Selecting Hardware for "New" NAS

Markess · 16. Mai 2018

My new NAS project got derailed when my wife's home workstation died on a Saturday night when she was on a deadline, and I wound up using my new NAS parts to get her running again. She liked the results so much, she decided to keep it, leaving me with a bunch of new WD Reds and nothing to put them in.

As a replacement, my wife suggested I look through some hardware at her work leftover from a recent refresh, My NAS doesn't do a lot of heavy lifting, so most of what I found was overkill. On the other hand, free is a great price.

So, I thought I'd list my options and see if anyone had any recommendations, or knew if any of these worked particularly well with OMV. Form factor isn't an issue for me, but noise and power consumption are. I'm not very knowledgeable on server hardware, so any advice on how noisy these are would be particularly appreciated.

-- Dell PowerEdge R630 1U: This was the newest item (Haswell E5-2667 v3), but also looked like it would consume the most power? Also, its configured for 2.5" drives which I don't have. If there's a compelling reason to go with it though, I suppose I could dig some up.

-- Dell PowerEdge R320 1U and a Supermicro 1U with X9DBL-IF: Both of these have ivy Bridge E5-2407 (the Supermicro has 2, although I'd probably remove one). These will take the 3.5" drives I have on hand. I assume that if I couldn't get the fan noise down on the Supermicro, it should be easy to transplant in spare tower case I have. I assume the Dells are too proprietary to try that.

-- Dell Optiplex 3020: There were several of these desktops that appear, from the SMART data at least, to have been turned off most of the time. Haswell i5s. They are typical Dell proprietary, but its "Desktop Proprietary" that I am comfortable with. But, it doesn't seem like it would be as much "fun" as having a real server to tinker with.

-- There's also a few Synology RackStation 815+. They look interesting, but I don't know anything about Synology, and I'd like to stick with OMV. Unless someone knows if I can load OMV onto them? They are Atom based units with a USB DOM installed, which I assume serves as the system disk?

Any recommendations or advice sincerely appreciated!

TheLostSwede · 21. Mai 2018

Even second hand, the R630 seems to be going for around $2,000-3,000, so you'd be mad not to take it and put it up on eBay if nothing else.

The Supermicro would most likely be the easiest one to work with, as you'll be able to easily replace things like the PSU etc. as unlike Dell, Supermicro follows standards. Note that the Supermicro board isn't ATX, but rather SSI CEB so it may or may not fit in a standard ATX case. The mounting holes should be the same, but the rear I/O might differ. My concern would be the button on the back of the board, as it seems to be below the I/O cutout on ATX cases, i.e. below the screw hole, which might cause some interference. 1U chassis are built to have a certain air pressure and if you start messing with the cooling, you might run into issues with drives and CPUs overheating, so please don't do that. Also keep in mind that to use all the slots and controllers on the board, you need both CPUs.

I'd leave the Optiplexes where they are.

The Rackstation won't run OMV, as Synoloy, QNAP et al. have proprietary BIOS/UEFI and normally only boot from the built in USB flash drive. The OS is installed from there onto the hard drives. That said, the specific models they have uses the Atom C2538 which has the Intel hardware bug which will make the CPU fail at some point. This can not be fixed and I doubt Synology would swap the board out for you, but it might be possible.

Markess · 22. Mai 2018

Zitat von TheLostSwede

Even second hand, the R630 seems to be going for around $2,000-3,000, so you'd be mad not to take it and put it up on eBay if nothing else.

The Supermicro would most likely be the easiest one to work with, as you'll be able to easily replace things like the PSU etc. as unlike Dell, Supermicro follows standards. Note that the Supermicro board isn't ATX, but rather SSI CEB so it may or may not fit in a standard ATX case. The mounting holes should be the same, but the rear I/O might differ. My concern would be the button on the back of the board

Long story, but I can't really take one and sell it. I can take whatever I want, but I need to use it. All the other equipment is getting donated to a charity that I volunteer with. I was asked to test and price the hardware for them when they get it. I'd decided on setting up both the Supermicro and the Synology while I work on the rest, and see which one I like better. But, I'd forgotten about the hardware bug. I didn't own one of those chips when the news came out, so promptly forgot about it. Thanks for reminding!

Thanks also for the tip on the switch for the SM! I completely missed it. SM says its ATX on the website, so I didn't even think about it. The board will fit in an ATX case because the switch doesn't protrude, but I'd need to drill a hole if I wanted to ever push it once the board was installed.
Pulling one CPU, shuts off half the PCI-E and memory slots. But, it will still take 24GB RAM, and all 10 SATA/SAS will still be usable. That's more than I ever plan to need.
I need to think a bit on thermals. If the Xeon's are like the consumer Ivy Bridge, then any quad core CPU will draw similarly at idle/low usage. That's where my NAS will typically be. If I tinker with the fans (via ipmi?) though, I could be a bit safer and use a thermal capped "L" processor for peace of mind when usage is higher. I have a 50watt 2418L in my spares. Its a similar performer to the E5-2407.

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