it try it out and then maybe come back towards the end once the machine's built and set up to talk about how I did the software side but yeah we're building a server setting up and I'll talk about how it all works so here we have all the parts here because we have the ssds over there and all the other components we'll take a look at those in a minute and then we have the case which is generously been provided by server case server case also provided the case using my previous server build video so when I was making this new build those researching cases for it I came across this so I got back in touch with something they sent it over so yep just to be fully transparent server case did send this over free of charge but they're not said it told me anything to say and I'll be preparing my honest feedback an honest review on this case in this case it's a logic case SC 23400 hyphen 2. and it seems like a nice case the reason I went for this is because I wanted a 2u case my previous build was for you which is a bit too big so I wanted to you and with my rack it needs to be short depth my rack's only about 500 mil deep really for in terms of usable debt for a server so most pre-builts especially with hot swap Drive bays are just too deep for that which is why I have to build it myself I've got no problem but buying pre-built servers in fact it's often my preference to do that however you just can't get a server with decent amount of hot swap drive that will fit into this rack without building it yourself whereas this case it's perfectly shallow enough so that's why we're using it so first up let's go in and take a look at the case in a bit more detail because sort of seeing how the case is laid out will kind of dictate what other parts will be putting in they'll kind of explain a lot of the parts so yeah let's jump in and take a look at the case take a look at the front of the case you obviously got loads of ventilation and the two five and a quarter inch Bays there but what sort of Drew me to this case over a lot of others is the front sort of LEDs and buttons are very much designed for servers rather than traditional sort of PC cases because a lot of rack cases you can tell are kind of designed for just PC use so all you've got is a power led a hard drive led a power button and a reset button whereas this has a lot more really important design for servers so you also got the power power button and reset button and hard drive LED and power LED but you've also got three Network LEDs and a fault LED and these are only really usable with server motherboards which is what this case is also designed for it's fairly self-explanatory the network LED show network activity and the fault LED is something that lots of servers have where if several motherboards takes a fault it will light that led up out of the box with this motherboard it'll do it for things like fan failures if a fan fails and the motherboard detects that that led will come on so I kind of wanted that don't really need it but it was nice to have there's also a pair of front USB 3 ports so we'll be connecting those up as well so that's one of the case there and as you can see here it has sort of standard rat Mount logs on the side so you can just Mount this with this straight into cage nuts you don't need rails however they do also sell a rail kit or a few different rail kits actually so let's send those over as well so this one the rail kits they have three different options for this case basically the main difference is just the different depth so different rail kits can go up to different depths of rack this is our smallest one which I think is 350 mil so as you can see it is adjustable but it is a tiny tiny little short Rail and that's exactly what I needed for my rack because it's a very short short depth rack and this is the first time I've seen a case that actually has a rail that is shallow enough to fit my rack which is quite nice so I can actually properly make this on wheels fairly standard rail kit nice bulb earrings that comes out there you say this little latch along to pull the inner rail out and you fit this on to save the case so we'll do this properly later but I'll just quickly demonstrate this because it did actually confuse me when it first arrived I actually emailed severification oh you sent me the wrong real kit it doesn't fit and they were like no you put you're putting it on wrong so what you need to do to put this on is you'll see there's a little metal tab that sticks out the front of the case here what you do is you slide one end of The Reel under that Tab and then you screw in to the other end of The Reel here with a single screw and that's perfectly secure but that's what threw me initially because I'm looking at this going just there's a bunch of screw holes in the back or holes on the back of the rail and there's holes on the side of the case and I couldn't find any combination that lined up but I think because it's a short depth Rail and a short depth case that's how it works but as long as you know that that's fine so you screw it onto the Reel of the server there do it on the other side another perfectly well slide into the real mounted in your rack that's nice reel as well is the sort of tight where it hooks over the square hole and this little spring will be plastic piece clips in and then you put a screw to the front of the case into that secure it and place the stop it pulling out so yeah we'll take a look at this properly later but it's really nice there's a real kit available for the server case it doesn't come with it but you can get it separately it's not that expensive and being able to get a reel that is this shallow is really quite unique so that's really good now as for the rest of the case we'll take the top off first take a look inside there isn't any sort of tool that's released on this you just have to take the screws out there's only there's two screws on each side so it's relatively easy to take the top off and then we'll get inside so with those screws removed all we need to do is peel the top forward and it'll come off so let's top the case off pretty thick metal if I had to criticize a little bit the edges are quite sharp so you need to be a bit careful but apart from that that is very solid it's very thick which is good just need to watch those sharp edges but definitely doesn't feel flimsy at all which is good so that often is the inside the case and as you can see there's a lot of open space inside here on the back you've got this basically the ATX power supply here and you've got a bunch of expansion slots these are all half height expansion slots perfectly fine for the story case and the same for Micro ATX board and then it's got sort of removable blanks there it's nice to see that these blanks are actually the ones you screw out and they're reusable they're not those snap out types you've got space for an IO Shield here and what's quite sort of nice with this I sort of noticed is that the expansion slots in IO Shield are quite set back into the case so even when you're looking at the depth of this case already being quite short depth because the i o and all your pork are also recessed a bit into the case it buys you a bit more space behind a bit more depth because you've not got the cables all sticking at the back of the machine which would add to the depth so that's quite good now interestingly you've also got this additional slot here and this is like another expansion slot for a full height card now this does just have a sort of snap out flying it's not a sort of reusable one but it's not a huge deal but this is like a little bracket for fitting an additional full height cards now of course there's no way you're going to have a slot up here and you're unlikely to get a riser for your motherboard it's going to sort of fit into this but what you could do with this is you could easily enough mount a full height expansion card in here just have it having it kind of hovering up here and then just use one of those sort of PCI Express ribbon cables to come out your out your card and down into slot on your motherboard you can even do it into like a name.2 slot if you wanted if you needed an extra slot so that's quite nice to have there it kind of just gives you that flexibility that even though this is designed for for low profile cards you could fit a single high high profile you know full-size card in there if you needed to essentially like SAS expanders as well could be quite nice you know they don't even need to go into slot but they tend to mount as an expansion B so you could potentially hang up SAS expander up here it's nice to have that so sort of a little surprise getting that there then down in the front of the case we have the drive base so over here you have two three and a half inch internal base and the way these work is there's a screw on each side that lifts out this sort of metal tray thing and then there's a rubber dampened hole on each side and you just screw your drive into that so that's pretty simple personally I think I might actually just take these out and leave them out purely because if I take these out it gives a nice sort of flat surface here to roots on cables around because obviously it's a server case you don't really get sort of decent Cable Management space and I need to obviously root those um big ATX and EPS power connections from the power supply over here over the motherboard here so I might just take these out because that thing gives me a nice surface I can rip the cables around on it keeps them out of the way so yeah if you do get these if you did want to mount three and a half inch drives next up here you've got five and a quarter inch drives and you've got this weird lever here it took me a while to figure out the way this works is it's a sort of tool-less mechanism for installing them and I suppose it's because otherwise it'd be quite hard to try and screw into that so the way this works is this slides back and forward so if you push this forward that's now unlocked five and a quarter inch drives so you can carefully push them forward or push the cat push the blanks or your drives forward and remove them from the case now I'm being quite careful here because when I mentioned the edges are sharp that was the one time I had about an incident was when I was first pushing this