The Ideal Home Server! Is it Possible?

my name is Wendell and I'm here to welcome you to the storage hoarders support group we're going to get through this by encouraging your hoarding addiction and just get to the other side of it let's just see where it takes this because you never know you might be using the information stored on your array to help reconstruct Society after the fall wait what oh what did he say [Music] it's 2023 and I want to survey the state of Home Server Hardware this is the reserver from Seed Studio it's actually really a case for their embedded I guess you'd call it not really exactly motherboard this is a second or third generation motherboard from seat Studio this is the one with dual two and a half gigabit Ethernet a fast quad core processor from Intel USB 3 usb2 even has a full-size PCI E uh 3.0 by four slot dual m.2 internally Plus m.2 for the E key for wireless cellular modem we've even got Wireless cellular antennas built in you could use this thing as a router or a combination router and Home Server the littlest forbidden server if you want as configured I've got two 20 terabyte mechanical hard drives in here so 40 terabytes of storage online or a mirrored 20 terabyte configuration if you want I'm really sort of enamored with this form factor it's it's just about perfect it's very quiet 20 terabytes is nothing to sneeze at for a home media server and media transcode backup something that mirrors to the cloud even if you're in the smallest just studio apartment this form factor would work really well in that scenario but if you want something that's got a little bit more horsepower you want something a little bigger well I'm a little late to the party but I've got the johnsbow N1 Nas case now I'm going to do a separate build with this system this is an ITX case it supports five three and a half inch hard drives do you know how hard it is to find an ITX motherboard in this day and age that has five uh SATA ports it's pretty rare most of them only have two these days don't worry we'll solve that problem child support actually made this a while ago I'm just a little late to the party but also these have been on sale for like 140 U.S which is still kind of a lot for an ITX case I mean especially in the wake of something like the fractal node 304 which is six three and a half inch Bays but this actually has some nice Creature Comforts I'll cover in a minute that make it a more featureful case than that but you know the node 304 was the Undisputed champion of compact home servers for the better part of 10 years so the N1 it's five three and a half inch base plus one two and a half inch Bay it's designed for a 70 millimeter height cooler a mini ITX motherboard as I mentioned it's 170 by 354 by 217 that's in millimeters in terms of its Dimensions it can work on its side but it'll also work in a tower configuration thank you [Applause] don't speak to me or my son ever again huh nah nah whoever Ed Jonesboro had the idea to include the mini right angle power extension cord plus the Little Feat to raise it genius move pure genius move because in a server configuration what do you really need to connect to this power and network and that's it does the manual tell us which screws need to come out to open it actually feels pretty premium they've so I think of the tower configuration I would reorient the fan so it's exhausting hot air at the top that's just me we'll do that experiment in the build video but one of the big Creature Comforts with this case is this PCB at the back this makes it a lot easier to hot swap drives especially when you have a drive failure that's the most annoying thing on pretty much every other case that works really well for a home server and this is surprisingly low cost given that that's an option so this got me thinking about what would be the ideal Home Server case like the ideal home form factor well remember I've done videos on the sligger rack mount series that's certainly an option even if you've got a short depth rack somewhere at home that really would be a good option I've been very happy with my slider cases in fact I'm still waiting on delivery of a couple of different configurations beyond the one that I've already reviewed ones that will hold extra three and a half inch drives but I haven't quite managed to get my hands on those yet so looking at our Seed Studio option and our jonesbow option you know these aren't necessarily inexpensive options I got to thinking you know what would be my ideal Home Server Chassis stay tuned for that Jones boat build you know get subscribed do the Bell whatever I don't know so get this extruded aluminum frame I did another video on that you can check that video out and I was thinking this might be useful for illustrating the perfect layout first Micro ATX motherboard this is the ASRock rack x470d4u and I've got a scythe downdraft cooler on it this is an am4 motherboard this has built-in VGA and Remote Management it also has dual built-in gigabit there's a version of this motherboard that has dual built-in 10 gigabit this is not an inexpensive motherboard but you can find these on sale occasionally for the 250-ish dollar Mark which is kind of a lot for an am4 motherboard but it's Micro ATX which means we've got a lot of expansion slots two x16 slots plus our X4 slot in the middle okay it's x8x4x8 but hey that's more connectivity than you get on a modern am5 motherboard right it's got four ddr4 dim slots you can rock up to 128 gigabytes of memory in this platform you've got a lot of options for connectivity we've got two front panel USB 3 ports as well as two at the rear you don't have to use a Server Motherboard like this this one actually does work with air correcting memory it doesn't actually log the errors to the ipmi but it does report them to the Linux kernel how do I know I'll get the pass smart ddr4 tester thingy it's USB and it actually injects memory errors you can write your own kernel module that will save the memory errors to the ipmi to sort of close the loop there that's normally handled by a system module but AMD only provides that for epic CPUs so that piece is missing the system management bus doesn't do that but you can do that in the Linux kernel and it's functionally basically the same so what I would do for my perfect Home Server case is basically just scale