4 ms·

What's your budget? My home server is mainly a file server and automated backup server. I also use it to host dedicated servers for some games my friends and I

What's your budget? My home server is mainly a file server and automated backup server. I also use it to host dedicated servers for some games my friends and I play (minecraft, KSP dark multiplayer, halo ce, etc.). It does PiHole and steam/origin/blizzard/uplay download caching (steam game install from a bonded dual-10G server is fun) as well. I picked up a SuperMicro mini-ITX 8 core Xeon-D based server board on eBay for ~$400. The idle power is <10W and it runs off 12V DC and has dual 10G ethernet, 6 SATA ports, IPMI, A x16 PCIe slot, and an x4 M.2 slot. With 6x 10 TB WD Red drives and 2 NVMe disks it pulls about 25W at idle (mostly the drives). If I wanted to run the Kodi or Plex on demand video transcoding I'd probably throw a used quadro in there (or, hack around the transcode limit on a GeForce card).

shijie 6y ago
This is a great list of suggestions. Also, Halo CE is one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time. My friends and I still play Halo CE (NHE) on LAN all the time.
rhn_mk1 6y ago
10W at idle sounds unbelievable, my AMD A1 server with 2x2.5 HDDs takes 30W at idle (okay, a bag of mostly idle services running). Is this some special server power saving feature? Are you measuring at 12V of before the power supply? What kind of power supply do you use? Is it noisy?
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  10W is just the motherboard. The whole thing pulls 25-30W at idle with 6 HDDs (10 TB WD Red). The measurement was with a kill-a-watt at the wall. The motherboard has a SuperMicro "proprietary" 12V connector (that they give you the pinout for and the connector housing) that can be used instead of the 24 pin ATX connector (populate one or the other). It has some regulators onboard to supply 5V for the hard drive logic. I'm using a 120W 12V laptop brick. Xeon-D is really neat as it has 10G NICs and SAS on-die with the CPU and run at really low power since there's no chipset (except the ASPEED IPMI). I'm waiting for some nice EPYC embedded boards (they also have on-die 10G) before upgrading. Except the eval board, I've only seen them with quad 1G interfaces. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10SDV-8C-TLN4F https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10SDV-8C... It's fanless, but if your airflow is bad it'll overheat under load, I just zip tied a 60mm Noctua fan to it (NF-A6x25). I have it in a Fractal Node 304 case. It's nice and compact and fits on a shelf in the closet.
yumraj 6y ago
What’s your OS? Are running plane Linux or some NAS variant?
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  I'm a masochist and run Gentoo on it. I work with Gentoo all the time at work so I just run it on everything to keep me on top of my game... That being said, I might switch it to FreeNAS in the future. FreeBSD 13-BETA1 uses the same ZFS codebase as ZFS on Linux (OpenZFS) so maybe I can do incremental (snapshot) backups of Linux ZFS boxes to it even though it's BSD. Doing Gentoo updates regularly is exhausting when you run it on 6 machines (personal laptop and desktop, work laptop and desktop, personal fileserver, personal guest PC). My personal machines (except the file server) all use the same CPU architecture (znver1) so I just run the same image on all of those.
  - yumraj 6y ago
    If you're considering FreeNAS you may want to wait till the TrueNAS SCALE comes out. TrueNAS is the new branding of FreeNAS, with FreeNAS remaining on FreeBSD and TrueNAS SCALE being based on Linux with ZFS. TrueNAS SCALE is in alpha at the moment so I haven't tried it..
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    Incremental snapshots work fine for me even from the base ZFS (i.e. not OpenZFS) in FreeBSD 12 to a Linux box with OpenZFS. Also, if you're comfortable with the command line, I fail to see any reason you would prefer FreeNAS over straight up FreeBSD.

shijie 6y ago

This is a great list of suggestions. Also, Halo CE is one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time. My friends and I still play Halo CE (NHE) on LAN all the time.

rhn_mk1 6y ago

10W at idle sounds unbelievable, my AMD A1 server with 2x2.5 HDDs takes 30W at idle (okay, a bag of mostly idle services running). Is this some special server power saving feature? Are you measuring at 12V of before the power supply? What kind of power supply do you use? Is it noisy?

Teknoman117 6y ago
10W is just the motherboard. The whole thing pulls 25-30W at idle with 6 HDDs (10 TB WD Red). The measurement was with a kill-a-watt at the wall. The motherboard has a SuperMicro "proprietary" 12V connector (that they give you the pinout for and the connector housing) that can be used instead of the 24 pin ATX connector (populate one or the other). It has some regulators onboard to supply 5V for the hard drive logic. I'm using a 120W 12V laptop brick. Xeon-D is really neat as it has 10G NICs and SAS on-die with the CPU and run at really low power since there's no chipset (except the ASPEED IPMI). I'm waiting for some nice EPYC embedded boards (they also have on-die 10G) before upgrading. Except the eval board, I've only seen them with quad 1G interfaces. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10SDV-8C-TLN4F https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X10SDV-8C... It's fanless, but if your airflow is bad it'll overheat under load, I just zip tied a 60mm Noctua fan to it (NF-A6x25). I have it in a Fractal Node 304 case. It's nice and compact and fits on a shelf in the closet.

yumraj 6y ago

What’s your OS? Are running plane Linux or some NAS variant?

Teknoman117 6y ago
I'm a masochist and run Gentoo on it. I work with Gentoo all the time at work so I just run it on everything to keep me on top of my game... That being said, I might switch it to FreeNAS in the future. FreeBSD 13-BETA1 uses the same ZFS codebase as ZFS on Linux (OpenZFS) so maybe I can do incremental (snapshot) backups of Linux ZFS boxes to it even though it's BSD. Doing Gentoo updates regularly is exhausting when you run it on 6 machines (personal laptop and desktop, work laptop and desktop, personal fileserver, personal guest PC). My personal machines (except the file server) all use the same CPU architecture (znver1) so I just run the same image on all of those.
- yumraj 6y ago
  If you're considering FreeNAS you may want to wait till the TrueNAS SCALE comes out. TrueNAS is the new branding of FreeNAS, with FreeNAS remaining on FreeBSD and TrueNAS SCALE being based on Linux with ZFS. TrueNAS SCALE is in alpha at the moment so I haven't tried it..
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  Incremental snapshots work fine for me even from the base ZFS (i.e. not OpenZFS) in FreeBSD 12 to a Linux box with OpenZFS. Also, if you're comfortable with the command line, I fail to see any reason you would prefer FreeNAS over straight up FreeBSD.