out I pushed that forward and my thumb or my the side of my hand caught this bit of metal here and it was quite sharp and I cut myself so just be a bit careful there but if you pull these out you get these two sort of solar panels and these are quite cool because even though they're just filler panels I'll be taking out they do actually have space internally it's about another three and a half inch Drive so as standard of this case you could actually Mount four three and a half inch drives just using these sort of additional trays which is quite cool and as I mentioned it has a sort of tool-less mechanism for mounting these and it uses these metal plates here if you get ones on the existing filler panels and you also get a couple of spheres in the back as well and essentially what you do with this is you take it you put it on the side of your drive so that these like little pegs go into the screw holes and you line it up so that I can't reach where it goes and I'll pull the other way out to take a look yeah you line it up so this little springy piece is sort of sprung at the front and the idea is that you can push it in and then with this lever pushed in you'll be able to pull it out again but if you pull this lever backwards if you try and pull the drive out this little bit here catches so it won't pull out and it seems to hold it really securely so yeah that's how you mount these drives so yep we won't be using these filler panels in this build but we will be using these little brackets we'll need those in terms of cables you've got a couple of cables coming from the front panel you've got a standard USB 3 header for those USB ports nice to see USB 3. and then you've got these headers for all the LEDs so fairly standard you've just got power hard drive power switch reset switch and then an LED fridge neck and an LED for the alarm so yeah it's fairly standard and then finally also you have these three fan cables and these are still included fans and you can see that I've never in front of the case here there's three 50 mil sort of fans basically and they blow air into the case to kill the machine now it's nice to see that they are at least three pin fans they are speed the speed is monitors the motherboard can monitor them but for this build I want to have speed controlled fans so I'll be taking these fans out and I'll be replacing them with pwm speed controlled fans just because that'll be a lot quieter I don't really need the airflow to be able to turn the fan speed down quite is quite important I did try these fans out and they're not deadly loud but because I sit next to this machine all day I kind of want to take these out just make it a bit quieter so that's fine so go do that as well now the only slightly tricky thing is actually getting to these fans they're too little while to figure it out because obviously they're installed under there and I couldn't work out to get these out and I'm trying to remove this whole panel here and this piece and I was taking screws everywhere and it wasn't coming out turns out removing this sort of piece here is possible but it's not really ideal you don't really want to be doing it so instead to replace these fans what you need to do is take these two screws out on either side at the logs which then removes the little handle and removes a little piece at the back here that sort of separates that and then all you need to do is you under the case there's three screws on this black piece here and if you unscrew all of those what will then happen is this black front panel will come off the case and you can then easily access the fans from the front so a little bit fiddly but it is possible foreign panel it's a bit fiddly you may want to do it all that often but it is possible so that they're removed we're going to lift that up there take that out and as you can see you can see the fans in there so all we need to do is actually like remove these fans now look down properly at it it's all I need to do is there's two screws at the top of each fan so you need to undo those screws take the fans out and put the new fans in so that's perfectly fine the only other thing of note in this case also does include a built-in dust filter in this front panel that way it has this little dust filter in here it's up to you with really whether you leave this in or not personally I don't really like dust filters on servers just because it runs 24 7. it does get Dusty and you need to take kind of take the server down to clean it out otherwise it's going to sort of clog up with a server I'd rather just let the inside get a bit Dusty and then occasionally clean out the inside of the machine rather than having to try and clean dust filter retain the clog up so personally I'm going to take this out but it's up to you if you get the option because you may be building these in sort of as more of a desktop and it might be in a super Dusty environment which case you might want to leave that in but yeah that can come out there so if it's in the case let's go ahead and take a look at all the other parts we'll be using for this build now if you look at this you'll notice we're missing a few quite important components you know there's no motherboard or rammer processor or storage controller or anything like that so yeah well let's go and get that give me a sec so we'll get those other parts in so here we go uh yeah that's that's uh that's another server I'm going to explain this so yeah when I was researching this I was looking at all different parts and I've initially went down looking at Z on e3s again because they seem like pretty good chips I think it's not e3s now it's like Z and E 2000s the series the lower end sort of zeons are based off the desktop chips so I went down that route and they looked quite good however with the current chip shortage there isn't that much stock availability of them and they're quite expensive so I started looking in the secondhand market for them and they came across this build and this server was such a good deal I immediately jumped at it so what we'll be doing is we'll take the server apart we'll be taking the motherboard processor Ram out of it and they'll be using that to do this build and this is quite an interesting machine it's a bit of a different platform that people have seen before so we'll go into it take a look at it so yeah let's get the table cleared out pop the server open and see what parts I've got and when we look at the price I paid for this you'll see why I jumped at this because it was a very good deal for the hardware it contains so here we have the server and you see here you can see a brand name and that is that hole now data's not a company I'd really heard of before but they seem to make sort of business continuity and backup systems I think they do software and virtual appliances as well but they also sell these Hardware Appliances it's the sort of thing if you're a big business that's got a lot of money you go to them you buy this magical box mainly for the software that runs on it you probably pay software licensing on top of that I'm not sure and this magical box does all your backups and stuff like that but realistically it is just an x86 server running their special software and obviously software will be wiped off it since but underneath it is just an x86 server and the key thing with this is how cheap player got it so I only paid 450 pounds for this machine now that could be a great deal or that could be a rubbish deal depending on what's inside it's when we get inside you'll see how much harder Hardware actually has and work out how much this really is worth because this was a really good deal and there's quite a lot of these on eBay at the moment I think it's the sort of thing that's getting to the point that either it's been deprecated so their companies are getting rid of them or maybe they're you know companies are moving away from data or just have got to the point that they're getting past the warranty period so they're being replaced because there's quite a few of these I've seen quite a lot of these on eBay there's a couple different Generations this is a newer one but I'll talk about that when we get into the hardware so let's pop the top off and see what I got from a 450 pounds because realistically I struggling to build anything really comparable to this for Less so that's what we have inside so the first thing you'll see here is the motherboard and this is customized slightly to dato but there isn't really much it is based in off the shelf motherboard the model number on this board is s4p2143 and that's the sort of Dazzle part number for it because this is a series 4 hence S4 however looking on the ASRock Rack website because Nas Rock rack board it seems basically identical to the d2143 d8 um the only difference I can really see between the Azeroth part and this part here is that the Azeroth motherboard has a USB 2 header and a USB 3A Port whereas this has a single USB 3 header that's the only real difference I can see and what's quite interesting with this is this is the Xeon D based motherboard now if you haven't heard of the Xeon d it's an Intel Intel sort of high-end system on chip platform for servers you can think of it a bit like an atom in the sense it is a single CPU on the motherboard that handles everything and it's solder to the motherboard however unlike the atom this is actually a really powerful chip and in particular this one is the second generation of Xeon D it's Skylake based which sounds old but bear in mind that xeons tend to lag behind desktop CPUs a little bit so this CPU only came out in like 2018 I think and then they still make it it's still a current model I think they're just about to replace it with a newer generation but it's not actually that old there's also other adaptive appliances based on the older 1500 series Eon D chips which should also be a perfectly viable option but I went for this because it was around about the same price and it's a fair bit newer and interestingly these Xeon D chips Arch that I would say closer to the Xeon scalable platform high-end CPUs than they are to something like the Xeon e-cpus and that's because this little invadi chip here has eight cores 16 threads got hyper threading It's a 65 watt TDP so it's relatively power efficient but it is still pretty powerful and it has