How To Plan and Build a NAS Home Server.

[Music] hey guys welcome to elevated systems i'm your host cj and today as promised i'll be tearing down my threadripper workstation and rebuilding it as an unraid server now unlike most of my projects and videos i don't have a well thought out and scripted plan going into this i have a rough idea and that consists of tearing this pc down to get all the components i need from it storing the parts i don't need and rebuilding it with some of the current parts in here and some new stuff and then installing and setting up the unraid server now i'm pretty sure this will have to be broken into two videos the actual hardware build and then the unread server software build if you will because i want to take my time with the actual hardware build side of it to explain why i picked the components i did and how it all relates to and works with the unrate operating system but first i really need to get this disassembled because the chassis i'm putting it all back into isn't intended for a motherboard as big as the asus zenith extreme alpha so there'll need to be some modification and i need the motherboard to plan those mods i'll explain the housing wise around that when i get to it but now for time's sake i think i'll just go with a quick deconstruction montage and i'm sure just as soon as that's done i'll have conceived a much better intro and explanation for this video so if you have no idea what's going on right now don't worry neither do i but we all will just in about 60 seconds [Music] so that was a quick montage for you for me it's four days later and i'm a little better organized i can better explain what this build is and what it isn't see some of the most popular home server builds on youtube take an old desktop pc you got sitting in the closet installing a hypervisor like proxmox or unraid spinning up a few containerized apps and boom you have a new home lab those are great guides this is not that this isn't an old 500 dusty optiplex even at current used prices just this motherboard and cpu cost between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars so unlike my typical home office and gaming pc build guides this isn't a build guide i recommend you duplicate and build yourself although all of this is probably a bit outside the price range of most reasonable people the principles behind the build are what i really want to highlight as everything could be scaled down your old desktop might not be a threadripper but you may have a ryzen 1700x or an i7 8700k desktop you're replacing you can apply the same principles that i'm going to cover here to convert that system to a nas or home server more importantly what i'd like to do is maybe help you plan your next desktop home office or gaming pc build with an end of life plan in mind see when i built the workstation i just disassembled over three years ago i did it knowing this would be its fate after its use as my daily driver workstation was over this build was already planned back when i built the original pc so even if you're planning a build today that you'll use for the next five years i'll be highlighting some things you could consider to help you plan for the five years after that so what i'm going to do now is go over all the hardware as i'm assembling the system then i'll explain how it pertains to my server and how the same principles pertain to scaled down servers and i'll start with the cpu this is a second gen threadripper 2990wx it's a 32 core 64 thread cpu with a base frequency of 3 gigahertz and a boost frequency of 4.2 gigahertz it has 80 megabytes of total cache 64 pci lanes and quad channel ddr4 memory with ecc support it's installed on an asus zenith extreme alpha x399 motherboard this motherboard has a ton of features and i'm not going to go over all of them just the big ones that pertain to the build there are 4 by 16 pcie slots plus a by 4 slot giving a ton of pcie device support it has both gigabit ethernet and 10 gigabit networking eight dimms to support quad channel memory up to 128 gigabytes of non-ecc or unbuffered ecc in these i'm installing 4 by 16 gigabyte unbuffered ecc ddr4 3200 memory dimms for a total of 64 gigabytes if this kit works good i'll pick up a second kit for a total of 128 gigs there are three m.2 nvme slots on board which i'm installing a one terabyte samsung 970 evo pro which will be part of my storage pool and reserved for application of virtual machine installations and two on the included dim.2 riser which i'm installing two one terabyte intel 670p nvme drives which will be the cash drives and there are eight sata six gigabit ports so enough for the two eight terabyte western digital red pros and four four terabyte seagate ironwolf nas 3.5 inch hard drives i'll be installing as my storage pool finally i'm cooling the threadripper with a be quiet dark rock pro tr4 dual tower cooler this is a good spot to pause the build and provide some explanation now the msrp total of just the parts i've covered so far adds up to over four thousand two hundred and fifty dollars however like i said you can accomplish the same thing on a much scaled down level in fact the minimum requirements just for an unraid nas is a 64-bit one gigahertz cpu and four gigs of ram so if you're just needing a storage server you can use pretty much anything going back almost 20 years but let's look at some of the requirement considerations for the entire server environment the cpu consideration comes down to what types of apps or vms you