Low Power/High Performance Server GRUDGE MATCH! DeskMeet, Ryzen, and Supermicro Micro-Tower Server

this video is brought to you by fractal and the meshify 2 RGB because the mashify 2 I mean it's Basic Black it's Ford Model T black there's nothing wrong with that right well it turns out there's some people that really live and die by the RGB this is for you now the meshified 2 is a full meshify which means that it comes with a lot of accessories and has the removable top unlike the matchify light with the top cartridge dust filter and a plurality nay I say a quartet of internal fans three in the front one in the rear end yes they're all RGB inside you've got all the build options you know and love at the rear we've got extra cable management accessories and even our cable Hider door that hides your sins and not only that they give you even yet more accessories four three and a half inch slash two and a half inch drive base that you can stack up here at the front if you want you can even use them you know elsewhere in the case get a lot of options check out our meshify 2 review you can learn more about the meshify 2 case but this is with RGB thanks fractal for spots thanks fractal for sponsoring this video be sure to check out the link in the description below if you want to learn more about this case and maybe use it as a platform for your next build well hello and welcome back all right this is our you know Home Server series for the non-fire breathing super fancy crazy epic whatever build now in a series we've covered up till now we have talked a little bit about repurposing old Enterprise gear but I wanted to do a special selection of three builds three configurations really that um I think are of particular interest to building a very low power and relatively low cost for what you get I mean there's a spectrum of cost here to be sure but relatively low cost for what you get home server options that will idle as low as about 10 watts of power yeah and we can do that with x86 we don't have to go arm okay it's easier when you use Arm that's kind of like cheating but I'm assuming that you're a little bit of a performance junkie and you know a Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi on steroids is probably not going to cut it another two or three years uh we probably will reduce the power usage further but coming down from 100 200 300 watts of your old Enterprise gear to 35 25 10 5 Watts it's diminishing returns and even when these systems are fully loaded they're not going to use a ton of power but I'm also going to show you how to set these up so that you can securely access them from anywhere we're going to use tailscale for that and we're going to use true Nas scale as our operating system it's a Linux based operating system and we're going to get all that going there's a there's a guide in the Forum but there's a there's a couple of things we got to talk about for what your goals are [Music] first up is this mini ITX system that was sent by Micro Center but it's from Super Micro this is a six core Intel Xeon it has error correcting memory and this is the most server-ish one of the bunch with our other system here that we'll talk about in a minute being a close second this system is also going to be the most expensive the six core processor in here is maybe overkill for your needs you could drop down to an I3 you could drop down to a Pentium but Intel is starting to play it a little weird and different than they used to with error correcting memory so it's sort of strange Alder Lake this is what this system is this is the ASRock desk mate that I reviewed separately this is strictly speaking a desktop system based around the b660 chipset air correction is not an option here but the w680 chipset from Intel will enable error correction on most Alder Lake CPUs and that's not really anything super new because this is an older generation Xeon this is not LGA 1700 but in this generation of Xeon the xeons enable error correction as did the i3s and the pentiums for very low end embedded system so when we were doing like Celeron J 3070 builds a long time ago and even some I3 builds you could actually use error correcting ddr4 on those systems as long as the system supported air correcting memory and you were using a chipset so Intel I think is playing segmentation games again they should not play except that the 12700 in the desk meet actually does support error correcting memory I've also got an I3 this is a four core and we're going to look at you know the power usage differences but this is a 12 core for a home server is a fire breathing Home Server option and we'll cover that but this as an I3 is almost as good and the for unless you know that you need 12 cores this 4 core I3 that you can find you know Street retails yeah 150 but street price is like 70 80 bucks for this I3 but this three doesn't support air correcting memory according to Intel Arc even if it did you need the w680 chipset and the w680 chipset is an option that super micro and ASRock rack and other companies are making available um in ITX form factors and in other form factors but you pay a little bit of a price premium I'll say right now for your home server for where we are with the state of the art with ZFS and truenath and everything else ECC is not as critical as it once was yes it's nice to know that data corruption is being introduced but you'll