Help with new build**

[tjnetworking]

Thanks in advance to all of those willing to help me.

 

I have been reading up on unRaid, even built a server out of old parts and its been running like a champ it does not do much but storage and a few Plex channels, but now I want to build a real unRaid server her is what I want to accomplish if possible.

 

IPMI or Vpro or some type of lights out management.

A minimal of 20 drives

I would like to use Antec Twelve Hundred V3 3.0 case or something similar since it can hold 20 drives.

A strong processor to handle VM's and transcode media if it has to.

 

I am open to any and all suggestions I want the best build possible as for a budget I want to try to keep it under 2000.00

 

 

[switchman]

I believe the Antec Twelve Hundred V3 3.0 only supports 20 drives if you use 5in3 cages.  If you are going to do that you might as well purchase norco 4220 or even a 4224.  I will say cages are the way to go.

 

The Norco SS-500 are still on sale for 71 (price plus s&h).  They do not give you a break on the shipping.  The case at $150 plus 4 cages at $282 brings your price up to $424.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133030

 

The 4220 is $339 while the 4224 $448.  Plus there is a $40 gift card on the 4224 and a $10 on the 4220.  If you have the room, these offer you the best bang for the $.  Wit these you would probably want a 120mm fan wall plus extra screws @ ~$25.

 

 

4220 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219033

 

4224 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038

 

The iStar cages are also nice looking.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=iStarUSA+BPN-DE350SS&N=-1&isNodeId=1

[tritron]

Do you need 20 drives?  I have 105 hd 1080P movies and 30 different tv shows most of them in HD and music and few audio books and so far I only  1.7TB had been taken. I would go for low power setup amd has 25W cpus semptron 3825 quad core or athlon 2.5ghz quad 25W.

I have two  kvm running on semptron one arch linux for my pbx openchange/sogo  and server 2012. I have node 804 that can hold 12 hard drives and has room for couple more. I paid 60$ for motherboard and cpu and case was 54$ and power supply 67$.  8 port controler card was 105$ so 300$ including ram I have nice case that supports 14 drives.  I saw a deal for 5tb red drives for 180 each so if you buy 10 drives you will get 45tb of space for 2100$ If you want 20 drives fancy motherboard cpu you are looking at 1500$

[tjnetworking]

I believe the Antec Twelve Hundred V3 3.0 only supports 20 drives if you use 5in3 cages.  If you are going to do that you might as well purchase norco 4220 or even a 4224.  I will say cages are the way to go.

 

The Norco SS-500 are still on sale for 71 (price plus s&h).  They do not give you a break on the shipping.  The case at $150 plus 4 cages at $282 brings your price up to $424.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133030

 

The 4220 is $339 while the 4224 $448.  Plus there is a $40 gift card on the 4224 and a $10 on the 4220.  If you have the room, these offer you the best bang for the $.  Wit these you would probably want a 120mm fan wall plus extra screws @ ~$25.

 

 

4220 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219033

 

4224 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038

 

The iStar cages are also nice looking.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=iStarUSA+BPN-DE350SS&N=-1&isNodeId=1

 

Thanks Switchman  I do like the The Norco SS-500 for it I would not mind using another case but I would need it to be a tower and not a rack-mount I will most likely go rack-mount in two years when I am get my house. 

 

Do you need 20 drives?  I have 105 hd 1080P movies and 30 different tv shows most of them in HD and music and few audio books and so far I only  1.7TB had been taken. I would go for low power setup amd has 25W cpus semptron 3825 quad core or athlon 2.5ghz quad 25W.

I have two  kvm running on semptron one arch linux for my pbx openchange/sogo  and server 2012. I have node 804 that can hold 12 hard drives and has room for couple more. I paid 60$ for motherboard and cpu and case was 54$ and power supply 67$.  8 port controler card was 105$ so 300$ including ram I have nice case that supports 14 drives.  I saw a deal for 5tb red drives for 180 each so if you buy 10 drives you will get 45tb of space for 2100$ If you want 20 drives fancy motherboard cpu you are looking at 1500$

 

Tritron,

 

I only want to allow for 20 drives or more for expansion I do not need to buy all 20 now, but with my current setup for just media (Movies, Music, Music Videos, TV shows) I am using close to 6TB of data and this is just since February. Mind you this does not include backups I would want to store on the server I am even thinking about charging family to store there backups with a software called urbackup which allows full image backups to happen live over the internet onto the server which is a whole other aspect. So I would kinda prefer to have the power and performance something like an intel I7 or maybe I5 processor or even A xeon processor. Plus right now I can have 4 -8 people streaming movies or tv shows from plex at any given time It works pretty well with the server I got now but I am using windows server 2012 with hyper-V and no type of data backup in place as of yet. Alot of my media stuff is automated and requires little to no management which is why I would like to be able to create Virtual machines on the unRaid to kinda of rebuild the current setup I have.

