6:44 "You can write your own kernel module," he casually suggests, as if that's as simple as flipping a switch. Throwaway lines like that are the best parts of your videos, Wendell!
I'd love to see two different videos on home storage servers. One covering 2 - 4u power-efficient, rack-mounted servers that hold as much storage as possible and are suitable for media, virtualization and even hosting VM's via TrueNAS scale. The second video covering power-efficient storage servers for people who don't have a rack and need a good looking quiet server that has a lot of capacity.
As far as I can tell, ATX in a tower with room for a lot of HDDs is the best value still. It takes up a bit more space but everything costs less than MATX or ITX. The ICYDOCK stuff is really cool, but also really expensive for what it is.
I've had really good luck scoring Icy dock cages on eBay, like the 3x3.5" sleds that fit in a double 5.25 slot. Not the best storage density, but big 3.5" drives are pretty cheap.
The ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T looks real interesting for that Jonesbo case - The 2 OCuLink connectors will connect 4 SATA drives each, or you can use them for PCIe4 x4 for some kind of U.2 functionality. And as it has dual 10GBe networking, it certainly has the throughput. Finally, you can bifurcate it's x16 slot into x8x8, x8x4x4 or x4x4x4x4 for NVMe caching. Or even a half-height GPU for HW transcoding as part of a FreeNAS SCALE box.
I think the Ideal Home Server would be something like: -The best performance/watt CPU to be energy efficient, I think the 7950x or 7900? -The most ECC ram you can get -2 SSD/NVME in raid for the host hypervisor. Proxmox, xcp-ng, unraid or whatever is your choice -5 HDD's with RAIDZ2 passthough to a Truenas VM as a target for the storage, with NFS or SCSi for easier ZFS management. -About GPU.. I'm not sure the iGPU in the AM5 is supported for HW encoding yet, I don't do much encoding as I mainly use direct playback, and for the little encoding I need the CPU is fine. So I don't think a dGPU is needed for the ideal Home Server...unless -Unless you want to do a Jack-of-all-trades Home Server and use it as a Gaming PC, locally or via Parsec/Moonlight. My current "main" Home Server is also my gaming PC as I can't have multiple computers (space+money). And passthough the dGPU to a VM that I turn on for gaming. It is in it's own nvme disk so if I need to play a anticheat game I can dual boot to it, I do loose all my "server" stuff while dual booted though, like media, password manager(though it's cached in each bitwarden device), etc... So this setup would be ideal for a Home Server-only machine.
I love that Wendell just casually suggests writing a system linux module for getting your memory errors into ipmi, that's not level1 that's graybeard level lol
I want two different form factors. One is a hypervisor node that only needs to support a handful of M.2 drives (22110 size would be ideal), and then a larger chassis that would be the storage server with both flash and spinning rust.
Putting aside hot swap ability, what you describe as the ideal mATX server case is pretty close to the Fractal Design Node 804. Room for nine 3.5” drives plus two more 2.5” drives. With a 3D printed adapter, you could add a tenth 3.5” drive. An extra bonus is that it looks good enough that you can put it anywhere. For filling all those drive bays, I’ve got a Supermicro X10sl7 which has 6 SATA ports, plus an onboard 8 port LSI SAS controller.
I am thinking of a build and I'm flip-flopping between the Node 804 at around 40 liters, or going more compact and more quiet (albeit warmer) with the Define 7 Mini (M-ATX, 33 liters) and adding some additional 3.5" drive space with their universal mounts or a custom mod for a drive cage. I can't seem to find thermal & acoustic case tests on UA-cam for anything accept gaming or editing PCs, but I feel like 4 or 6 or 8 drives humming away would be "loud" in a typical open-mesh type case, so I'm leaning towards the Define 7 Mini.
I'm still rocking the old Define R5 and loving it. I currently got 10 HDDs and 4 2.5" SATA SSDs with space for 2 more for the latter. I just upgraded my system and I can add 4 nvme drives on the motherboard in the future as well. Won't go wrong with any of these FD cases tbh.
I just rebuilt a server by putting it into a Node 804. It's a great option, but I think Wendell is right that there's a lot of wasted space considering what I use it for. Half-height expansion cards would be fine with me and that would save at least 10 liters
@@Uriel51 Anecdotally, my Node 804 setup is pretty loud with 4 drives in it. 2 WD Reds, and 2 Seagate Exos X drives in it. I had the WD drives connected to a raspberry pi on my desk before and they were fine. But I added the 2 Seagate drives at the same time as I moved to a PC in the Node 804, and that's pretty loud now. The vibrations of those harddrives resonate through the case, making it pretty loud as a whole. Maybe I can do something about it, but I haven't put any effort in it since it's just sitting in my basement. Otherwise I'm very happy with the case. If you really want to get that case, I'd make sure I'd also buy relatively silent hard drives. The DC drives are great for reliability but they're just that much louder in my very limited experience.
@@Niosus it is that exact scenario I was suspicious would happen when you pack 3+ drives together. I am leaning towards the Define 7 Mini for the added dampening material. My NAS will be in my office and not a closet so that will become a noticeable aspect
For my server, I'm still rocking a Fractal Design R5 I bought a couple of years ago. It's using a couple of IcyDock adapter bays as well (two 5.25" bay to 2x 2.5" SATA + 1x 3.5" SATA adapter). I currently have 10 HDDs and 4 2.5" SATA SSDs on it.
Yes the Intel 4x3.5" or even 8x3.5" and 8x2.5" hot swap drive cages are available for cheap, but they can be a pain to use. Drive access is controlled (via signals on the SATA / SAS connectors) by the micro (typically a Cypress CY8C22545) on the PCB which is usually controlled by the Intel motherboards BMC via the I2C interface (white 5 pin connectors). So to use these cages you need to either hack the I2C, micro or PCB. None of which are great options for the uninitiated. Another options is to just remove the PCB and use regular cables to the drives which is easily done but also removes the hot swap option.
My first homelab server for plex and Nas functionality was a node 304 with old core i3 and quadro p2000. I'm out growing that 6 drive bay limit so I decided to go ryzen with a fractal define 7. It holds so many 3.5 drives. This enables me to use lsi hba adapters with SAS expanders to scale out. It's not same use case as your living room server scenario but I'd love to see some content on expanding bay enclosures that don't take up a lot of space and cost effective to another 16 drives etc. Especially considering we have to prepare for the apocalypse 😂
Left the Mac world and loving my first awesome PC build.. I was thinking adventures when I stumbled on this channel.. now I’m excited but just more confused with so many options.. I fell into a wormhole looking up raid setups and networking.. 😅
I've ended up with a Synology NAS and a separate mini PC setup. I went through all this home server stuff before realizing I wanted two different things from my home server setup. Firstly I wanted absolute stability and availability for my storage. I didn't like the opportunity for backups to fail, lost data, or even slow data access. Separately, though, I wanted a server I could absolutely hammer with transcoding and compiling something I could do experiments with and not think in the back of my mind. Eventually I would like like to upgrade my mini PC into something more SFF sized so I can gain some extra performance but mini PCs consume so little power that there will always be some use for one.