know that data corruption is being introduced in other ways and you should have other extra backups anyway honestly I'm a little bit surprised why IX systems doesn't offer a plug-in in true Nas If there was a one-click thing where it's like give IX you know 50 bucks a month and we will let you back up a terabyte of information and it's push button in true Nas they could make a lot of money tomorrow all IX would have to do is look at online services like tarsnap which offer a reasonable service for a reasonable price and make that basically push button in true Mass Heck if they don't want to do that just partner with the tar snap people and take a commission it's an easy button solution and then you can replicate this thing to the cloud something bad happens you upgrade Hardware hit a button and it comes back down ZFS is really awesome for that you should check out the level one video where we partnered with 45 drives to do an off-site backup the Machinery in ZFS that we did in that video is exactly the same as what we're looking at at the small all low end systems here all right let's dive in configurations now for the drive and storage configuration I'm going to use two 20 terabyte Iron Wolf Pros as our primary data storage mechanism they're 20 terabytes and there's two of them and it doesn't really dramatically increase the power usage if you're using two of these hard drives and they're idle and when I say idle I mean that the drive is spun up the motor is going that takes a a certain amount of energy but the drive is not doing anything because that'll also consume a little bit of power so we move from the 12 13 ish watts of this system back up to about 30 just having two of those 20 terabyte drives connected to the system but idle now I'm going to show you how that you can spin those drives down so that they're not using they're basically using you know a one-ish watt of power instead of you know the difference between 12 or 13 watts and 35. when the system has been idle for a while basically the drives will go to sleep so it's going to use less power but I also want to show you that at extreme maximum load meaning that both drives are under heavy activity and the CPU is pegged this system will still not consume over 100 Watts from the wall it's about 95 Watts give or take now if we add our m.2 and our networking and some other niceties it's probably going to go over the 100 Watts at Peak but a regular normal load even from a bunch of containers even from you know indexing your media and doing that kind of thing assuming that you know this is a Workhorse you can hook it up to a watt meter and it's going to be spiky to like 50 Watts 60 watts then back down to 35 watts and like I say this is an older you know sort of generation uh lower power core still very good I mean still modern you're still in production all that kind of stuff but Alder lake is going to be even faster than that and so is our ryzen system I wanted to include ryzen because these are the most uh Power Frugal per performance per unit performance like power per unit perform performance per unit power system for something like this that you want to do and this is a relatively fire breathing system because it's got a lot of cores you know we're talking about six cores 12 cores right now four cores in a minute I'll show you that and then this now bigger picture I also do love the fire breathing older Enterprise gear for comparison I've got a dual socket 2011 system we'll take a look at but just so you know that system even with the power saving States and the Sea States turned on you know just a bare motherboard and power supply that thing is going to idle right around 100 watts and the performance is going to be on par especially with something like this like these 12 cores here versus the 16 cores of the older generation it's not a fair fight but we'll take a look at that a little later in the video now the other half of our storage configuration something that's going to help us keep those drives spun down longer is nvme you don't have to do this for your build but I've got a couple of one terabyte m.2 nvme and we're going to use that as a metadata special device with ZFS one terabyte into 20 terabytes that's kind of a lot of space like you probably don't really need that much metadata but you can also create data sets that say Hey if we have files below a record size threshold like if you created data set that has a one megabyte record size which is not atypical for media then anything that's smaller than whatever size you set like say 256 kilobytes or 128 kilobytes you can actually just store that on the m.2 and so the metadata device is very very critical so we're going to mirror it to hence to one terabyte drives but having all of your really tiny files and also where everything is on your big and relatively slow mechanical hard drives will change dramatically your experience using the system so it'll be a much much better end user experience another thing you might be thinking and worried about is one gigabit just isn't fast enough the super micro system one gigabit the desk meet b660 the built-in Nick one gigabit our ASRock system is available with 10 gig mix which is going to use more power to idle and blah blah blah but fortunately we have cheat codes for this I did a whole separate video on your options for modifying these platforms you don't have to