quad Channel memory so this has full qual Channel memory supports that's what this Ram will be running in it's ddr4 and also unlike the Xeon e chips which again only support dual Channel memory this also supports registered ECC memory whereas Xeon e-chips only support unregistered ECC and this is quite useful mainly if you're buying Ram second hand because secondhand registered ECC memory is super cheap and that's really for a couple of reasons first of all it doesn't generally work in standard desktop Hardware whereas unregistered ECC memory quite often can so there's not really a certain market for it second hand and additionally because this type of ram that comes out of servers are disposed of unmasked from big companies there's huge amounts to this memory in the secondhand Market now speaking of ram this has it has 64 gigs of RAM it's got eight eight gigabyte stacks and it's ddr4 however if I want to upgrade this looking on eBay right now I can get 128 gigs of RAM for this machine for about 100 140 pounds registered ECC memory is super cheap it's also nice having ECC memory for like error correcting and stuff like that and having a nice reliable server but the fact that these Xeon D chips support register DCC means the second hand memory is really cheap and it kind of just also shows that this comes from the higher end Xeon scalable series platform rather than coming from like the lower end zone E-Series chips so I'll do is I'll spin around getting a little bit closer and take a look at the motherboard and I'll conclude the other Hardware as well okay so it's rambling on a bit there but yeah we'll take a look at this Hardware so this machine here as you as I mentioned before take the ram out we'll see that each of these is an 8 gig stick of ddr4 registered memory so that's 64 gigs which is absolutely plenty for what I'm doing here of course you could upgrade it but I don't really need more but that is an absolute ton of RAM for this machine so yeah that's the memory there obviously there's a lot of that we'll take all that in a minute it's got this Riser card we can take out here and yeah that is the motherboard so we'll take the Riser card I'm just gonna take a look when you take the whole machine apart and also the cpu's under that heatsink we won't take that off but interestingly actually looking at pictures it's actually essentially a full-size Intel chip with integrated heat spreader it's not like a little atom thing at all and there's that heatsink there we'll need to do some interesting stuff to cool this because obviously it's currently the same for this case with these big fans blowing air directly across it but I've got a plan for that so we'll take a look at that later and as I mentioned speaking of this chip it's a Xeon d2143it which is their Sky Leaf generation chip released in 2018 it's eight core 16 thread base clock of 2.2 gigahertz and it boosts up to three gigahertz so it's actually a pretty powerful little CPU and the interesting thing with the Xeon D is it's a system one chip so essentially where you normally have your chipset and your CPU with this it's all embedded into the ones one single chip and this this chip is extremely powerful for example in terms of storage this chip has 12 SATA ports and that means with this I don't really need to worry about a separate HBA with a traditional server like my old one you've maybe only got four SATA ports on the motherboard it's not enough so you then you'd have to buy an HBA which is quite expensive put that in Flash firmer on it and then having that HBA also requires additional power consumption whereas these 12 SATA ports down here are connected directly into this chip so you don't need any of that extra stuff now it doesn't support a SAS it's only SATA but for the ssds I'm using that's absolutely absolutely fine and that'll hopefully save a fair bit of power consumption and additional cost time to get those additional Parts in so for the storage you'll see down here there's a bunch of different starter ports there's four SATA ports here that are just normal SATA ports and there's these two mini SAS connectors that are again just four SATA ports on each and I've got some breakout cables for those so yeah that runs off this chip now I mentioned that there's an older generations of this machine from datto and they use the d1500 series Z on these they're not quite as powerful and don't quite have as many onboard stat supports but those boards are also worth looking at for this sort of system because what data we've done on those are ASRock I think I've done on those is they've actually embedded an LSI HBA onto the motherboard and apparently you can just flash the it firmware onto that so you could actually get one of those and still have I think they do 16 ports on the motherboard and yeah you have one motherboard there's enough starter ports just because it's got that built-in HBA so that's another option now the other thing integrating to the SOC is the network interfaces and this chip actually has up to four 10 gig networks and 10 gig network interfaces built into it and because obviously it's high-end Intel Xeon chip they're pretty high-end Intel Nicks so they've got all the features you need in terms of virtualization and stuff like that it's really pretty powerful plus the other benefit of actually having it built into this CPU is where there's a lot of server next especially 10 gig ones require a lot of cooling because they're designed for very high airflow cases with all that heat concentrated on this one heat sink I only need to worry about cooling that one chip I don't need to worry about cooling all these out on necks so that's really good now down the back you'll see this additional board I'm taking out here and you may think wait but it's not a network card sort of but not quite the actual Network controllers itself is inside the CPU here and I've just dropped that screw down there that's very inconvenient but what it doesn't have is the ethernet 5 is built in that's the thing that converts to the physical and the ethernet interface you're going to connect into on the back so what this motherboard has is these cards that they call mezzanine cards and this contains the ethernet 5S so the idea is that you can get different cards like this they'll have different interfaces depending on what you need so at standards machine has come with two 10g base T ports so that's two 10 gigabit ports over copper and I'd probably rather had SFP but this will do I mean I'm not actually going to be using 10 gig for this anyway at least for a while but it's nice I've got that now one thing to bear in mind just like I sort of Saw as an observation is that apparently this doesn't support nbaset so it won't support um five gig or 2.5 gig ethernet it only supports one gig or 10 gig so that's just something to bear in mind that you couldn't just plug this into cheap 2.5 gig switch without having a switch to also took 10 gig so that's something to bear in mind but yeah that's this card here so this isn't the network controller itself it's just the ethernet 5s and while it does have a heatsink it won't require really any active cooling which you would require if it was actually a full network card however you'll notice there is actually quite a lot of interesting connectors here and that's because you can actually get different Riser cards for this and some of those can be full on network cards so this one connects onto this interface here and that's just for the ethernet 5S that are connected directly onto the CPU here however looking at the data sheet for this board these other two connectors have atex pcie Lanes so the idea is that you can actually get other mezzanine cards that actually house the network controller themselves that plug into the same space but connect over PCI Express so it's pretty flexible they do sell other fly cards that do integrate with the Xeon D CPU the cell ones that either have this one here they sell one with two SFP plus ports all the cell one I think had four gigabit Ethernet Nicks so you can do that as well of course this will do absolutely fine I'll run a gigabit for now but I can maybe upgrade it down the line or upgrade my network online to use this card to its full potential and while you can see the board there again is branded by dashboard there as is this here they're basically identical to the ASRock Parts apart from a couple of minor tweaks so yeah it's basically an ASRock board so yeah it's network card out so what else do we have here well next up we've got this little SSD on the motherboard and this is a little Intel optane Drive I think it's 58 gig now again I'm not going to be using this but it's nice that it came with it I suppose I'll keep it under the spare but this is also what the machine would have originally booted from so yeah what we need to do is obviously disconnect the rest of this get the Ram out and get the whole bundle board out of the case and then we can start building a new build look before we do that we'll take a look at all the other hard drives in here as well because even though all I actually really bought this for is a motherboard processor and RAM there's a lot of other additional Hardware in here that I could either sell on or use okay so I've told all the Ramo it's starting to disassemble this but there's a few other partisans we'll take a look at so first of all if you look in the front there's a couple hard drives so pull these out and you'll see that we this machine came with two two terabit hard drives obviously they're used hard drives they're from 2017. I don't think these are original to this machine but yep it came with two two terabyte hard drives and then if you look under here there's a screen either side they've already taken out this cover slides off and there's a couple more Powers so we see a couple of hard drives here there's a one terabyte Western Digital blue laptop drive now this is definitely not original to this machine because as you can see it's got a sticker on it that says replaced with HP spear which is the sort of sticker you get on the HP laptop drives so presume they've just Chuck this in and then next up it comes an SSD again I don't think this is original but it's a little Kingston 256 gig SSD it's just a basic starter SSD don't model that is um KC 600 yeah it's KC 