[kciaccio]

Watching this thread with great interest because I am doing exactly what the OP is doing.

[tjnetworking]

I thought I would give a little bit more detail of the apps that I am currently using this also allowed me to completely cut cable so cost savings on that alone makes one time fees worth it.

 

Plex

Playon

Media Center Master

headphones (for music)

filebot

robo basket

 

Plus a VPN Server built on an Ubuntu Hyper-V machine that does the downloads and run cron jobs to move the files to there respective locations.

 

I also have other VM's that run

 

These are applications always running

 

My current setup is the following

 

Intel Core I5-2500K CPU

16 GBS of ram

64bit Server 2012 R2

12 TB worth of space

(2x 4TB Drives &  2x 2TB drives)

about 6TB being used.

[switchman]

If you have the depth for the case, you could always turn it on its side like this.  I wish I had thought of this when I built mine,  I would prefer to have support for at least 20 drives.

 

If it has to sit on the floor, you could always build a small stand for the mounting ears to hang over.  I have been thinking of this and purchasing a new cage vs an antec 1200 and 1 extra cage.

 

http://imgur.com/nV6zp.jpg

[tjnetworking]

I was thinking about this case setup (http://greenleaf-technology.com/our-servers/20-drive-tower-server/) with the guts of AVS-10/4 do you guys think this will work do you see any con's in this setup? what should I consider in this build? I would also like to try to add 4 SSD drive cage I may have to remove on of the five or maybe I could mount it Somewhere inside the case so I would not loose my 20 drives.

[tritron]

Well the drives are getting bigger so three 8tb hard drives  gives you 24tb of space those drivers are 260 from seagate. Remember more drives more power draw.

[JeffSimpson]

With that many drives you don't have too many options, but consensus would be Antec Twelve Hundred vs Norco 4220/24.  The trade off is price vs. space.  As mentioned, if you have the space for it, all things being equal the Norco will probably be cheaper in the long run.

 

I've just finished building an ESXi server based on a Norco 4220, Xeon E3 1230, Supermicro X10SL7-F MB and have been very happy with it.  My anecdotal experience is that server processors handle virtualization better, but you may be limited in other areas (i.e. PCIe slots on the motherboard) so plan out all of the hardware now (even if you don't need it right away).   

 

Fortunately it sounds like your current setup is working OK so that can be your baseline.  Are you planning to continue with Hyper-V, or are you looking at using another VM environment?

[tjnetworking]

First let me say happy New years to everyone and hope that everyone had a nice Xmas. So my fiancee got me the  Antec Twelve Hundred V3 case for Christmas so I will be building from that. Jeff to answer your question I was not going to go with hyper-v but I am not 100% sure on that I like XEN when I used it since it was very flexible the problem with that was when it broke it took for ever to fix because I am still a Linux beginner, but you live and you learn right. can anyone tell me if they think XEN is a better solution to hyper-v standalone server?

[tjnetworking]

Hey guys what do you think of these MB's

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157405

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157405R

[garycase]

Although I personally prefer SuperMicro, the AsRock board works very well.  I've not used that specific board, but have used a few AsRock boards in the last year, and they've been very nicely made.

 

Two caveats:  (1)  Be sure you're buying a CPU that's compatible with your current BIOS revision, or it can be a hassle to get it set up [The removable BIOS chip is a nice feature if you have a way to get it flashed ... not sure if AsRock will do that for you or not].

 

                      (2)  I wouldn't buy the Open Box board, as there's no guarantee it will have any of the ancilliary parts ... most notably the I/O Shield [Not an absolute necessity; but I wouldn't build a system without one].  Spend the extra $$ and get a new board.  [This is also more likely to have an updated BIOS, so #1 won't be an issue  ]

 

 

[garycase]

With the Antec case you have, 4 of the Norco 5-in-3 bays will give you 20-drive support (as I'm sure you know).  These are the most economical 5-in-3 cages I'm aware of that still provide hot-swap capability.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133030

 

For the load you're planning, with heavy virtualization, I'd definitely go with a Xeon instead of an i3.  An E3-1271v3 will give you the same level of performance as a high-end Core i7 (e.g. an i7-4790), with better virtualization and ECC support.    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117314&cm_re=E3-1271-_-19-117-314-_-Product

 

Add 16GB of ECC RAM [e.g. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239117 ] and you'll have a very nice setup.