up this this design we would have a chamber for the motherboard that's designed for half height expansion cards why half I well I don't want a ton of wasted space in the case so this third of the case is going to be for the motherboard so keep that in your imagination as we go forward on this side we should have two Banks of three five and a quarter inch Bays six five and a quarter inch bays in total it's really cheap to make a case that's just empty five and a quarter inch base and why mt5 and a quarter inch base enter IC dock I've done a lot of videos in the past for the different wacky options from icdoc here is a thing that fits in a five and a quarter inch Drive Bay that will hold eight m.2 storage devices yeah eight m.2 you could put 64 terabytes of m.2 Flash in this if you had more money than Sans I do not yet have more money than sense but I'm working on it just to give you an idea of the options so I see Dock and it's not just icy dock you can order all kinds of stuff from AliExpress that's cheaper and crappier but you know just depending on what you want to do whatever your imagination will come up with you can probably Cobble together if you've got empty five and a quarter inch base that are completely standard so like if I wanted to have a u.2 plus 8 m.2 that's going to take 16 PCI Express Lanes times two just to get these connected into the system so it's all ready we're going to need something with more pcie Lanes than we have in am4 we're going to need one of those little tiny you know epic realm motherboards around those little tiny Xeon motherboards but here's 32 flames of PCI Express connectivity in just three five and a quarter inch bays and I had the vision for building that and I want to make it hot Swap and boom we can totally do that by legoing this thing together with stuff you can get from icdoc it's no problem at all if you want something more pedestrian like three and a half inch mechanical storage these are like 50 bucks on eBay so this is the spectrum of creativity you can do if you've got three and a half inch Drive bays and in this physical configuration it doesn't take up a lot of room and there's not a lot of empty space which is the problem that I have with a lot of physical cases that you might have doing this I mean when we did our CD-ROM server a long time ago for archiving your DVD collection the best choice of case was the antec 900 because the entire front of the case was five and a quarter inch Bays you do realize that case is over 10 years old at this point and that's the best choice if you're gonna go crazy with five and a quarter inch drives and the answer is yes for this or for CD-ROMs that case is still the best choice and it's kind of big it's not not as attractive as these options I really want to normalize having something like this as part of your living room or home theater setup having this instead of a Chromecast or a really long fiber optic HDMI cable or whatever you have in your living room in your central home theater to me makes a lot of sense your media is physically close to your main TV but it could be streaming media to all the TVs in your house and your neighbors houses and your friends houses and everybody else's house thanks Alan molventano no I'm just kidding so if you had something like this here then you could have five hot swap three and a half inch mechanical hard drives and then you would have room over here for u.2 or SATA or some other kind of hot Swap and you would have three five and a quarter inch base in order to do that now you don't have to fully populate the system that could just be empty Drive bays and your power supply would be down here somewhere and this would be the perfect layout for your Home Server the form factor ends up being really similar to The Seed Studio but scaled up and with five drives you could Rock a hundred terabytes of local storage plus all the local flash storage you could ever need you could Rock 16 cores in this configuration either am4 or am5 and that should satisfy most of the Home Server needs for all but the most egregious abusers of Home Services among us and for us well there's rack mount systems and we can totally just do a rack mount system the thing that I really wish that we could do in the Seed Studio form factor is at least three three and a half inch drives and the reason for that is if you pick up two 20 terabyte mechanical hard drives you lose half of your investment in drives for redundancy if there were three Bays you only lose a third because any one of the three drives could die so you'd have 40 terabytes of usable storage with 60 terabytes of raw storage and that's probably a good balance of you know a drive failing and covering and redundancy that sort of thing the next place I sort of want to live is five drives which is where our Jones bow case will enter five three and a half inch drives 20 terabytes is a hundred terabytes of usable space plus we've got enough connectivity we can have high speed networking or other similar facilities because our expansion slot is available at the rear here it is only a half height expansion slot but it is available for rear i o so if we wanted to have a 25 gigabit Ethernet card or a breakout card to give us more m.2 or some other similar connectivity that is an option with this case the problem is that it's harder to find ITX motherboards that have more than four SATA ports and really this thing would rock six because you could run you know your two and a half inch SSD or two you can just cram one in there plus your mechanical storage for operating systems plus whatever m.2 storage you have on board so you know the build in the jonesbow is going to be fun and there are already a lot of other builds you can check out with the Jones bow in one online and that because there's so many other build videos they kind of took the wind out of my sails a little bit like I want to do it I'm probably going to run this at home for media consumption because right now it's a virtual machine on a more powerful system maybe I could turn this into one system and a cluster I'm not really sure I just needed something that has a little bit more more horsepower than the Seed Studio system which I might use here for steam cash or something like that in a lab I'm not I'm not really sure because right now our steam cache is running