600 Kingston SSD I don't really need it but again useful little thing to have sitting around so yeah may as well have that so that's the other part of the sort of came with and I finally up here with the power supply which is from act Bell and it is what what is that I think 350 what I think I saw last time I watched it I've talked about 400 watts a 400 watt actual power supply and it's 80 plus gold which is quite good but if you're going closer and take a look at the sticker on the side of this power supply it was quite surprising to me so here we have the power supply and here with a sticker that was very surprising when I first saw it now obviously Americans are very proud of building things so it's probably assembled and tested in the USA by George H and yeah see if that said me in the UK I'd expect it to catch fire but yeah that's the sort of who made it and when it was made but the key thing is when it was made now if we noticed being an American date because well it is that's the 10th of January 2022. now the time of filming it's the 13th of October 2022. so this machine is way less than a year old which makes an even better deal because speaking of pricing I hadn't really mentioned that our Xeon D motherboard based around this sort of platform and this particular chip currently probably costs around 800 pounds the ond platforms are really expensive so you'd be looking at about 800 pounds just for this motherboard really then you factor in that this also came with 64 gigs of RAM the network amazing card that alone is worth would probably be buying that new probably about a grand if not more and I paid 450 for this and then you factor in the fact this came with a couple of extra hard drives 450 for this is a strictly good deal and then you factor in that it's less than a year old it's ridiculously cheap so I was looking at that thinking wait so someone's bought this machine has was made in January and somehow in the space of 10 months it's come from the USA to the UK it's been put into service if they've been taken out of service again and then it's gone to recycling company who's then had time to go through and process amongst all the other machines they'll be processing who's then at times list on eBay then I've had to buy it and then it's had to come here all that in about 10 months how long will this machine actually used for so that kind of got me thinking this opt-in drive I'm pretty sure is original to this machine because a lot of the data machines I've seen on eBay I think about all of them come with an octane drive like this and it'd be a bit of a weird thing for the recycler to put in so I suspect this is original to the machine so the other day what it is I fired it up and took over the smart data for this SSD and I was very pleasantly surprised because according to the smart data this drive has only had 46 power on hours I have a suspicion this machine was possibly never actually used in service because it's almost spotless in size and the SSD has been powered on for such little time that I can't see how reasonably could have been deployed for this SSD to only run for 46 hours so yeah that was very surprising I'm pretty sure that for 450 pounds I essentially got a brand new system that's worth well over a grand so yeah that was a very good deal so yeah I was very pleasantly surprised with that so we now needed to do is continue stripping this down really just get the motherboard out get all these parts tidied up and we'll take a look at the parts here and then all the other parts going for the new build so here we have the motherboard so we'll take a quick look at this before we take a look at the other parts so I've already covered some of this before but we've easily all the i o on it so we've got on the back in terms of IO you've got a Serial port a VGA port this is like a locator button so you press that and it lights up or you can light it up in the IPM eye and speaking of the ipmi you've got a gigabit interface with the ipmi here and a pair of USB 3 ports and an amazing card we go in here inside the network ports which is on the back plate of course your standard power connector is about 24 pin ATX and an 8 Pin EPS loads of 4-pin fan headers there's three up here one here and one here one here so all the fans I'm putting can be connected over four pin for pwm control you've also got your eight ddr4 slots which will be running quad Channel CPUs under that heatsink there and then expansion slots so as I mentioned before we've got amazing card where you can either put a card like the one I've got here in which just connects up ethernet files to the onboard or the next built into CPU but two of those other slots there can also carry PCI Express if you want to use a card that uses PCI Express then down here you've got some pcie slots you've got a 16x slot and an atex slot which is open back so you can put longer cards and if you needed to but it's set up that if you put an apex card in here this drops down to 8X as well so it's either 168 card or two ATX cards there's also an m.2 slot so that had that opt-in drive in it that's got four pcie gen 3 Lanes all the PCA you're on here's gen 3 which is good so you could use that for ssds or anything like that over here we can see we have the a-speed chip which is an AST 2500 that's the outer band management controller because this board has full ipmi capabilities and finally at the bottom board with all the ports so we've got a bunch of different things here serial Port they are USB 3 header there that's right angled so I'll need to potentially get a right angle adapter again to try and get it in because it'll probably not fit in the case like it is but that's fine connection for all the front panel i o and then finally here we've got all the SATA ports so as I mentioned this is all SATA is not a SAS but that's absolutely fine you've got four ports here the red one is red I think that's for sassa Doms so you think it's powered so you can put a stata domain and that's powered and then these too many stats connectors here that also carry four ports each so essentially you've got eight or sorry 12 starter ports here down here which is quite good so yeah that's the parts was taking it that data server so we'll now do is we'll get all the other parts in and think about all the parts we use for this build and then we'll build it so other than that we need some storage and that's what we've got here with these ssds so here I have a bunch of crucial mx500 ssds I've used the mx-500 extensively along with the older mx200 mx100 and I can't think I've ever had an issue with them they've always been Rock Solid ssds you can get them for a very reasonable price nowadays they're often on sale but they're not cost cut really they've got full dram cash and all that sort of stuff so they're proper good drives I've got six one terabyte drives and two 500 gig drives no this is where I'll talk about how I'm actually going to set this up in software I'm gonna try something a bit weird that's a bit Niche but I feel could work very well with my previous server I just used freenas or true Nas nowadays but I don't say to that is it's not super easy to expand cheaply you have to add in groups of drives at a time and while raid Z expansion is coming to ZFS it's probably still a while off but for now I want something that's very easily expandable now if you look online the immediate thing people jump to with that is unread and I'm gonna get shot down I'm not in too much detail I've just I something with unread and I can't work out what it is just unsettles me a little bit I don't know what it is it seems to just not really know what it is it seems to see it's a hypervisor gaming server for people's desktops and Extreme Gaming also data storage and everything else and then also for your business it just seems to be a it seems to just try and try and be too much and then just looking at some of the forums I've just seen a few red flags there's things like apparently this might have changed but apparently there's no way to get security patches between future releases I might be wrong but just seeing that sort of stuff just is a little bit of a red flag to me and then additionally it talks about there's I've seen stuff on forums saying like oh it's good because it now enforces a password for the web interface it's like well surely that should be a feature out the box but what but what I do like about unread is the way it's sort of drive storage array works now if people don't know how that works on unread essentially what it does is it pulls a bunch of Drives together so when you save a file to on a normal rate array it will stripe across multiple disks but with unread all it does is rate it to a single disk so each file is on a single disk and what then happens is parity data is calculated to one or two parity disks so that means the disk feels you can rebuild it from the parity information a bit like read 5. but what's quite cool with it is because it's sort of single file on a single disk without having to stripe it it means you can very easily expand the array you can just add in an individual disks one at a time and expand the array and as long as your parity disks are bigger or the same size or bigger than the biggest disk in the array that's that's fine the other cool thing with unreads is that your actual data disks the ones in the array just use standard file system so you can use xfs or btrfs or anything like that so you can take a disc out of the machine put it into another machine and access all the files sure you can only access the files that are on that disk not the ones on the other disks but they're still there so we're just like a traditional raid array or ZFS pool if something catastrophic happens and totally corrupts it you could be totally out of luck and be unable to recover anything because your fails are all straight across all the disks whereas with unread you can still recover the files from the individual drives that are still working so even if you have too many Drive failures so you can't recover the array you can still recover the data on the working disks because they're not not striped it's just on individual desks now of course the key thing is biggest lesson in this reader's not back up never rely on a raid array or parity or unread or anything as a backup