I have this case and the Node 304, but now my go to home server case is the SilverStone Technology CS351. It supports mATX motherboards while still being compact, so you can have a GPU and a 10gbe nic. Plus the 5 bays are hot swappable.
I would like to see the "budget home NAS that can be upgraded in the same case to the Best cost/efficient Home NAS" because I believe a lot of people who don't know they need a NAS if they are presented with a compelling option they will join the datahoarder club and with it they will join this channel, the best one for this type of content! Magnificent work! I have known your channel for a while, but I joined recently and I am glad that I did because enjoying the content even thought neither do I have more money than sense.
I am looking to lessen my dependence on Adobe and Google cloud services for storing achieved projects. Great information and gave me some ideas for configurations.
Also please don't stop reading my mind about these insane machination such as using many of those ICY dock 5.2" bays. I was going to put it in the basement of my Dual PC (Desktop / Server) P600S. Filling the other 3.5" bays with 20TB EXOS drives.
FANTASTIC VIDEO! - I just built in a Node304 case with a AXZEZ ITX carrier board (with 5 SATA ports - yes!!) & a RasPi CM4 module (available as a combo!) and I wish I saw this sooner! The only thing missing is ECC memory. I'd also look at the Silverstone DS case which comes with a SATA/SAS backplane (if money is more important than time for you) . Thanks for thinking of us mere mortals Wendel! :D
By the way, SATA Ports wise, you can always get a couple 1 to 5 sata port expanders, I actually used one with a BananaPI M1 so I could connect 5 disks to a single SATA Port with SATA PMP enabled being the one trick needing to be done. Not the fastest solution though will work in most cases where the disks do not saturate the single sata port.
I got an OG Antec Nine Hundred in 2007 or 2008 for gaming and used it as a fileserver enclosure until a few years ago. Still have it standing around here somewhere too. The Antec Nine Hundred was a "Premium" gaming case back then, going for the spectacularly high 100€ mark. (for the time 100€ was expensive for a case ...) Man, our hobby has gotten silly expensive.
I have a cheap Rosewill case with my old main PC guts as a home sever. Recently moved to a pair of sata SSDs instead of my failing spinning rust for storage. Its great, but loud, and gets so dusty. I like those little NAS box options.
You are hitting all the right pain points. I ended up getting a used case off of facebook marketplace. The kid I bought it from seemed like he never did anything but pull it out of the box to look at it. I can't remember the brand or model for the case but it has room for 10 HDD's and more expansion for the 5 inch bays. I'm ready to get it up and running but the old i5 4000 motherboard I have for it only has 4 sata ports. The only motherboard that really interested me were the ASRock ones used here. I haven't convinced myself to put the money up for a new motherboard, cpu and ram just yet.
It's just a little less space efficient than this extruded aluminum idea, but my old Bitfenix Prodigy continues to be my favorite case for small home server. 5 hard drives, cheap full size power supply, room for a big tower cooler so you can have a chonky cpu doing hard work, and then you just use that one pcie slot for an hba.
The Gigabyte B650I AORUS ULTRA has 2.5Gb intel, wifi 6E, 4 SATA ports and 3 m.2 ports. you could put in the m.2 slots a boot drive, a sata to m.2 adapter and a network adapter.
Wendel I haven't been able to watch a video in awhile but I just wanted to say, you're so damn skinny! Way to go! I know that's insanely hard work that barely gets noticed over time but seeing it all in one go, like damn you're almost another person! Congrats, and I hope you keep it up.
So I built a "server" in the jonsbo n1, 5x 12tb drives, 2x 2tb name, 1x 1TB sata ssd. Gigabyte b650 its board, 64gb ddr5-6000 memory kit, Ryzen 7900. I ended up using an HBA in the pci slot. This thing flies. Running trueness scale on it so far and it flies. I am interested to see Wendells take on it when he builds.
I know it was designed for HTPC duties, but the Silverstone GD08 doubles extremely well as a home server. From memory holds up to 12 x 3.5"drives, and plenty of room for add in cards. And it can live beneath your TV and look good while doing it.
I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing with icydocks for sometime. I already have the Rosewill server case with the hotswap bays but I've been considering buying a couple more with 5.25" bays for this reason. The front panel on those cases is all modular.
I want to see the Toptron (or AliExpress equivalent) mini-ITX NAS mobo with 6x SATA, 4x 2.5 GbE NICs, and the Intel 5105 CPU! Crazy cheap and functional! Gracemont stuff is right around the corner, too... Mini home server hardware market is heating up!!!
My home server is in a 15+ year old Lian Li PCv1000. Back when Lian Li made nice cases. Picked up a bunch of their old HDD cages that match the design of the case from some random PC parts stores that carried ancient stuff.
I'd like to see a run-down of the USB DAS boxes (mediasonic, sabrent, terramaster) , as there's a lot of real-world usability issues regarding disconnections and drive ID naming. It'd be nice to know what's good/bad to use. I have no horse in this race other than being a r/HTPC mod recommending storage solutions to our users across the breath of the pre-built/diy/hybrid space.
I love your idea of the 5.25 inch focussed case. Maybe someone can 3D print it as a proof of concept? On the motherboard to test I'd love to see a focus given to power efficiency.
I would love to find a series that dealt with a solid state setup. I am looking at something that would be good in an RV or on a boat as I am looking to put movies and music on it. It needs to handle vibration and preferably have a passive cooling setup. This would mainly be a NAS setup and then duplicated for a pfSense node. Passive cooling because moist saltwater air eats electronics and passive would slow that down a bit. Also would like to do SFP+ connections.
A+ hilarious intro to this vid 👍 16:48 -- Thank you for the heads up about i225-V being "on the struggle bus." I have one, no issues so far. Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
I'm half tempted to go towards a rack mount system. My biggest problem is space in de house (so have to hang it vertical which I'm not happy with). I'm now rocking a Fractal Design Define R5 and I'm out of 3 1/2 slots (this is including the 5 1/4 repurposed, tho I could go for an icy 2 5 1/4 -> 3 3 1/2, as now I''m only using 2, but yeh that's a minor step) Your aluminium extrusion intrigues me. That opens up the options that I can expand / resize at will. I still have a lot of them (for my never finished 3d printer project) but that changes my thought on my Define R5, would be a bit more space effecient if I'd go a small case for my server (althought it's an ATX mobo, it feels like it's a tiny bit bigger.. I think they cheated with specs to fit as much stuff on it as possible, it's the ROMED8-2T from Asrock)
TrueNAS Scale, for any additional software features either use the containers or set up a VM or two to run those and if need be save any data directly on a TrueNAS share. That's what I have actually done, have a couple VMs for stuff like downloading tools/apps and some other niceties and basically they just store the data directly on the same share I have to my stuff for ease of use.