settle for a one gig Nick and it's not going to consume one of your pcie slots and actually put network cards in m.2 slots and VGA cards and literally anything else next up let's take a closer look at our ryzen system our Hardware configuration for the ryzen system is very similar to the super micro in terms of ipmi and some other things it's a Micro ATX motherboard instead of an ITX motherboard it gives us more pcie connectivity it's going to be bigger I'm using an inexpensive you know extruded aluminum frame the fractal pop air mini ATX is also another inexpensive enclosed option that would be good for this build I'm cheating a little bit I'm using the ryzen 3900 no X so this is a 65-ish watt TDP processor but it's 12 cores the Xeon that we just looked at from Super Micro it's going to be a little faster a little bit faster on a per core basis our Ultra Lake system is going to be quite a bit faster on a parchord basis but this is 12 real homogeneous cores Linux in trinette scale doesn't really care about you know eight plus four eight big cores and four little cores versus four homogeneous scores but if you were going to do VMware this is the system I'd recommend for VMware because the e-cores and VMware is not a thing that you want to undertake right now unless you're feeling adventurous in my opinion this is also a 470 not a 570 series motherboard if you look at this build and you say wow this motherboard is going to be super expensive now it's the x470 version which right now is pretty attainable because I don't think it's in production anymore and everybody's going for the 570. so this is about a 200 motherboard in the market right now which I think is a good deal it also supports air correcting memory so you can run error correcting memory with your 3900 and it's basically fine there is a little bit of an asterisk there a little bit of a gotcha it will silently correct single bit errors and it will report two-bit errors to the operating system but there is a more elaborate normally in Hardware path for how error correction is handled you would normally want the error correction to be injected into the system management unit so that you could look at the logs in the the ipmi the platform doesn't do that the modules for doing that on am4 and ryzen are deliberately not there and so if you look online it's like oh can we confirm that error correction is working is it actually working you know what's going on blah blah blah um you can have platform first error handling or operating system first error handling with error correction this platform also has two m.2 pcie slots out the Wazoo etc etc it's going to idle a little bit higher in terms of power utilization out of the box the out-of-the-box configuration was almost 70 Watts but it didn't really move a lot from there for the base configuration and that's before we add hard drives so let's add some hard drives and see what difference that makes now in this configuration we're already at a disadvantage because it's a Micro ATX motherboard not an ITX motherboard it's going to use a little bit more power the power supply is also a little bit of a factor here our EVGA power supply is 80 plus gold I think the power supply in the super micro is also an 80 plus gold power supply efficiency that kind of thing but ryzen has another thing it has to worry about called low idle current versus typical idle current you see Power Supplies when ryzen first launched like five years ago they used so little power when they were idle that power our supplies had trouble supplying that little power so there's a bios option that says typical idle current or low idle current this configuration will work at low idle current so I set that in the Bios also remember that we're operating even though it's a 12 core CPU we are operating at that 65 watt TDP which is actually it'll use a little bit more power than that and I've also added my mechanical hard drives so with all of that with 12 cores this is using like 38 39 40 Watts at idle when the system is Idle but when the system is fully loaded it's more like 80 Watts 82 Watts 83 Watts so our total system power at Peak even with all 12 cores loaded is a little bit lower according to our kilowatt than our super micro system now the reality is that these numbers are so close together that it's a bit of a wash and that's kind of what I was going for here we could put a six core in here or we could put you know another eight core in here but the reality is the Silicon of these are better and for practically no more money I can get an extra 12 cores and basically be paying the same in electricity and other costs also like to like this thing has ipmi which is gonna you know vampire a little bit of power the Remote Management and the supermarket does as well so depending on what your needs are one or the other could be a better choice for you absolutely this motherboard also doesn't have built-in 10 gig which would put us at a further power disadvantage that thing's going to use like five Watts at idle because it doesn't sleep and doesn't want to do anything it's definitely a lot of reasons not to do an open air case you fry rectal pop air is a breath of fresh air literally see what I did there because you got five and a quarter inch base so you can add stuff in the five and a quarter inch Bay Area it's got room for physically mounting two and a half inch and