intend to run servers in general are multi-threaded animals and if you're running apps that are multi-threaded like plex or handbrake or you want to run multiple vms then you want to look at 8 12 or even 16 core cpus while if you just want to run a nas or maybe a gaming server you can do that with a cpu with much fewer cores and a better single core performance other things to consider is does it have virtualization support now there are differing levels of virtualization support but if you're just running virtual desktops or server operating systems all ryzen or intel core cpus can do that now unread boots from a usb device and then runs completely in ram which is why i'm going with error correcting code memory it isn't necessary you can use non-ecc memory you'll just need to regularly reboot your server and if you're going with an intel cpu there's no ecc support until 12th gen and then you'd still need a w680 motherboard which brings me to the motherboard selection while your cpu may support hvm or m u virtualization and ecc memory your motherboard will also need to this is where you may need to look at those features in your motherboard you wouldn't normally consider now most if not all modern intel and amd motherboards even the budget chipsets have virtualization support but you should definitely double check however while only ryzen threadripper cpus officially support ecc memory unbuffered ecc will work with all ryzen cpus as long as the motherboard supports it and many of the budget chipsets don't so again you may want to look at the ryzen x series motherboards rather than the b or h series and again double check that ecc can be enabled in the bios and this leads me to the memory selection and why i went with ecc because unraid runs completely in ram and this server will have extended up times it's important that there are no errors in the data passed back and forth between the memory quick explanation without getting too boring and technical a computer fundamentally sees data as ones and zeros each one or zero is a bit of data those bits of data move back and forth between the cpu and ram if a one goes in a one should come out however sometimes a one goes in and zero comes out or vice versa this is a single bit memory error or as we informally call it flipping bits this can be been happening in hours days or months of uptime depending on the quality and stability of your memory these errors can lead to data corruption or even system crashes ecc memory as the name implies can detect these single bit errors and correct them again you don't need error correcting memory but a few things to consider if you're using non-eccd memory is first try to avoid consumer memory with high xmp or docp compared to its base or jdex speed for example the fancy ddr4 3200 memory i took out of here had a direct overclock profile of 3200 mega transfers per second but a base out of the box speed of just 2133 mega transfers per second while this ddr4 3200 has a base of 2666 and the ecc dvr4 3200 ram i have installed now has a base speed of 3200 so requires no overclocking now while it is very possible for docp and xmp overclock ram to be very stable overclocking is something you typically don't want to do in a server but regardless if you do enable an xmp profile or not what you do want to do is run a memory stability test to ensure your memory is in fact running stable at whatever settings you use and finally if you do go with non-ecc memory you'll want to completely reboot the server on a regular basis finally some other things to consider when choosing a motherboard is both available pcie and sata expansion now if you don't have enough sata connections for all the disk drives you may want to add that's okay you can get a pcie sata expansion card that can significantly expand your state of capacity but you will need available pcie slots and if you want to add things like graphics cards or 10 gigabit networking then you'll need to look at whether you need a motherboard with maybe more of the actual pci lanes used for physical by 16 by eight or by four slots and not say extra m.2 nvme drive slots but the biggest consideration is the overall quality of the motherboard a consumer motherboard is typically the first major component to fail in a home server and in my experience this is the one area where you just get what you pay for while the quality the components or the number of power phases available to the cpu may not be hugely important in a gaming pc the longer you keep the motherboard in service the more important it becomes so if you plan on giving your pc a second life as a server the motherboard is one of the areas you may want to spend a little more on than you normally would the other area is the power supply now i haven't introduced the psu yet but this is a corsair hx 1200i 80 plus platinum rated 1200 watt fully modular power supply this is overkill it was overkill for it when it was a workstation but it was extremely efficient the fan never even turned on and while it is overkill for the server as built today it gives me loads of headroom to expand as i will be doing i definitely see this utilizing multiple gpus in various vms and applications so again when you're planning your build i recommend looking at the power supply requirements of everything and after adding the normal 20 to 30 because you never really want to surpass about 80 percent of your psu's capacity well then step it up to the next higher wattage so if you were looking at a 650 watt