I'm SO excited for you to do a Jonsbo N1 Media server build because I picked up the case to do exactly that! I did some research and apparently you can also grab a m.2 to SATA converter card to do the last 2 SATA ports in the Jonsbo and if its a ITX with 2+ NVME slots you should be golden to run 6 SATA + 1 NVME Boot. I definitely plan to go AM5 in only for having the onboard graphics so that I can free up the PCIE slot for extra networking. No idea what Motherboard I would go for. Hell it might not even exist till Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 6 comes out with the AM5 platform
I'm still rocking a 10+ year old Thermaltake case with 9x 5.25" front facing drive bays. Mounted 9x 3.5" drives in the bottom 6, DVD drive up top, and room for 3 more 3.5" drives for the future. Don't think I'll ever get rid of that case.
I have an Antec 900 sitting collecting dust. Funny to see it mentioned here. Have a Fractal Define 7 XL arriving today that will be an all in one media and file server, etc.
The main obstacle to the ultimate home server build is that it still needs to be a home server, so it needs to be (relativity) affordable. The main obstacle that I am encountering is lack of PCIe, ideally I would want a PCIe switch/router since while I need a significant amount of port I don't need to hit them all at full speed at the same time, but that does not exist (at a reasonable price). In my home server I'm orienting myself to buy sata SSD since I can more easily multiplex port, but is not ideal.
For mass storage needs, I'm quite happy with my HP N40Ls, which have up to 4 3.5 SATA each. Then there is a Lenovo T420 with 2TB in the optical bay and some USB hard drives as a streaming server.
I want to see lower power, modern hardware. Something like the B650D4U-2L2T/BCM in a shallow rack mount case and i want to see how far you can reasonably push the PCIE connectivity. That means, m.2 adapters, pcie sata cards, pcie switches (plx?) I want a lot of pcie 3.0 / 4.0 devices on NEW hardware, not power hungry data centre ebay stuff. How can I turn 1 PCIE 5.0 16x into as many lanes of pcie 3.0/4.0 as possible. And how can that fit into a rack case.
This is where ASRock Rack mITX Epyc board comes to the rescue... with PCIe4x16 slot standard and 6xPCIe4x8 over miniSAS if I recall correctly... with 2x of those PCIe4x8 being splittable to a total of like 16xSATA drives... before you factor in any AiCs with storage controllers or networking or eg. media transcoding acceleration (maybe Intel ARCs or similar, once some lower power option becomes available, elsewise T400 or T600, or - wishful thinking - Alveo u30), this looks great, only the cost of the mITX ASRock Rack board with Rome (or newer) even lower-core-count lower-TDP Epycs may scare most... And that's before you factor DIMMs and storage itself.
That mini server looks pretty nice for people with limited space, I'm still happy with my generic late 90s ATX tower filled with drives and cheap used Supermicro board for that ECC goodness.
Can't wait to see what motherboard you use for the N1, I built a TrueNAS Scale server with it using an older gigabyte b-chipset motherboard and a ryzen 3400g I got with a system I bought for a 3090 back in the dark days. I put an asm1166 chipset sata expansion card in it and it's been pretty solid.
I bought a used dual xeon lga-3647, installed 2 m.2 expasion cards populated with 8 m.2 drives of 4 tb each. Enough storage for me. I use the system for vm's and as a storage server. Extremely fast for me, the server was quite economical as well, still have 2 more pciex16 slots left over for more storage if required.
You make me glad I still have my old Antec Nine Hundred around. It was my first PC Case and I used it for 11 years. Hoping to repurpose it for a home server.
Currently migrating to a Node804 for my server, and pairing it with the MSI PRO B550M-VC WIFI. With 8 onboard SATA ports and 2 M.2 slots, it's got plenty of storage. Plus the case can fit a slimline optical drive which is perfect for ripping media directly on the server. To top it off, the mobo has 4 16x slots. I'll be adding a 10G card, GPU for transcoding, and maybe down the line some more storage cards.
Like you, my only lament of these home NAS and media server cases is the lack of drive bay accessibility from outside. Opening up the whole machine for a drive swap is inconvenient, even if it makes for a prettier looking system. I currently use and old Acer EasyStore H340 chassis (4 bays). It is standard ITX but needs (a) some wiring modification for (some of) the front panel buttons/lights to work, (b) a really low profile CPU cooler, and (c) a carefully measured out flex PSU or a pico-PSU. I have it running intel 6th gen, mostly for NAS, non-transcoding media, and VM duties.
I'd love to see one using 12th gen Alder Lake and the W680 chipset. All the articles I see about this are from Q1 2022 but it seems like there are almost NO motherboards available. The one I have seen is the ASRock IMB-X1314.
Perfect timing! I've been contemplating my first home server build that will be focused on "bang for the buck", power efficiency, quiet, and with support for ECC memory. It's for these reasons I'm considering using the 12th gen Alder Lake and the W680 chipset. I am less knowledgeable about AMD platforms, but I've also heard of the excellent power efficiency of recent-gen Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 so maybe this is a great option too.
I have an ASRock Rack EPYC3451D4I2-2T motherboard in a Silverstone CS-01 as my current storage server. The CS-01 only has two 3.5 inch bays and two 2.5 inch bays, but I couldn't easily get any other case (such as the Jonsbo N1) for a reasonable price here in Australia. The motherboard is admittedly pretty expensive and only takes RDIMMS, but it has an incredible 14 SATA ports on an ITX board, 12 via OCuLink ports (one x4 and one x8) using octopus cables. I wish using connectors and cables like that was done in the consumer space - we could have so many more ports on ITX motherboards! I notice others are mentioning the X570D4I-2T, which does similar with two x4 OCuLink ports and is probably a less expensive way to get enough ports for most uses. I really wanted the Lian Li PC-Q26 as shown on this channel years ago (ua-cam.com/video/K8HMLi7pt3I/v-deo.html) with 10 3.5 inch bays, but I couldn't find it anywhere. It would've been the perfect case for that motherboard!
I'd like something like the Antec 900 but I want it in a rack mount. Something I could use standard (120mm) fans, populate the whole front with those icy dock bays. Then I could mix and match the front hotswap as I need and it'd be a case that could grow. Make it a shallow depth and allow it to accommodate add-in cards for more customization. I love rack mount and even a small rack is pretty cheap for your home. A 12u on rollers or something is amazing but what isn't amazing is your typical rack mount fans. I want something that you could have in a room and still be able to use that room for something.