always back up and that's what I'll be doing so as I mentioned I like how unread works but I'm just not super confident about using it so I took a look to see if there's an open source way of doing it because I thought surely someone's come across this and solved that problem and they have there's two pieces of technology I can use to get a very unread like setup but without using unread just using standard Linux and that is merger fs and snap read first of all we have merger FS all that does is take a bunch of disks with individual file systems so each driver will be formatted with ext4 or butterfs or anything like that and it presents them as a single Mount point and when you write to that mount Point all it does is it distributes the files across all the drives based on the policy and that policy can be something like new files to the drive the most free space and then when you open it up it just presents all the files as if it's one big Drive which is basically what unread does and then what snapbreed does is it calculates parity information so a bit like unread you give it a bunch of disks you give a multiple one or more parity disks I'll be giving it two parity desks and when what it'll do is when you run it it'll calculate poverty data for your array and if a disk error fails or a file gets corrupted you can rebuild just that disk or just that file from the party data now the one disadvantage of snap parade over unread is the unread priority information is calculated in real time snapbridge on the other hand is a program that you need to run on a schedule so you say you'd run that snap rate sync every hour or every day that's when the parity information is calculated so if you were to write a file to disk until the next snap read sync runs that file isn't parity protected the other disadvantage is that snap pretty doesn't sort of it won't keep the array up if a disk fails if a disk fails you won't be able to access any of the files that were stored on that disk until you rebuild it that's a bit of a pin but I can deal with that realistically I've got enough backups if a disk did fail I could access the files I needed and most of the data on this is more or archive it's not like it's live data it's business critical used all the time the final disadvantage of snap breathe is it has what's called a right hole and that is if you were to delete a file or modify a file until you run the next snapbreed sync there's a risk that some other files might not be recoverable if they are parity data is computed using the blocks that you've modified first of all this can be mitigated a bit by using a second parity disk because that provides additional parity information to kind of cover for that but what I'll also be using with this is as I'm using Buster face that supports snapshots so I'll be using a script which is a wrapper around snapbridge called Snap breed buttery face and essentially all that does is it creates snapshots and buttery face before doing the parity calculation and calculates the parity from those snapshots and that basically eliminates the risk of this right hole because I'm modifying any files of deleting any files they're still going to be stored in that snapshot that the character is built from until they're next on the sink and the snapshot will be recreated so yeah that's my plan there in terms of deathstraw I'm still toying with that I'm not quite sure yet one thing a lot of people use is open media vault which is like a sort of Linux distro a bit like freenas but the idea is unlike freenas which is tied to ZFS open media vault is just a sort of web interface management front end for any sort of file systems you want so you can very easily set that on top of snap reader measure fs and there are plugins to do that I played about with it the plugins were a little bit buggy and it didn't really rap very well with merger with the snapberry buffer effect so I need to do a lot of bulging so I don't know if I'll bother with that it's probably not worth the effort for me so I'll probably just take the last up on beer Debian and just set it all up from scratch which will be quite easy to do I do want the ability to run VMS on this though so I'm still toying between two different ways of doing that either I installed Debbie and bear metal and just run VMS on Debian which would give me a slightly worse VM experience or I installed proxmox on this and pass through some of the storage controllers to a VM and that VM will run the roller on than that so here we have the ssds as I mentioned before which is the crucial mx500s we've got six one terabyte ssds and two 500 gig ssds so the one terabyte ssds will be the main storage array two of those will be parity desks the rest will be data giving me four terabytes of usable storage and then keep expanding that with individual one terabyte ssds to basically about eight terabytes of storage in this machine of course it would be possible to upgrade bigger ssds in the future put two terabytes ssds or whatever and get even more capacity but yeah six one teraby ssds for now and then a pair of 500 I guess is these which will be the boot drive so these will either run proximox or Debian or rather poster VMS if it's running process anyway these will be the sort of main OS drives and there's been some sort of mirror so either a ZFS mirror or Linux MD raid or battery FS mirror so these will be somehow mirrored so that's these will be the boot drives there and next up we have the power supply so you'll notice this about an interesting power supply in a sense that it looks prehistoric but this is something you'll need to bear in mind if you're going to do a build in a 2u case you'll notice a 2u case is the exact same height as an ATX power supply and that means that you can't really use a power supply that has a top 120mm or 140mm fan in a 2u case because all you'll do is you'll cut off the airflow and suffocate the power supply now you do get 2u power supplies or hot swap redundant power supplies and things like that but those are generally quite deep so those won't fit into short depth case like this which is why this case uses an ATX power supply so what it means is you need to get an atex power supply with a rear 80mm fan so the keyword you want to look for if you're buying a power supply for a system like this is an industrial power supply so that's what this is here this is a c Sonic ss350es and this is one of their what is called an industrial power supply so it's designed for applications like this this is a few years old I've had it for a while so it's not they don't currently make this one anymore but they basically superseded it with the es2 which is basically the same thing just a slightly updated version of it so they still do the es2 series which is a replacement for this which is 80 plus bronze they also do the RS series and the JS series which are a bit higher end they're 80 plus gold and they go all the way up to 1000 Watts so you're not going to ever have an issue where you can't get a perfect powerful enough in this form factor the trick is you just need to look for industrial ones and see Sonic currently have the best range of those it's got plenty connectors but the cables are a little bit short unfortunately just because the power supply has to go on the left of the machine and this motherboard has the ports at the far side over here so I'll be using a couple of extension cables so pick these up stuff 24 pin extension and EPS extension so only choose these to extend the cables it'll do I could have got a pair of pile of longer cables but that would be additional cost and this is perfectly fine now one other trick you could maybe do if you don't want to get an industrial power supply like this is to look at sfx Power Supplies an sfx power supply is essentially a bit like an ATX one but just a lot smaller in all dimensions and it's the same for small form factor cases but what you can get is you can quite easily get brackets that will you can screw onto the front of an sfx power supply and then mount it in an ATX case and the post player kind of just floats in the middle of the case while those power supplies do tend to have top mounted fans you need to be very careful but you may be able to get a bracket in power supply combination such that it would float in the middle of the case and still have enough space for the airflow with that fan now the benefit of that would mean is you could potentially use a power supply that's got potentially better connectors or nicer cables or something modular you also be able to get easier it might be easier to get a power supply or something like 80 plus Platinum certification so that's another option as well the next stop you may be looking at this case and thinking well how am I installed on the hard drives but what I really wanted was a case with hot swap drive base but as I've mentioned there just isn't really any that are short enough depth for the rack because what they'll always do is they'll have hotspot plays across the entire front of the machine which then protrude into the machine and then the case gets really deep so instead of what I've done is I went for this case which has a two five and a quarter inch base and I've bought these now these are probably one of the most infuriating things to get because they're always so expensive for what is a very simple device and these are often called mobile racks or back planes or hot slot caddies there's all different names for them and essentially all this does is a little device that goes into five and a quarter inch B and gives you a bunch of hotspot drive base if you're buying these in the UK AC dock is the Big Brand that people tend to go for but they're just quite expensive so I didn't really want the AC dog but I wanted the AC dog one but it was about 150 pounds I just couldn't really justify that these ones on the other hand are more of a generic sort of white label device these worked out about 100 pounds each which when you're buying two of them is you know 100 cheaper than buying the AC dog one AC dot do do a cheaper one around about 100 pounds but it's all plastic because I wanted metal Construction but yeah that's that there so essentially what you've got is sex individual hotspot Drive piece which you can get a little caddy drive in that slot in there it's got a