 

I assume you're well aware of this, but your budget of $2,000 is nowhere near enough to fully populate this server (with 20 drives) ... but is plenty to get the system built and a good set of "starter" drives.  Don't skimp on the size of the drives ... use at LEAST 4TB drives; and you may want to go even larger.  Personally I'd probably use Hitachi 6TB NAS units [ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145973 ] or 6TB WD Reds [ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236737 ] => if these are too pricey for you, you may at least want to use the Hitachi unit for parity, so you'll have both a fast parity drive (7200rpm) and support for up to 6TB data drives as you populate the server.

 

[tjnetworking]

Hey Garycase,

 

Thanks for the input do you think this board would be better then the AsRock

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182253&Tpk=supermicro%20x9scm-f

[garycase]

Hey Garycase,

 

Thanks for the input do you think this board would be better then the AsRock

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182253&Tpk=supermicro%20x9scm-f

 

No -- that's a nice board, but it doesn't support the latest generation processors.  You'd have to use an E3 v2 series chip instead of the Haswell v3 series.  If you want to use a SuperMicro board, use one of the X10 boards.

 

This is a good one with 14 on-board SATA ports:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182821

or one of these if you don't want the extra onboard SATA ports or want more expandability (with the full ATX version) and the 226 chipset:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182822

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182831

 

 

 

[tjnetworking]

I like the 14 port board but like you said there is not much room to expand and I will need 20 sata ports maybe 24 because I want to customize the case to fit a 4 2.5 bay for SSD. So I am thinking the Full ATX motherboard would be best It also has on board audio and HDMI for pass-through on the VM's.

 

here is my pc part picker list please let me know if I am missing anything I already have the case and some HDD mostly 2 and 4 gigs so I will buy one large 6 or 8 gig for cache.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ZYMGt6

[garycase]

I agree full ATX boards generally have better expansion options.

 

Actually, I like this board much better than the one I listed above (I meant to list this one, but picked the wrong link):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182830

 

It has 3 PCIe x16 slots plus a few x1s in x4 physical slots, whereas the other board only has 2 x16 slots.  Give the likelihood of adding 2 x8 controller cards plus a video card to pass through to a VM, the 3 slots are very nice to have 

 

 

[tjnetworking]

The only thing about that board it does not look like it has IPMI interface on it. Is that correct?

[garycase]

Very interesting -- I hadn't noticed that.  The Description does say it has IPMI support; but the specifications tab doesn't mention it; and it's also not mentioned on the SuperMicro web site ... so that may be the case (I'm surprised).

 

Don't know if that's an oversight by SuperMicro in the documentation, or if the board actually doesn't support it.

 

[tjnetworking]

I don't see the extra nic they usually have for it in the pictures I am assuming its not included on this board what a shame would have been a great board I mean I can use vpro with the processor I have but I am not sure these boards support vpro.

[garycase]

Looking at the specs on their website, it's not listed, and it is for most of their other boards, so I suspect this particular board simply doesn't support it.  I'm disappointed in SuperMicro for making a C226 board without IPMI !!

 

Personally IPMI is a very-nice-to-have but not mandatory feature for my systems, but you may have a different view.

 

 

[tjnetworking]

Yes I need some-type of bios remote management want to be  lazy and not have to go to the basement if the machine is having issues or if I am away :-). Did you get a chance to check my part picker list? I think I will stick with the other motherboard for now unless you got any more you could suggest thank you for all your help.

[garycase]

No, I'm not aware of any other boards with that much expansion capability that have IPMI.  I thought all of the C2xx SuperMicro's had IPMI, but in looking through their website that's clearly not the case.

 

Your other parts look fine ... the only thing I'd do differently is I'm not a fan of the C-series Corsair power supplies;  I always use TX or better (usually HX units).  I've seen a few systems that simply wouldn't boot with the CX series units.  Not sure if the issue is stability, timing of the power good signal, or what ... but the higher-end units never have the problem.