I agree with mATX for home servers. The extra space at the bottom is perfect for some extra drives. What I did with my racked NAS was 3D print some hotswap cages and stick them to the bottom with double sided tape. Pick an mATX board with extra PCIe slots rather than extra M.2 though, even if they are only a single lane. Each PCIe3 lane can do 1GB/s, meaning it’ll support 3-5 SATA HDDs before becoming bottlenecked (assuming each drive does between 200 and 300 MB/s in a sequential read, which is my experience with NAS drives). Each M.2 slot then is costing you an awful lot of potential 20TB HDDs. Kudos to Wendell for making me get Optane for a metadata special device, too. I didn’t think it would do anything noticeable over Ethernet, but that was entirely wrong and the improvement in latency is nothing short of incredible. Definitely you want two M.2 slots, so you can use fast modern storage for your metadata and small files. Even if you’re not getting optane it’ll be a huge boost.
Oooooooh, you know exactly the words that excite us. You had me at 'Hi' but all the stuff after was icing on the cake. "hoarding" "reconstruct society after the fall 💦" "addiction"
Asrock has a mini-ITX board that supports LGA 3647, looks interesting and those 2nd-gen Scalable processors are fairly inexpensive on the used market these days
Firstly Wendell, this video was my tech wet dream of doing my home server setup 🤤🤤🥰😇👍💪with the said itx Jonsbo case 😱🤩🤯! Secondly, good to see you looking healthier, better and taking better care of yourself 😇👍.
Main things I’m looking for at the moment is a power efficient platform (high energy prices and all that) simple and bullet proof. ZFS on a TrueNAS OS with ECC is a must. A fair few cores so I can virtualise home assistant and a docker host VM for the remainder of the containers. Cheap enough ideally to run two for ZFS backups as not yet found ZFS hosted online for decent money to run the backups too.
Been looking at the Sliger Cerberus mATX case for a nice compact home server. If you could fit 6 3.5" drives in it that would be amazing, I dunno why everyone always stops at 5 hdd's but it's been driving me insane! Y'all should do a build in one at some point and figure out just how many disks you can cram into it!
I'm 100% on-board with this line of thinking regarding the expandability of 5.25" bays and having looked around there just aren't good options any more, well not cheap options. Something like the Lian-Li PC-343 would be pretty epic but they were always too rich for me though to fill them out would be super costly anyway, but at least you could do it over time. Of course you'd need a lot of PCI-E lanes to fill out that many bays even if you only went with 30x3.5" spinning rust. Of course the flexibility of 5.25" bays is that you mix and match to your heart's content.
I'm moving towards getting a rack server. I have a bit of network gear a backup server a application server and all the ups stuff. Not really worth having a server unless it's 24-7 and you need a ups for that. A rack mount is the only real option at this point.
I have two of those Intel cages and a rosewill cage in a old atx case. Now lays flat for eventual use in a rack. Adaptec 3016 / omv / mergerfs / snapraid I cut out most of the case front/bays and just bolted the cages in. Sealed the gaps with painters tape so the rear fans pull air across all drives. Ugly, but works. You should list the models of everything mentioned so people can search easier. I snagged my cages for about 35 but that was pre chia
I‘m happy with my Dell T320. 8x LFF bays, 3x 5,25, cheap and enough slots for PCIe cards. Redundant PSU if you like. Little bit noisy but everything else for very little budget without any headaches
I know it has some flaws but I like the ds380. But motherboards are always an issue. With the right HBA or maybe an M.2 slot card you could get 8 drives into the case plus 3-4 2.5inch drives
Very interesting video Wendell and Level1! You definitely got my idea cog wheels turning. I'd love to build a home server to work as a NAS and use as a remote server to learn Linux!
I have an Antec 900 and always thought it would be an awesome home server case. I already have a Norco rack mount case with 20 3.5" bays but if I didn't I'd be using that Antec for it
Ooh my that seeedstudio server looks really cool! And for that price too! If you get that and two 20tb hard drives, that would be an easy choice to get a backup server for my homelab!
For me the ideal server is one that takes up as little space as possible while still being powerful. A cluster of n100 mini pcs actually has fit that bill quite nicely
The JonsBo case has a flaw and an omission imho the flaw is that the when used as a tower the fan sucks from above and blows down while the hot air from the mobo and PSU + the hot air from the drives themselves wants to go up... thats an efficiency pitfall and the omission is that they should have some sort of lid on its side to be able to swap (e.g a dead) hard drive even easier (compared to having to take the entire shell out )
I am noticing a pattern where I will watch a Level1 video then spend the following 2 or 3 hours researching a build list.
It's all fun and games until you end up hitting Submit on a full cart.
@@gavination_domination _yeaaaaaah..._ 😬
I ought to start tracking my homelab spend, tagging things with L1 and do some chargebacks to Wendell
Just check bank account before giving in to the urge to make a build list. Just as depressing, but saves time 😜
@@deviantflux 😆
Every video somehow gets better. This channel is an absolute GOLDMINE of top-quality content.
6:44
"You can write your own kernel module," he casually suggests, as if that's as simple as flipping a switch. Throwaway lines like that are the best parts of your videos, Wendell!
Let's all imagine how filthy rich Wendel would need to be to have more money than sense.
even cookie clicker couldnt count high enough
This is such an oddly wholesome compliment, I hope he sees it haha
🤯
“You see this lake? It’s for the computer!!!” *Wendell freak out face*
I think this is one of the best compliments one can ever receive.
I'd love to see two different videos on home storage servers. One covering 2 - 4u power-efficient, rack-mounted servers that hold as much storage as possible and are suitable for media, virtualization and even hosting VM's via TrueNAS scale. The second video covering power-efficient storage servers for people who don't have a rack and need a good looking quiet server that has a lot of capacity.
As far as I can tell, ATX in a tower with room for a lot of HDDs is the best value still. It takes up a bit more space but everything costs less than MATX or ITX. The ICYDOCK stuff is really cool, but also really expensive for what it is.
Agreed. I have a gpu for plex, 10gbe nic, says card etc in my server. Need space, need pcie.
I've had really good luck scoring Icy dock cages on eBay, like the 3x3.5" sleds that fit in a double 5.25 slot. Not the best storage density, but big 3.5" drives are pretty cheap.
I think we need to see a Sliger and Level 1 Techs team up for the ultimate home nas/server case!
Love my U-NAS NSC-810A. MicroATX, dual full size PCIe slots, 8x3.5 hotswap bays. Little tough to build it but now that I'm done it's been awesome.
Rip U-NAS. 😢
The ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T looks real interesting for that Jonesbo case - The 2 OCuLink connectors will connect 4 SATA drives each, or you can use them for PCIe4 x4 for some kind of U.2 functionality. And as it has dual 10GBe networking, it certainly has the throughput. Finally, you can bifurcate it's x16 slot into x8x8, x8x4x4 or x4x4x4x4 for NVMe caching. Or even a half-height GPU for HW transcoding as part of a FreeNAS SCALE box.