on our main video server which is fine most of the time except when I'm seeing a bunch of games onto a bunch of different systems at the same time and then that sort of messes with the editing workflow first world problems I know I know and so thinking through this and doing that kind of thing I just really wanted to Vlog a little bit about my thoughts on the perfect Home Server and really Micro ATX because this look it's got eight SATA ports six here and two on the top eight eight SATA ports and then Micro ATX really is not that much larger than ITX and so this feature set in a Micro ATX form factor with six five and a quarter inch base that doesn't exist anywhere and it's really not a lot more complicated than extruded aluminum and or folded metal so for building my fantasy case wish list thing then maybe that's something we can do honestly the tooling for some of those sliger rack mount cases can probably be retooled very very slightly especially the two U cases just have two 15 inch depth two U cases back to back and boom you've basically got what I've uh what I've outlined here and it probably worked fine in all of these cases I'm perfectly fine with the sfx or the sfxl it's a longer version of this power supply this is a 450 watt power supply and this is plenty of wattage even when we're talking about something like this platform with 16 cores and 128 gigabytes of memory and some mechanical hard drives 450 Watts totally fine and EVGA is in it for the long haul 24 7 Operating time this power supply not an issue because guess what this has been doing since I think 2019 24 7 operation not a problem so yeah I'm Wendell this is level one let me know what ITX motherboard you'd like to see me test in the Jonesboro N1 and it does not have to be an Enterprise grade motherboard with onboard Remote Management why because I've got all the pi KVM stuff we can use the pi KVM and do all the Remote Management we need not through an add-in card up to and including turning it on remotely we don't have to have an Enterprise grade motherboard that said if you see one let me know I am keeping my eyes peeled for an ITX am5 motherboard that is Enterprise grade I'm working on getting both the gigabyte and ASRock ITX am5 motherboard the Asus x670 is a little less interesting because it's an x670 ITX motherboard and when it's x670 you've got the extra chipset chip and I'm probably going to get flame for this but it doesn't make any logical sense that they did the the chipset the way that they did they put the extra AMD chipset chip on a riser to give you a single m.2 I it doesn't from the block diagram it doesn't seem as if that chipset is providing any USB connectivity or anything else it's consuming for PCI Express Lanes from the first chipset to give you four PCI Express Lanes for an m.2 and so they can call it x670 why would they do that it makes no sense so probably not going to get that motherboard but I'm probably going to pick up the ASRock and the gigabyte motherboard for ITX and try them in here and those are consumer boards those are not really designed for servers but I think it'll work pretty well on this platform especially when we're talking about the ryzen 7900 no X 7600 no x 7 800 no X those CPUs will work great in this platform I already know it but also those platforms have some limitations things like well the next not even necessarily you know you're lucky to get two and a half gig is it Intel or real Tech which would you rather have I mean Intel's got the 225 which maybe has been on The Struggle Bus with Hardware bugs realtek's been up and coming but maybe you'd like to have something higher in 10 gigabit or even 25 gigabit can we use the m.2 to add expansion like I don't want to use the pcie slot for a storage controller can we add one of the m.2 storage controllers can we add one of the m.2 cards that gives you more Network ports which I've already reviewed yeah there's a name two cards out there that you just add to your system and then boom you've got one or two more Network ports you can have a 10 gigabit port or two two and a half gig ports or a single two and a half gig Port whatever you want to do for your particular configuration you can do that through an m.2 that's pretty exciting so I've got a lot of options and a lot of Hardware which is why I want to hear from you what do you want to see me build for the ultimate Home Server I know the software stack for your contemplated Home Server is as unique as you are it's a million snowflakes but what I'm trying to do here is find the right balance of value complexity and ease of building this I mean yeah the Seed Studio it's a nice sexy package you're paying for the nice sexy package maybe you could come out ahead if you try to DIY something with the Jones bow I mean it'll be faster and have more memory capability and you know real 128 gigabytes of memory in this form factor 16 real cores that is a lot more Headroom than something like this most people don't need that much Headroom but it's pretty cool if you can do something interesting with it but I'm not worried about that for right now I want to sort of thread the needle on value and storage and everything else which means I'm not necessarily looking at those Enterprise motherboards or Enterprise storage we're just using SATA hard drives here it's not even SAS or anything like that and maybe Enterprise cast off ssds maybe that's an option those are just in like the two-ish terabyte range right now so it's not super exciting but I don't know it's interesting engagement challenge let me know below or on the Forum what motherboards you're looking at that might make sense for this build or this Home Server use case especially am5 but I'll consider other platforms even as far back as 10th Generation Intel that's maybe an option and I know that there's some some really competent ITX am4 options as well I've got a couple of those already so maybe we'll try that but I'm sort of more forward looking but again you know 10th Generation Intel I mean it's a Home Server what do you really need I don't know I'm one of this level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forms [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 159,790

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

Id: Jqg1G78cH2A

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023