couple of LEDs as well this one has a locking mechanism as well so you can feel it comes a little key you can use to rotate these silver things it's not really super secure it just stops driving accidentally being removed not going to five for quarter inch B and around the back you see you have individual SATA ports for each Drive apparently this is capable of SAS as well I've not tried it but it does say that it is um SAS 12 gigabit capable I'm only going to be using SATA but yeah we've got your individual ports there a single SATA power connector it also has a 40mm fan on the back which will cool the drives this is a bit loud it's not too loaded just like the grating annoying noise so I'm replacing out those nachos over there but yeah that's what we've got there so that's gonna go into the case now as I mentioned the fans are quite loud so I think that these knock these not your fans which is the A4 x20s which are really good fans um these are very common for sort of retrofitting into networking equipment because they're quite thick 40mm fans and they're dead quiet but they move a lot of air so I'll do is I'll replace fan on the drive caddy with this so I've got two of those fans here as well and obviously to connect these up to motherboard we need some cables so as I mentioned the motherboard has these two mini SAS connectors so what I've done is I've got this breakout cable which goes from a mini SAS connector on one end to four SATA connectors on the other end so we've got two of these because that's one for each mini SAS connector and that'll be four drives on each finally what we need is that will give us four more drives because we've got a six um six drive on each caddy and those four drives will connect up to standard SATA ports on the motherboard so far that I could have just used four standard SATA cables but I thought we'd try something a bit nicer so I got this which we'll take a look at let me pop links probably in the description and this is essentially four SATA cables in one now realistically all it is is four starter cables and then they go through a sort of braid in the middle but I thought this is quite neat because first of all it's the sort of thin server style SATA cables which are all foiled you know foil shield and all that sort of stuff but they're just a lot easier to bend and move around than a big thick sort of plasticky Sata cable and then being in one Bridge just makes it nice and convenient and then just simple things like they're all numbered so you can identify each end from each other end so I think they'll pick that up well that's quite neat and you can actually get these really large variants you can get these up to like six drives maybe even 10 drives so I'll leave the links for that description as well so there's a couple of smaller parts left the first one is just this very boring it's a USB 3 header right angle adapter and that's just because the header on this motherboard sticks out sideways so it'll I wouldn't be able to get a connector into that so I'll just about that they're cheap and that'll just push into there and that just means a USB 3 header no stick straight up so I can get a connector into that so that's just a very simple little thing there now the final device we have this one that looks a little bit weird and that's this is a SATA controller that connects to PCI Express over an m.2 slot now the reason I'm going for this and I don't know if I'm necessarily going to need it I might return it if I don't need it but as if I decide to run proxbox on this bare metal I know I'll need to pass through at least 10 of the SATA ports to a VM to run my storage stuff on now with this motherboard these too many SAS connectors are on one PCI Express lane or port or whatever they call it IMU group that's the word these ports here are another iommu group so I can pass through these separately from these however I will still need drives to boot the machine I can't pass through 10 of these ports and keep two out for the proxbox host so I bought this additional controller here so what that means is I can pass through two SATA controllers and keep one back to boot the machine I'll leave a link for this as well this is based on a g Micron JM b585 I think which is just a five port PCI Express SATA controller now let's say this is a slight warning if you're buying cheap SATA controllers is a lot of them are very dodgy and this one it probably isn't great so I'll be very interested to see how reliable this is however you do need to be quite careful there's two different things you really need to think of when you're buying these first of all is are they all genuine SATA ports running off a SATA controller or are they using Port multipliers you can quite easily get very cheap SATA controllers that have like 20 odd ports but what they're actually doing is they're taking a device like this that has five SATA ports and in hooking five port multipliers off of that each of those Fanning out four ports that'll give you 20 drives but each of your four drives is constrained or a single sat or six gigabit interface to one of the ports on the main controller and then you're squishing that down even further onto like an X2 PCI Express Lane or two PC express lanes this doesn't have that issue because this is just literally a five port SATA controller however even if you're looking at these you do need to be quite careful about things like the PCI Express interface because it's quite easy to get ones where you're actually going to be constrained by your PCI Express interface especially looking at Pizza Express Generations because this is Gen 3 so that's fine but a lot of these controllers are gen 1 or gen 2. in fact I've even seen ones that have say five ports four or five ports and they've got a single Lane PC Express gen one interface and with that you're literally looking at 250 megabytes a second which is you know not enough for one drive let alone five so you do need to be very careful with these it's just if you're going to use a cheap controller like this do your research and make sure you a get one that doesn't have weird Port multipliers in it and B make sure it's got enough PCI Express bandwidth for your needs but additionally if you're wanting to actually build an app with lots of drives get a proper HPA the only reason I'm using this is because I literally need two more SATA ports to pass through to a VM I'm not gonna be using a lot of drives off of this and I'll be interested to see how it goes I kind of bought this I was more of a curiosity to see how bad it is and yeah it's pretty neat though because it goes with an m.2 slot so that'll go in there and it'll kind of keep it out of the way so yeah we'll be using that or we won't be using that it really depends if I'm going to use prop smokes or not if I'm going to use proximals I'll be using that to pass some discs through to the VM I'll probably only pass the parity disk through and keep the data disks on the more reliable or more trustworlly SATA controller if I don't interview using that I can always return it to Amazon so yeah we've got that there so now we've only got a couple of Parts left and that's some Cooling so we've got these three fans here which are 50 mil pwm fans so we're using these fans just to replace the original ones just to give you some speed control because this motherboard has really good built-in speed control in the bios so I can very easily control all the fans so we've got three of those to replace the original fans and then finally we've got this big heatsink so I mentioned this earlier but obviously this motherboard is designed for cooling using sort of high airflow through a case so in a one year even a 2u case you'd have big fans that run at full speed potentially Aero deflectors going over this and that would keep it cool but I don't want that in this case because that would be really loud and all these fans aren't exactly going to do that so I need to have another option and realistically all I need to do is mount a fan to this heatsink of course the easiest option would just be to zip tie a fan on I could have done that but I came up with another idea now you can actually get replacement coolers for this particular chipset or this particular CPU however super micro seems to be the only company that makes it it's about 60 pounds it takes a couple of weeks to arrive because companies have to order it in and people still complain the fans really low so need to patch on the cost of additional fan as well so I thought well I've already got a heatsink here I test it by putting a fan on top and rolling prime95 and it didn't get hot so it was fine so all I need to do is figure out a way to mount a fan so my initial plan we just started just a zip tie a fan on and to be honest I'd be perfectly fine but I had a slight a slightly weird plan and that is that I saw these so this is a copper heatsink server cooler you can find these online I bought the second hand it's a cheapo a casa AMD operon cooler it's a very old AMD Ultron color that's totally obsolete but you can find these looking like AliExpress for like silver copper cooler or something like that no I'm not gonna be using the cooler itself but by having a solid copper heatsink what they tend to do is rather than screw the fan into the heat sink they have this aluminum profile that sits over the heatsink and screws into the site so what I did is I deliberately looked up a heatsink like this it's only about 17 pounds I looked up a heating like this that had a heat signal at the exact same width as the heatsink on this board so my plan here is to take this aluminum sort of assembly and fan off of this heatsink and somehow mount it onto this heatsink so yeah there's my slight bulge for cooling again we'll see that once it's all built but yeah that was look at all the parts that we're going into this build it's definitely a bit of an interesting mismatch of parts and some little bodies of that color but it should be quite a fun build so there you go let's look at all the parts and then we can finally do the fun part and start building this thing [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you thank you [Music] and there you go with that the builds no complete so what I'll do is we'll pop it all open take a look at what I've done talk about some of it because