Yeah, that's what I'd have right now if U-NAS hadn't gone out of business.
They are 650 euros a POP....Jesus christ at that point just build a Node 804
I think the Ideal Home Server would be something like:
-The best performance/watt CPU to be energy efficient, I think the 7950x or 7900?
-The most ECC ram you can get
-2 SSD/NVME in raid for the host hypervisor. Proxmox, xcp-ng, unraid or whatever is your choice
-5 HDD's with RAIDZ2 passthough to a Truenas VM as a target for the storage, with NFS or SCSi for easier ZFS management.
-About GPU.. I'm not sure the iGPU in the AM5 is supported for HW encoding yet, I don't do much encoding as I mainly use direct playback, and for the little encoding I need the CPU is fine. So I don't think a dGPU is needed for the ideal Home Server...unless
-Unless you want to do a Jack-of-all-trades Home Server and use it as a Gaming PC, locally or via Parsec/Moonlight. My current "main" Home Server is also my gaming PC as I can't have multiple computers (space+money). And passthough the dGPU to a VM that I turn on for gaming. It is in it's own nvme disk so if I need to play a anticheat game I can dual boot to it, I do loose all my "server" stuff while dual booted though, like media, password manager(though it's cached in each bitwarden device), etc... So this setup would be ideal for a Home Server-only machine.
Have you tried setting the smbios = host in the OS section of your vm's xml? I can run games with EAC without it complaining I'm on a vm.
@@mobius_71 to be honest I haven't tried, i just didn't wanted to risk the ban. Could you tried it with Vanguard/Valorant and Warzone2?
@@rodrimora sorry I haven't tried it with those so I can't say for sure.
I love that Wendell just casually suggests writing a system linux module for getting your memory errors into ipmi, that's not level1 that's graybeard level lol
The follow on builds / videos to this one can't come fast enough for me. I am so very ready to do this same thing.
Very happy to see Sliger getting a mention, there cases are underrated and under reviewed, love my SM550 case.
I want two different form factors. One is a hypervisor node that only needs to support a handful of M.2 drives (22110 size would be ideal), and then a larger chassis that would be the storage server with both flash and spinning rust.
Putting aside hot swap ability, what you describe as the ideal mATX server case is pretty close to the Fractal Design Node 804. Room for nine 3.5” drives plus two more 2.5” drives. With a 3D printed adapter, you could add a tenth 3.5” drive. An extra bonus is that it looks good enough that you can put it anywhere.
For filling all those drive bays, I’ve got a Supermicro X10sl7 which has 6 SATA ports, plus an onboard 8 port LSI SAS controller.
Totally agree with the idea of 6-5.25” drive bays.
I really like FD Node 804 with micro ATC MB support and 8x 3.5" drives (+ enough space to mod some extra 3.5" bays into it).
I am thinking of a build and I'm flip-flopping between the Node 804 at around 40 liters, or going more compact and more quiet (albeit warmer) with the Define 7 Mini (M-ATX, 33 liters) and adding some additional 3.5" drive space with their universal mounts or a custom mod for a drive cage.
I can't seem to find thermal & acoustic case tests on UA-cam for anything accept gaming or editing PCs, but I feel like 4 or 6 or 8 drives humming away would be "loud" in a typical open-mesh type case, so I'm leaning towards the Define 7 Mini.
I'm still rocking the old Define R5 and loving it. I currently got 10 HDDs and 4 2.5" SATA SSDs with space for 2 more for the latter. I just upgraded my system and I can add 4 nvme drives on the motherboard in the future as well. Won't go wrong with any of these FD cases tbh.
I just rebuilt a server by putting it into a Node 804. It's a great option, but I think Wendell is right that there's a lot of wasted space considering what I use it for. Half-height expansion cards would be fine with me and that would save at least 10 liters
@@Uriel51 Anecdotally, my Node 804 setup is pretty loud with 4 drives in it. 2 WD Reds, and 2 Seagate Exos X drives in it. I had the WD drives connected to a raspberry pi on my desk before and they were fine. But I added the 2 Seagate drives at the same time as I moved to a PC in the Node 804, and that's pretty loud now. The vibrations of those harddrives resonate through the case, making it pretty loud as a whole. Maybe I can do something about it, but I haven't put any effort in it since it's just sitting in my basement.
Otherwise I'm very happy with the case. If you really want to get that case, I'd make sure I'd also buy relatively silent hard drives. The DC drives are great for reliability but they're just that much louder in my very limited experience.
@@Niosus it is that exact scenario I was suspicious would happen when you pack 3+ drives together. I am leaning towards the Define 7 Mini for the added dampening material. My NAS will be in my office and not a closet so that will become a noticeable aspect
I love the idea, I didn't even realize the 5.25" bay thing until you brought it up, and I think its genius.
For my server, I'm still rocking a Fractal Design R5 I bought a couple of years ago. It's using a couple of IcyDock adapter bays as well (two 5.25" bay to 2x 2.5" SATA + 1x 3.5" SATA adapter). I currently have 10 HDDs and 4 2.5" SATA SSDs on it.
Yes the Intel 4x3.5" or even 8x3.5" and 8x2.5" hot swap drive cages are available for cheap, but they can be a pain to use. Drive access is controlled (via signals on the SATA / SAS connectors) by the micro (typically a Cypress CY8C22545) on the PCB which is usually controlled by the Intel motherboards BMC via the I2C interface (white 5 pin connectors). So to use these cages you need to either hack the I2C, micro or PCB. None of which are great options for the uninitiated. Another options is to just remove the PCB and use regular cables to the drives which is easily done but also removes the hot swap option.
My first homelab server for plex and Nas functionality was a node 304 with old core i3 and quadro p2000. I'm out growing that 6 drive bay limit so I decided to go ryzen with a fractal define 7. It holds so many 3.5 drives. This enables me to use lsi hba adapters with SAS expanders to scale out. It's not same use case as your living room server scenario but I'd love to see some content on expanding bay enclosures that don't take up a lot of space and cost effective to another 16 drives etc. Especially considering we have to prepare for the apocalypse 😂
I looked into external SAS enclosures a year ago and gave up as there didn't seem to be many on the market and they were all quite expensive.
Left the Mac world and loving my first awesome PC build.. I was thinking adventures when I stumbled on this channel.. now I’m excited but just more confused with so many options.. I fell into a wormhole looking up raid setups and networking.. 😅
I've ended up with a Synology NAS and a separate mini PC setup. I went through all this home server stuff before realizing I wanted two different things from my home server setup. Firstly I wanted absolute stability and availability for my storage. I didn't like the opportunity for backups to fail, lost data, or even slow data access. Separately, though, I wanted a server I could absolutely hammer with transcoding and compiling something I could do experiments with and not think in the back of my mind. Eventually I would like like to upgrade my mini PC into something more SFF sized so I can gain some extra performance but mini PCs consume so little power that there will always be some use for one.