three and a half inch hard drives so you could go SATA if you don't need 20 terabytes of mechanical space it's got three big fans this thing will be completely and audibly Silent with this configuration and our 450 watt power supplies basically Overkill now if you're thinking one of these things is not like the other well the ASRock desk meet is very aggressively priced for what it is it is a shockingly good system and unlike other Nas Solutions this is the completely standard ATX power supply the motherboard is the most proprietary thing but if the motherboard died you could totally put an ITX motherboard in here at least as a stop Gap it's got two m.2 slots it only has the single Intel one gig Nick at the back but we do have an x16 slot and it has four dim slots so you can put lots of memory in it like our other systems there's there's some expandability here you can run up to 128 gigabytes in this thing now I know what you're thinking well in the storage configuration you talked about having two m.2 plus two mechanical hard drives does this motherboard support bifurcation can you run the x16 slot and X4 X4 X4 the answer is no you cannot well if you've only got two m.2 how are you going to make this work ah our Intel 225v is available in an e key configuration yes we can put this in the Wi-Fi slot it is a little longer than what normally will physically fit in a Wi-Fi slot but that's okay I've got a 3D printer I can solve that problem with some 3D printing basically the screw hole wants to be here in the middle of the board I'm just going to make a little plastic shim to hold this in place and boom two and a half gig Nick and I still have my one gig Nick so I could use this for other more creative things in terms of the value proposition this is the champion yes it's not going to support error correcting memory but you should be taking steps to back up your information somewhere else USB hard drive something like that ZFS will still detect the errors it will not deal with errors as gracefully if you have memory that has gone really bad and is continuously producing ECC errors but the reality is that most of the time ECC events are transient you get a couple of flipped bits a year and that's basically it that's going to be detected in the system it is nice I mean two-thirds of the time two-thirds of the systems we looked at today have error correcting memory this one doesn't it is nice to have it's a best practice it's good but it is not absolutely critical the universe will not implode if you don't have air correcting memory it's not like crossing the streams not a best practice but it's basically fine now with our Alder Lake system it's more interesting than you might think our maximum power usage from the system is 125 watts it's 120 that's just that's 25 watts more than our worst case scenario and really more like 45 Watts more than you know what we would expect it is 12 cores four efficiency cores and eight performance cores and the eight performance cores are no slouch if we switch to the I3 in this system configuration then our worst case scenario power draw is down around 95 Watts 90 Watts or something like that but it doesn't really move the needle much on our idle power consumption which is the real interesting thing here this system doesn't have Remote Management it doesn't have ipmi it's the same configuration same base configuration basically as our other systems it doesn't have error correctly memory it is basically an ITX motherboard it has a standard-ish ATX power supply at idle it's 40 Watts it's sitting here it's not doing anything the mechanical hard drives are spinning the idle power is about 40 Watts so if we really really dot our eyes and cross our T's with power utilization we can get this system down to use about 18 19 20 watts something like that and that's with the mechanical hard drive spun down Linux still awake the system's not in a suspense State an S3 state or anything like that but Linux is in its most deep power saving mode CPU Governor frequency thing if you want to call it that and we're still going to consume about 20 watts from the wall give or take when the system is is basically asleep so what that means is that this system is basically on par with the 12 core 3900 no X system from AMD in terms of it's awake and the hard drives are spinning power usage a notice here too that the power of the mechanical hard drive spinning is most of our power if power saving is that important to you maybe you should get four terabyte SATA ssds they'll have better durability and better longevity than mechanical drives anyway uh maybe that makes sense for your use case me I like to have a lot of space for versions and snapshots and things 20 terabytes and this desk meet platform from ASRock will run a lot of virtual machines it's a fire breathing machine basically if you know that you don't plan to run a lot of virtual machines in the running this with 64 128 gigs of RAM makes sense the I3 is a perfectly reasonable option and like I say this is the deal This Is The Sweet Spot deal all the other options that I showed you are going to cost a lot more and not really deliver anything significantly better except for server-ish platform air correcting memory that may be worth a premium to you that's totally an option for me for the rate at which I upgrade and that kind of thing if it were my money this is probably