it probably looks very messy but there is very little you can really do about something like this but we'll talk about what I've done and then we'll try it out and see if it works because hopefully it does I'm not actually turned on yet so fingers crossed I've done it all right so yeah first of all obviously looking at the front you've got the hotspot Drive caddies and these don't have the ssds in them so you can pop that out pop one out there and that's now got an SSD in it I think that's on the 500 gig ones because one of the top ones so yep that's the ssds in there they fit very neatly into those candies which looks great so we have the inside and obviously you can see there's an absolute ton of cables but I've tried to manage them as best I can in rackpoint cases you don't really have the space that you get in a nice desktop case where you can root stuff behind the motherboard tray with this you've really only got you've only got one side panel so you can only really root the cables but you really can it's obviously got the power supply here and as I mentioned earlier the cables on it aren't really long enough to reach all the way from here all the way around to here so I've used these extensions I've got a 8-pin EPS connect extension and a 24 pin extension and those will extend down here and go into the motherboard and what it is I took those um hard drive bays out because I'm not going to use them and then instead of having them there I was able to put zip ties through the holes in this metal plate and secure all the cables down so even though there's a lot of cables floating around they're all very solidly in place like none of these are really going to move they're all very sort of tied up nice nice and tightly so they're not going to move and get in the way of fans or block airflow next up we've got all these cables for all the drives and I am so glad I went for these super thin SATA cables because this would have been an absolute nightmare of a full-size ribbony type cables now if you look down to The Rat's Nest behind the drive cages you'll see a couple other things I've done first of all you'll see that I've replaced those sort of included fans with these knock shows as I mentioned I was going to do and that'll never be a lot quieter and these are obviously pwm fans so one of them just connects the motherboard header under here so that's very a very simple route for the other one there wasn't any motherboard headers around here the only spare header was up here so I've used I've used an extension cable it comes under up around here and it's connecting over here so it's a bit of a weird cable route but that means it's connected up it's one pwm header the other option I did have was just use a pwm splitter which actually the fans came with so I could plug it into that single header there and split it out to both fans and that would work absolutely fine however I would lose speed monitoring for one of the fans I'd only get the speed from one of them and that means if one of these fans ever failed the motherboard wouldn't be able to say well if the fan didn't have the speed monitoring failed the motherboard wouldn't detect it and wouldn't indicate it on the fault light so I thought given I've already got the extensions and let's face it I don't really need I don't have an issue running along cable giving those cables everywhere anyway I thought I'll connect the other fan to this head over here so now both fans are independently monitored so if any fan in this system fails the system will know and it'll alert me the other thing I've done here is I've re-labeled some of these cables so as standard all these cables just came with with connectors labeled P1 to P4 I don't know what the P stands for but it had p on it so I kept them but just kept up with that for the starter starter cable I've just used it as is so I've used that for the first four drives but for the mini SAS breakout cables what I've done is I've re-labeled them so like you can see they're that's labeled p7 that's labeled P6 all the way down it was P11 P10 p12 so I've re-labeled all of them on this side and then the other side obviously the SATA ones are just using original labels and then I've relabeled the mini SAS cable so that was P5 to p8 and that's P9 to p12 so it just means I can easily see which Drive bees are mapped to which connectors are the same and then finally we have the CPU Cooler so I have bodged this a little bit but I'm happy enough with it my original plan was take that aluminum profile take off the original heat sink drill holes in it and screw this aluminum profile onto that heatsink and that would have worked quite well however well first I looked and I don't have a small enough drill bit I think I broke it and I just didn't really want to go to all that effort because I found I can actually slip it into this heatsink and it fits perfectly fine so if I pull that up you can see what I mean so if I slide this sort of profile like this into the outer two fins of that heatsink the tension of that is way more than enough to keep it in place and that worked fine was just a metal but just give it a little bit of extra get extra friction up a bit duct tape on either side a bit of a bulge but that works perfectly fine that makes it much more grippy I'm going to slide that into that heatsink that is absolutely not going anywhere and that's what's connected with the four pin cable into the motherboard for full pwm control and then finally looking around the rear of the machine We have basically what we had on the old one but same I also got VGA port serial port a two 10 gig next two USB 3 ports and then the ipmi management port a bunch of expansion slots I could use in the future and then the power supply so yep that they are is a finished build and while it isn't the prettiest thing in the world I'm dead happy with how it turned out okay so there's another moment of truth let's fire this up and see if it works and I have genuinely not even flight powered this on yet so this could all blow up I mean it shouldn't but let's see so I've got to connect to this little CV tester I did a video about this before essentially it's a little it's sold a CCTV tester but it can test network cables and stuff like that and it also works really well as little battery operated VGA monitor so I'll be using that to test it so let's turn the power on the back and see what happens okay no fire yet and I can see the ipmi heartbeat light on the motherboards come on so that's a good sign so now if we turn it on hopefully it works there we go so first test is I've wired the power button right correctly that's good and the power light as well that's good and it's yep it's turning on good so I've not broken it that's that's nice I mean it also tested the old server so I knew the motherboard and everything worked so it's good no I'm not broken it putting in here just need to wait for this to post it's a server it'll take absolutely used to post so once this comes on we'll come back okay so the machine's finally posted and we're now back in the Bios so a woman's too much detail here but if you look through the BIOS you can see it's detected the CPU it extended all the Rams 64 gigs find wherever the discs would be shown probably advanced storage there we go and in here we can see yep it's detect double drives so we can see it's detected and it seems to be missing some of them interestingly so I need to look at that yeah so it's missing a couple of the drives so we can see it's detected one two three four five six seven that drives one of them doesn't seem to be detected so I'll just go and check the cables on that and then we'll come back cool that's that sorted it was literally static cable so nothing went to storage configuration you'll see that all drives are recognized so we've got their four one terabyte drives on One controller and the other controller has two one terabyte drives and the two 500 gigabit drives so yeah close detected the other thing I didn't hear was I tweaked the fan curve settings that's under HW Monitor and basically what I've done is I've tweaked them so the CPU fan still works off the CPU temperature the front fans are just set up permanent I think 75 speed and the fans on the drive cages are set to I think about 60 or 55 speed you can also make all that work on CPU temperature as well you know see all the fan speeds there you see the temperatures and yep there's all the fan speed settings so it's actually pretty flexible here you can sort of set individual levels for the fans and then if you go into smart fan control you can set this what level each speed is or what speed each level is and also what temperature thumbs up the next level so it's fairly flexible you can also set it in here and as default it'll say to pass fan control over to The BMC and that does allow the fans to automatically ramp up and don't based on CPU temperature but I can't find anything in the BMC web interface to actually configure the fan curve so I don't know if that's just not a feature on this so I've decided to set manual control for the BIOS thing controls instead of The BMC and I've got that more customized fan control so yeah machine seems to be working so what I'm going to do is I'll go away off camera just get it all set up play a bit with those different software and I'll come back with at least some sort of working solution and we're back I've never got all the software set up and I've got the machine working I tried out a few different options and I've settled on running Debian bare metal using snap pretty to merger effects for the file system and then he's running VMS on top of Debian just using KVM I've also installed cockpit which is sort of system management web interface and that's got a nice web UI for creating VMS and stuff so I can use that to make it a bit easier than using the command line for VMS I also tried it using product smokes and that did work so I was able to set up proxmox past the little cheap pcie controller or starter controller through to the VM as well as well as one of the onboard controllers and that worked fine all the drives showed up and it worked great I just said I'll just say to go for Debbie and just keep a bit simpler because with this machine it's a Nas that occasionally is host VMS it's not a VM host that stores files I