I have this case and the Node 304, but now my go to home server case is the SilverStone Technology CS351. It supports mATX motherboards while still being compact, so you can have a GPU and a 10gbe nic. Plus the 5 bays are hot swappable.
That RAM tester is absolute genius
I would like to see the "budget home NAS that can be upgraded in the same case to the Best cost/efficient Home NAS" because I believe a lot of people who don't know they need a NAS if they are presented with a compelling option they will join the datahoarder club and with it they will join this channel, the best one for this type of content!
Magnificent work! I have known your channel for a while, but I joined recently and I am glad that I did because enjoying the content even thought neither do I have more money than sense.
I am looking to lessen my dependence on Adobe and Google cloud services for storing achieved projects. Great information and gave me some ideas for configurations.
Also please don't stop reading my mind about these insane machination such as using many of those ICY dock 5.2" bays.
I was going to put it in the basement of my Dual PC (Desktop / Server) P600S. Filling the other 3.5" bays with 20TB EXOS drives.
My normal go-to platform for home server stuff would be an old gaming system that myself or a friend is trying to get rid of for cheap.
Glad to see you getting healthier! Looking good.
FANTASTIC VIDEO! - I just built in a Node304 case with a AXZEZ ITX carrier board (with 5 SATA ports - yes!!) & a RasPi CM4 module (available as a combo!) and I wish I saw this sooner! The only thing missing is ECC memory. I'd also look at the Silverstone DS case which comes with a SATA/SAS backplane (if money is more important than time for you) . Thanks for thinking of us mere mortals Wendel! :D
By the way, SATA Ports wise, you can always get a couple 1 to 5 sata port expanders, I actually used one with a BananaPI M1 so I could connect 5 disks to a single SATA Port with SATA PMP enabled being the one trick needing to be done. Not the fastest solution though will work in most cases where the disks do not saturate the single sata port.
I got an OG Antec Nine Hundred in 2007 or 2008 for gaming and used it as a fileserver enclosure until a few years ago. Still have it standing around here somewhere too.
The Antec Nine Hundred was a "Premium" gaming case back then, going for the spectacularly high 100€ mark. (for the time 100€ was expensive for a case ...)
Man, our hobby has gotten silly expensive.
I have a cheap Rosewill case with my old main PC guts as a home sever. Recently moved to a pair of sata SSDs instead of my failing spinning rust for storage. Its great, but loud, and gets so dusty. I like those little NAS box options.
I'd actually love to see this case created. This was one of my struggles in find a small case that had expansive storage solutions.
You are hitting all the right pain points. I ended up getting a used case off of facebook marketplace. The kid I bought it from seemed like he never did anything but pull it out of the box to look at it.
I can't remember the brand or model for the case but it has room for 10 HDD's and more expansion for the 5 inch bays. I'm ready to get it up and running but the old i5 4000 motherboard I have for it only has 4 sata ports. The only motherboard that really interested me were the ASRock ones used here. I haven't convinced myself to put the money up for a new motherboard, cpu and ram just yet.
m-ATX is the way to go, totally agree. I have an Asrock b450m pro4 with 32GB of DDR4 ECC unbuffered and a R5 2600. Works great with Truenas.
It's just a little less space efficient than this extruded aluminum idea, but my old Bitfenix Prodigy continues to be my favorite case for small home server. 5 hard drives, cheap full size power supply, room for a big tower cooler so you can have a chonky cpu doing hard work, and then you just use that one pcie slot for an hba.
The Gigabyte B650I AORUS ULTRA has 2.5Gb intel, wifi 6E, 4 SATA ports and 3 m.2 ports.
you could put in the m.2 slots a boot drive, a sata to m.2 adapter and a network adapter.
oh also because of the fact AM5 has onboard video, you could quite easily forgo a videocard and run a pcie 5.0 m.2 card for a fast raid.
Wendel I haven't been able to watch a video in awhile but I just wanted to say, you're so damn skinny! Way to go! I know that's insanely hard work that barely gets noticed over time but seeing it all in one go, like damn you're almost another person! Congrats, and I hope you keep it up.
So I built a "server" in the jonsbo n1, 5x 12tb drives, 2x 2tb name, 1x 1TB sata ssd. Gigabyte b650 its board, 64gb ddr5-6000 memory kit, Ryzen 7900. I ended up using an HBA in the pci slot. This thing flies. Running trueness scale on it so far and it flies. I am interested to see Wendells take on it when he builds.
7900 non x for the CPU is a solid choice. It runs extremely efficiently so that makes perfect sense to use for a small form factor server
I know it was designed for HTPC duties, but the Silverstone GD08 doubles extremely well as a home server. From memory holds up to 12 x 3.5"drives, and plenty of room for add in cards. And it can live beneath your TV and look good while doing it.
I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing with icydocks for sometime. I already have the Rosewill server case with the hotswap bays but I've been considering buying a couple more with 5.25" bays for this reason. The front panel on those cases is all modular.
I want to see the Toptron (or AliExpress equivalent) mini-ITX NAS mobo with 6x SATA, 4x 2.5 GbE NICs, and the Intel 5105 CPU! Crazy cheap and functional! Gracemont stuff is right around the corner, too... Mini home server hardware market is heating up!!!
My home server is in a 15+ year old Lian Li PCv1000. Back when Lian Li made nice cases. Picked up a bunch of their old HDD cages that match the design of the case from some random PC parts stores that carried ancient stuff.
I'd like to see a run-down of the USB DAS boxes (mediasonic, sabrent, terramaster) , as there's a lot of real-world usability issues regarding disconnections and drive ID naming. It'd be nice to know what's good/bad to use. I have no horse in this race other than being a r/HTPC mod recommending storage solutions to our users across the breath of the pre-built/diy/hybrid space.
I love your idea of the 5.25 inch focussed case. Maybe someone can 3D print it as a proof of concept?
On the motherboard to test I'd love to see a focus given to power efficiency.
I would love to find a series that dealt with a solid state setup. I am looking at something that would be good in an RV or on a boat as I am looking to put movies and music on it. It needs to handle vibration and preferably have a passive cooling setup. This would mainly be a NAS setup and then duplicated for a pfSense node. Passive cooling because moist saltwater air eats electronics and passive would slow that down a bit. Also would like to do SFP+ connections.
I've got 2 of those Antec 900's with a load of 5.25in trayless caddys. Great thing and it was super cheap a few years ago.
A+ hilarious intro to this vid 👍
16:48 -- Thank you for the heads up about i225-V being "on the struggle bus." I have one, no issues so far.