what I would be spending it on I really like the other platforms I especially really like the the DIY as rock system as well but uh I like the performance of this I like the eight bursty P cores and the lack of error correcting memory doesn't really bother me too much you can set the bias on this to automatically turn on in the event of a power outage which is the nicest feature so if the power goes out this will come back on automatically of course it's the opposite situation if I'm doing this for somebody else if somebody came to me and said I Want To Build a Home Server and I want it to be as bulletproof as possible I'm going for the super micro system at the end of the day it is a bit of a wash in terms of power usage and you know total operational costs over time this one's going to be a little bit less up front but they're all basically going to cost a close to the same amount of money to operate over a given period if you're using two mechanical hard drives in a mirrored configuration so either one of them can die that's why we're using two of them now this has taken me a little bit longer to explain and go over than I expected so we're going to put the software configuration and the software setup with tailscale like basically you can you can whip out your phone and you've got a secure tunnel from your phone to this thing so you can run next Cloud you can run all your files you can have your media and it's not really open to the internet that is a complete Game Changer in terms of maintenance if you were running uh Plex and next cloud or MB and next cloud and you know other different stuff you're gonna have to sort of manage the care and feeding of all those applications or pretty soon it's going to be mining Bitcoin for somebody in some other country and that's not a great situation but with tailscale or any other VPN option but we've gone over wire guards and now I'm going to show you tailscale you can use the telescale client on your phone and your laptop and your desktop and your other machines and they'll have a secure tunnel back to this and anybody that's not on the secure tunnel can't get to it so you're not even really opening it up to the Internet you're really only opening it up to your VPN that is a completely different situation in terms of security so it's a great thing it's really awesome we'll cover that next time if you're anxious uh you can join patreon and get to it because it'll probably be on patreon but there's also a written guide that will be linked below for how to do that but uh yeah this system very proud of breathing very nice very happy with where we end up all right I'm going to finish getting this put together so I can finish the how-to and like I say this is a perfectly reasonable attainable Home Server option that's not going to idle at 125 watts our Peak power usage is 125 watts and I guarantee you this 12 core Modern CPU is going to absolutely run circles around that old Enterprise gear destroys it and performance destroys it in power utilization and yes I know it's fun to run old Enterprise gear I do it too but the needle has moved so far because of Alder Lake and because of 3000 and 5000 series ryzen CPUs epic realm and epic Milan that a lot of those older Enterprise platforms really aren't worth the cost of the electricity I mean the energy costs and things like that have gone up as well this thing can idle on the order of 20 watts 10 watts if you really really dot your eyes across your t's on some of the other platforms for what you're building if you use the consumer grade am4 motherboard to get rid of the ipmi you might you might give up your error correcting memory and some other options and then you used a really really power Frugal CPU from AMD then you can get that 10 ish watt idle there as well the mechanical hard drives are going to use more power than the rest of your platform that's a completely different ballpark than what we're talking about with dual socket 2011 or dual socket 2011 3. the Skylake systems are okay if you can afford the energy and the clock speed is high but I see on eBay like the 2.1 or 2.4 gigahertz you know Skylake that's those are basically obsolete I you can get so much better performance out of something like this and in a home use scenario this is so much better than a rack mount system this is basically silent works a lot better it's a lot more practical it's a lot more affordable so I had some comments in the other videos it's like okay you're showing us your fire breathing Epic Systems which are also silent and amazing but this is a little bit more affordable and reasonable and really gives you 95 to 98 of what you get going the other route so I'm little this is level one this has been more of a look at what you're getting into with your home server setup the core I3 with four P cores plus a platform like this it's not going to break the bank and you're going to be able to do a lot more with it than than you could with a dedicated Nas platform that said a dedicated nice platform is nice because it's a security out of the box you don't have to think about it so depending on what your goals are you got options all right I've rambled enough I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 106,243

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: RWmfZHn2wLs

Length: 26min 23sec (1583 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022