thought focus on the NASA aspect of it it can run VMS if it needs to because long term if I wanted to host a lot of VMS I'd rather have a separate VM host or move some of the stuff that's all on this off on site like a Raspberry Pi because the stuff at Host isn't actually that that power hungry or anything so yeah that's the software set up there now with proxbox I mean they use this little cheap Samsung adapter and while it did work I did end up having issues with it and what I found is that say while running a snap read scrub it would run a gigabyte a second for like a minute or so and then the speed would start dropping down it dropped down to about 500 megabytes a second so I took a look into this and what seems to happen is that out of the box this runs at full pcie gen 3 which is what it should do but after stressing it it would drop down to pcie gen1 I can't quite work out what's causing that and I don't know if maybe there's a weird incompatibility or something or just this this card rubbish which is probably more likely option I'm not sure but that was an issue I had I could you know try and debug it more put it in different machines test out but realistically I'm not going to use it anyway because I'm running Debian beer metal so I'll just return this Amazon but that's something to be reminded when I got this I remember saying this it was a bit suspicious of it and normally I don't trust cheap SATA controllers and ultimately that's sort of issue you get with these but yep as I mentioned for the software side of things I've got my snap read and merger effects so on this machine I've got all six storage drives one terabyte drives are formatted as boss Ray face and I've mounted them at various different moment points to indicate whether it's a parity desk or a data disk the top two discs are well the top two definitions machine are boot drives these are just in the Linux MD mirror they're just ext4 the next drives down are the two parity drives and then the next four drives are data drives then merger face mounts these four data Drives together into one big pool so if we take a look at that you can see we have one big pool with all the files in it and then if you look inside the individual data drives you'll see they have the same directory structure however only some of the drives or files are stored on each Drive so for example here if we look at a directory listing for a folder of all my YouTube videos you can see in the pool we see all the videos but if you look at the directory listing of that folder on each individual storage Drive you'll see each drive has a subset of those files so that's kind of how it works each file is stored on OneDrive and then it all mergerfish presents it as one unified file system then snap Bridge setup so snapbreed runs across all the data drives calculates parity information and writes it to the two parity disks you can also run scrubs which go through all the files on the desk or on the whole system compare it to the checksums on the parity drives and if any fails don't match it can repair them from Paris from the parity data so that's used to take the games like bit loss and Silent corruption I said let's not be taxed up on a schedule so currently every 10 minutes it runs a snap read sync to update the parity data and then once a week it runs a full scrub of the system but you can configure that and you can even set it up to run self scrub every day but only scrub 10 of the system every day so over the course of 10 days it scrubs the whole machine it's really configurable and I really need to play about with that a bit more I just set this up as a very basic test Alexander's performance but snap it is actually really good for it to build the parity data so for it to do a sync it does that about a gigabyte a second when doing a scrub which Spirits just checking the file Integrity it runs that about 1.7 gigabytes a second which is loads me that's really quick to just scrub so that's really good in terms of rebuilding if there's a field disk that's not quite as fast but that runs at about 100 100 megabytes a second or so which is fine you realize that they could rebuild one of these one terabyte drives in probably under three hours so that's not too bad so yeah that's the sort of performance you get the snap in terms of all the parity calculations and rebuilding in terms of the performance for accessing the machine because I only have gigabit Ethernet devices currently I can't really test this to its full potential so it maxes out about 100 megabytes a second using Samba I'm just using sample share the files though but because the way this works whenever the architecture realistically you're going to get the full speed of a single SSD so probably about 500 megabytes a second you're going to be looking at read and write in terms of noise and power consumption I'm pretty happy noise-wise yeah there's a bit of fan noise but once that's in the cabinet it'll be absolutely fine and realize I can adjust the fan speeds and compared to my old server the lack of hard drive noise is great and it was almost a bit of a weird thing to get used to because at one point I was just doing some tests just to test the file system and I was looking obviously this activity LED is blinking and then not hearing any hard drive any disc activity noise and then that felt weird because I'm like why can't I hear the drives oh yeah they're ssds whereas in my old machine you as soon as you just even slightly write to it or access it you hear all those hard drives rumbling away it's really loud so yeah the lack of hard drive noise is great and that was my main reason for going full SSD and then in terms of power consumption I'm also really happy when I first tested it out I was a bit worried because it was pulling about 60 watts at idle without even any having any discs in it this is when I tested the old server and I was a bit worried about that but I dug around in the Bios and the Sea states were all disabled or I think it was maybe only going to drop down to C1 so I reconfigured those so I can drop it into C6 and with that all set up with this machine connected to the network fully powered on all the drives in ipmi Connected all that sort of stuff it draws a bit 48 watts which is absolutely great I can't quite remember how much my old server is but I think it's 60 to 80 Watts it's a fair bit more so this is already quite a big power saving now I could have probably got a bit lower power consumption if I hadn't gone to the Xeon d-based platform because zlds are obviously based off their server chips so they don't have all the C states that their desktop chips support so this only goes down to C6 whereas the desktop sort of I3 I5 i7 type chips I've got many more C steps they can drop down to much lower power States when they're not being used I think also if I built this using a Zeon e chip they might have also had a little more had more sea States because they were based off the desktop chips so that could have been an option if I really wanted the lowest power consumption possible however the Xeon D has a lot of benefits in terms of performance ECC memory all the onboard storage and 10 gig and all that sort of stuff and I'm dead happy 48 watts that's perfect in fact I remember a few years ago well many years ago now when I built one of my first home servers that was a Intel atom d525 like a super cheap little dual core atom and a pair of SATA hard drives and I'm sure that pulled about 50 Watts so going from that to this and having the same power consumption is quite impressive to me so yeah that's broken consumption absolutely fine so I guess the final thing we need to do is make the rails onto the case and get installed in the rack okay so let's put the reels on all we need to do is take the inner rail out I think there's the same on both sides we Slide the front of it under that little tab there and put a single screw into the back there so get that screw in place and then we'll do the same on the other side and all we need to do is clip the rails into the rack and then get several slid in and there we go that's the real snow in place and these rails are really good because of that clipping style so it makes it super easy to install it in the rack especially for a rack like this where you can't really get into the rear remote without having to pull it forward and unscrew the back it makes it it's so easy to be able to clip it in at the front and back without undertake the rack apart so that's really good so yeah got one reel in there one wheel in there so all we need to do now is take this over and slide it in and you can put a single screw through the front to secure it in place and there we go that's now installed in the rack and yeah those rails make it much easier so that's sitting there connect up the switch and the pdu down the bottom um and yeah and you see there's a single screw on each side that screw secures it into the rail so that's not actually holding the weight of the server or anything that just stops it being able to be pulled out so if you want to pull it out you undo those screws you don't really need those you could actually leave those out and then just be able to pull the server out you know totally as you please but you can't screw it in like that so yeah got server installed in there so there you go that's my brand new fully SSD based Home Server I'm dead happy with how it turned out build went pretty well really like the end result and yeah it'll be really interesting straight it's not pretty to merge your face long term so obviously that's all installed there and working away so what I need to do is sort of get it all set up get the VMS moved on to get all my data moved off of that server onto this one and then rebuild that one as a backup server so that'll take a little while but I'll go and do that and really interested try this out long term so yeah there we go thank you very much for watching if you're interested in buying any of the parts using this build especially this case from server case there's links in the video description and a pinned comment so yeah thank you very much for watching

Channel: Cameron Gray

Views: 99,890

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Id: YkbP4mAEcBs

Length: 77min 36sec (4656 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022