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
I'm half tempted to go towards a rack mount system. My biggest problem is space in de house (so have to hang it vertical which I'm not happy with). I'm now rocking a Fractal Design Define R5 and I'm out of 3 1/2 slots (this is including the 5 1/4 repurposed, tho I could go for an icy 2 5 1/4 -> 3 3 1/2, as now I''m only using 2, but yeh that's a minor step)
Your aluminium extrusion intrigues me. That opens up the options that I can expand / resize at will. I still have a lot of them (for my never finished 3d printer project) but that changes my thought on my Define R5, would be a bit more space effecient if I'd go a small case for my server (althought it's an ATX mobo, it feels like it's a tiny bit bigger.. I think they cheated with specs to fit as much stuff on it as possible, it's the ROMED8-2T from Asrock)
Jonsbo just announced the N4 and it supports mATX w/ 7x 3.5" bays
I've watched at least 100 to 150 videos kinda like this but this was exactly what I was looking for.
TrueNAS Scale, for any additional software features either use the containers or set up a VM or two to run those and if need be save any data directly on a TrueNAS share. That's what I have actually done, have a couple VMs for stuff like downloading tools/apps and some other niceties and basically they just store the data directly on the same share I have to my stuff for ease of use.
I just found this channel and I'm loving the hardware content!
I'm SO excited for you to do a Jonsbo N1 Media server build because I picked up the case to do exactly that! I did some research and apparently you can also grab a m.2 to SATA converter card to do the last 2 SATA ports in the Jonsbo and if its a ITX with 2+ NVME slots you should be golden to run 6 SATA + 1 NVME Boot. I definitely plan to go AM5 in only for having the onboard graphics so that I can free up the PCIE slot for extra networking.
No idea what Motherboard I would go for. Hell it might not even exist till Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 6 comes out with the AM5 platform
I'm still rocking a 10+ year old Thermaltake case with 9x 5.25" front facing drive bays. Mounted 9x 3.5" drives in the bottom 6, DVD drive up top, and room for 3 more 3.5" drives for the future. Don't think I'll ever get rid of that case.
I have an Antec 900 sitting collecting dust. Funny to see it mentioned here. Have a Fractal Define 7 XL arriving today that will be an all in one media and file server, etc.
The main obstacle to the ultimate home server build is that it still needs to be a home server, so it needs to be (relativity) affordable.
The main obstacle that I am encountering is lack of PCIe, ideally I would want a PCIe switch/router since while I need a significant amount of port I don't need to hit them all at full speed at the same time, but that does not exist (at a reasonable price).
In my home server I'm orienting myself to buy sata SSD since I can more easily multiplex port, but is not ideal.
For mass storage needs, I'm quite happy with my HP N40Ls, which have up to 4 3.5 SATA each. Then there is a Lenovo T420 with 2TB in the optical bay and some USB hard drives as a streaming server.
I definitely agree I wish the Seeed reServer was a 3 bay 3.5" drive system. That would be an excellent NAS product!
Reminds me of the Fractal Design Node 804. Could fit 8x3.5 drives and PSU on one side then on the other is your MATX board and the rest of the system.
I want to see lower power, modern hardware. Something like the B650D4U-2L2T/BCM
in a shallow rack mount case
and i want to see how far you can reasonably push the PCIE connectivity.
That means, m.2 adapters, pcie sata cards, pcie switches (plx?)
I want a lot of pcie 3.0 / 4.0 devices on NEW hardware, not power hungry data centre ebay stuff.
How can I turn 1 PCIE 5.0 16x into as many lanes of pcie 3.0/4.0 as possible. And how can that fit into a rack case.
I have the CoolerMaster Centurion 590, also 9x 5.25" drive bays, and about the same space inside as the Antec.
This is where ASRock Rack mITX Epyc board comes to the rescue... with PCIe4x16 slot standard and 6xPCIe4x8 over miniSAS if I recall correctly... with 2x of those PCIe4x8 being splittable to a total of like 16xSATA drives... before you factor in any AiCs with storage controllers or networking or eg. media transcoding acceleration (maybe Intel ARCs or similar, once some lower power option becomes available, elsewise T400 or T600, or - wishful thinking - Alveo u30), this looks great, only the cost of the mITX ASRock Rack board with Rome (or newer) even lower-core-count lower-TDP Epycs may scare most... And that's before you factor DIMMs and storage itself.
That mini server looks pretty nice for people with limited space, I'm still happy with my generic late 90s ATX tower filled with drives and cheap used Supermicro board for that ECC goodness.
Would love to see a video about building in the Jonsbo and/or a slick mATX build!
Can't wait to see what motherboard you use for the N1, I built a TrueNAS Scale server with it using an older gigabyte b-chipset motherboard and a ryzen 3400g I got with a system I bought for a 3090 back in the dark days. I put an asm1166 chipset sata expansion card in it and it's been pretty solid.
I bought a used dual xeon lga-3647, installed 2 m.2 expasion cards populated with 8 m.2 drives of 4 tb each. Enough storage for me. I use the system for vm's and as a storage server. Extremely fast for me, the server was quite economical as well, still have 2 more pciex16 slots left over for more storage if required.
You make me glad I still have my old Antec Nine Hundred around. It was my first PC Case and I used it for 11 years. Hoping to repurpose it for a home server.
I used to have an antec 900. Absolutely loved that case. Now I kinda wish I didn't sell it.
Currently migrating to a Node804 for my server, and pairing it with the MSI PRO B550M-VC WIFI. With 8 onboard SATA ports and 2 M.2 slots, it's got plenty of storage. Plus the case can fit a slimline optical drive which is perfect for ripping media directly on the server. To top it off, the mobo has 4 16x slots. I'll be adding a 10G card, GPU for transcoding, and maybe down the line some more storage cards.
Like you, my only lament of these home NAS and media server cases is the lack of drive bay accessibility from outside. Opening up the whole machine for a drive swap is inconvenient, even if it makes for a prettier looking system.
I currently use and old Acer EasyStore H340 chassis (4 bays). It is standard ITX but needs (a) some wiring modification for (some of) the front panel buttons/lights to work, (b) a really low profile CPU cooler, and (c) a carefully measured out flex PSU or a pico-PSU. I have it running intel 6th gen, mostly for NAS, non-transcoding media, and VM duties.
I'd be interested to see what kind of temps you see in the N1. I've heard they can have overheating problems.
I'd love to see one using 12th gen Alder Lake and the W680 chipset. All the articles I see about this are from Q1 2022 but it seems like there are almost NO motherboards available. The one I have seen is the ASRock IMB-X1314.
Perfect timing! I've been contemplating my first home server build that will be focused on "bang for the buck", power efficiency, quiet, and with support for ECC memory. It's for these reasons I'm considering using the 12th gen Alder Lake and the W680 chipset.
I am less knowledgeable about AMD platforms, but I've also heard of the excellent power efficiency of recent-gen Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 so maybe this is a great option too.