psu step it up to a 750. in the end you'll end up saving finally i replaced the 360 aio with an air cooler simply for reliability the aio was already a few years old as is but especially a dual fan air cooler is a great choice for a system that will have a 24 7 uptime that leaves one of the hardest choices i had to make and that was the enclosure now first i want a desktop solution because i don't have nor do i have a place to put a server rack in my house now if you're just building an application server or hypervisor any case that holds your components will work if you're going with a storage server you'll just need to ensure it has room for your drives and if you're going standard atx there are a ton of great options there are even some great options for my extended atx board the fractal meshify 2 i took this all out of is and has been an awesome case for all of this but i had some other criteria three main criteria it has to hold the six drives it needs to be no bigger than a mid tower case and it needs to be silence focused and instep be quiet who sent me their silent base 802 it meets all my criteria out of the box that holds three 3.5 inch drives and is expandable to seven using these floating drive cages in its default configuration it's definitely silence focused with sound dampened front top and side panels there are included mesh panels if i ever want to go more airflow focused the entire enclosure can even be reconfigured for an inverted build and it's a mid-tower case which i said wasn't designed for my e-atx board which isn't completely true it does fit my 27 centimeter wide motherboard but the board covers the grommeted cable pass-throughs in a typical build you can then use the adjustable pass-throughs in the front of the case to very cleverly managed cables however when you fill those slots with drives like i am you lose that ability however because there is such a huge opening at the top of the motherboard tray i can feed the atx and cpu power cables down from there very cleanly my motherboard also has the 90 degree sata ports on it so those do block the bottom slot so i can't put a drive tray there luckily i only have six drives the stock cover also had to be removed to fit the sata cables so i just 3d printed a flush panel with one of the grommets installed just to keep it looking clean the case also comes with silent wing 2 140 millimeter fans installed i installed two more one more intake in the front and one top exhaust all the fans are connected to the included fan hub which i will keep to the lowest setting which with six 140 millimeter fan should provide plenty of airflow while being super quiet okay real quick final components i will need to directly access the system to initially set it up and then i can go headless so to do that i need a gpu for video output but also because this is a consumer board it actually needs a gpu installed to boot so i could go with something super simple like a gt710 but i'm using a gtx 1660 because eventually i will be utilizing the gpu or the onboard encoder and decoders for hardware transcoding finally because unrate boots from a usb i got this sandisk cruiser fit and because the rear i o on this board can get pretty warm i got this internal adapter so i can plug the usb directly into the motherboard where it should get plenty of air flow and be safe that's everything the build is complete and for time sake because i know this video is getting on i went ahead and booted it up i did get a cpu code on the first boot but after clearing cmos i tried again and booted into the uefi where i could see the cpu and memory were operating as expected and all of the drives were showing up so i restarted now the more complex the motherboard the longer it takes to post and this one takes forever but after a minute or so the system did boot into windows as there is a windows install on the samsung 970 ssd i installed this will of course be overwritten when i install unraid but as it did load into windows it looks like we're good to go now again all of this is not where most people are going to start their adventures and home servers the total retail cost of this is right at about five thousand dollars but you can use the same principles i've covered here and build a great server for five hundred dollars or you can take the info and apply it to your next pc planning for its next life now i still have a lot of work to do to get this server set up which is actually a quick process but running the memory stability test takes about 24 hours at least and i have many terabytes of data to move to the nas so be sure to check out part two where i'll cover all of that which if you're an early viewer will be posted probably about one week from the day i posted this one if it's been longer than that then the link will be in the description below be sure to subscribe to catch the entire series and like and share this and i'll see you in the next one but i do have one very crucial task to accomplish before i can call this build complete the first peel of the first server build on the channel now this is history

Channel: Elevated Systems

Views: 42,188

Keywords: unraid, threadripper build, home server build 2022, unraid server build, homelab, diy server, diy home server, best home server build, be quiet, silent base 802 build, how to plan a home server, desktop PC to storage server, nas build 2022, network attached storage, best NAS OS

Id: dK_ImhC80Yo

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 05 2022