I have an ASRock Rack EPYC3451D4I2-2T motherboard in a Silverstone CS-01 as my current storage server. The CS-01 only has two 3.5 inch bays and two 2.5 inch bays, but I couldn't easily get any other case (such as the Jonsbo N1) for a reasonable price here in Australia.
The motherboard is admittedly pretty expensive and only takes RDIMMS, but it has an incredible 14 SATA ports on an ITX board, 12 via OCuLink ports (one x4 and one x8) using octopus cables. I wish using connectors and cables like that was done in the consumer space - we could have so many more ports on ITX motherboards!
I notice others are mentioning the X570D4I-2T, which does similar with two x4 OCuLink ports and is probably a less expensive way to get enough ports for most uses.
I really wanted the Lian Li PC-Q26 as shown on this channel years ago (ua-cam.com/video/K8HMLi7pt3I/v-deo.html) with 10 3.5 inch bays, but I couldn't find it anywhere. It would've been the perfect case for that motherboard!
I still have two Chenbro SR30169 cases and, honestly, with the 4 front-load hot-swap SATA bays, they make fabulous SFF servers.
glad to see I m not the only one searching for a case design that does not exist
I'd like something like the Antec 900 but I want it in a rack mount. Something I could use standard (120mm) fans, populate the whole front with those icy dock bays. Then I could mix and match the front hotswap as I need and it'd be a case that could grow. Make it a shallow depth and allow it to accommodate add-in cards for more customization.
I love rack mount and even a small rack is pretty cheap for your home. A 12u on rollers or something is amazing but what isn't amazing is your typical rack mount fans. I want something that you could have in a room and still be able to use that room for something.
is dude melting away? Looking good my man
"Don't speak to me or my son again" perfect.
I agree with mATX for home servers. The extra space at the bottom is perfect for some extra drives. What I did with my racked NAS was 3D print some hotswap cages and stick them to the bottom with double sided tape.
Pick an mATX board with extra PCIe slots rather than extra M.2 though, even if they are only a single lane. Each PCIe3 lane can do 1GB/s, meaning it’ll support 3-5 SATA HDDs before becoming bottlenecked (assuming each drive does between 200 and 300 MB/s in a sequential read, which is my experience with NAS drives). Each M.2 slot then is costing you an awful lot of potential 20TB HDDs.
Kudos to Wendell for making me get Optane for a metadata special device, too. I didn’t think it would do anything noticeable over Ethernet, but that was entirely wrong and the improvement in latency is nothing short of incredible. Definitely you want two M.2 slots, so you can use fast modern storage for your metadata and small files. Even if you’re not getting optane it’ll be a huge boost.
I am looking at the Supermicro A2SDi-H-TF Motherboard. It's the same one used in iX Systems home servers. It has everything you need on one board.
Oooooooh, you know exactly the words that excite us. You had me at 'Hi' but all the stuff after was icing on the cake. "hoarding" "reconstruct society after the fall 💦" "addiction"
Asrock has a mini-ITX board that supports LGA 3647, looks interesting and those 2nd-gen Scalable processors are fairly inexpensive on the used market these days
Firstly Wendell, this video was my tech wet dream of doing my home server setup 🤤🤤🥰😇👍💪with the said itx Jonsbo case 😱🤩🤯!
Secondly, good to see you looking healthier, better and taking better care of yourself 😇👍.
Main things I’m looking for at the moment is a power efficient platform (high energy prices and all that) simple and bullet proof. ZFS on a TrueNAS OS with ECC is a must. A fair few cores so I can virtualise home assistant and a docker host VM for the remainder of the containers. Cheap enough ideally to run two for ZFS backups as not yet found ZFS hosted online for decent money to run the backups too.
Been looking at the Sliger Cerberus mATX case for a nice compact home server. If you could fit 6 3.5" drives in it that would be amazing, I dunno why everyone always stops at 5 hdd's but it's been driving me insane!
Y'all should do a build in one at some point and figure out just how many disks you can cram into it!
I'm 100% on-board with this line of thinking regarding the expandability of 5.25" bays and having looked around there just aren't good options any more, well not cheap options. Something like the Lian-Li PC-343 would be pretty epic but they were always too rich for me though to fill them out would be super costly anyway, but at least you could do it over time. Of course you'd need a lot of PCI-E lanes to fill out that many bays even if you only went with 30x3.5" spinning rust. Of course the flexibility of 5.25" bays is that you mix and match to your heart's content.
I'm moving towards getting a rack server. I have a bit of network gear a backup server a application server and all the ups stuff. Not really worth having a server unless it's 24-7 and you need a ups for that. A rack mount is the only real option at this point.
9:03 Unfortunately it's a bit hard to find mini tower cases with 3 5.25 bays.
I have two of those Intel cages and a rosewill cage in a old atx case. Now lays flat for eventual use in a rack.
Adaptec 3016 / omv / mergerfs / snapraid
I cut out most of the case front/bays and just bolted the cages in. Sealed the gaps with painters tape so the rear fans pull air across all drives. Ugly, but works.
You should list the models of everything mentioned so people can search easier. I snagged my cages for about 35 but that was pre chia
I‘m happy with my Dell T320. 8x LFF bays, 3x 5,25, cheap and enough slots for PCIe cards. Redundant PSU if you like. Little bit noisy but everything else for very little budget without any headaches
I know it has some flaws but I like the ds380. But motherboards are always an issue. With the right HBA or maybe an M.2 slot card you could get 8 drives into the case plus 3-4 2.5inch drives
Very interesting video Wendell and Level1! You definitely got my idea cog wheels turning. I'd love to build a home server to work as a NAS and use as a remote server to learn Linux!
For Home server you need. Home Epyc 9004/9005, home Supermicro E-ATX motherboard, and Home RM44 case. A few Home U2 SSDs...
I have an Antec 900 and always thought it would be an awesome home server case. I already have a Norco rack mount case with 20 3.5" bays but if I didn't I'd be using that Antec for it
Every time I see a 900 or 902 pop up on craigslist I get sooo tempted to just buy it even though I have no immediate need
In the pictures of the new case I noticed that the vanes on the SPU cooler were at right angles to the air flow. That doesn't seem optimal.
Ooh my that seeedstudio server looks really cool! And for that price too! If you get that and two 20tb hard drives, that would be an easy choice to get a backup server for my homelab!
For me the ideal server is one that takes up as little space as possible while still being powerful. A cluster of n100 mini pcs actually has fit that bill quite nicely
The JonsBo case has a flaw and an omission imho the flaw is that the when used as a tower the fan sucks from above and blows down while the hot air from the mobo and PSU + the hot air from the drives themselves wants to go up... thats an efficiency pitfall and the omission is that they should have some sort of lid on its side to be able to swap (e.g a dead) hard drive even easier (compared to having to take the entire shell out )