The Phoenix (AliExpress Edition)
I should preface this by saying that this build is replacing some pretty old hardware!
The outgoing system is a 4770k cooled by a corsair H100i on an ROG Maximus VI Gene with 4 x 8GB sticks of DDR3 3200 Corsair Vengance. In 2012 this was the shit!!
Although it was cutting edge and some of the best for my form factor at the time, 2012 was quite some time ago! Originally funded by the small amount my grandfather left me when he died in the summer of 2012, the 4770k powered beast (circa 2012) saw me through years of gaming and countless hours of learning to do "computer stuff", helping turn me into the person I am today: that is, technically minded and now in an excellent career involving PLC's, distributed BMS systems, Process Control and networking to name but a few facets. I'm sad to see the old hardware heading towards the great recycling pile but as my curiosity grew, my desire for ever more virtualisation potential grew with it and that meant replacing the 4C/8T processor that had grown old and weary as I have... That silicon has taken a severe battering!
As the title (The Chinese Reincarnation) suggests, this new iteration of the beast's life cycle shall be based on Chinese components. Now don't get me wrong, for what they are they're cheap! But in the world of Chinese hardware, I probably overpaid if anything.
I'd bought myself an Nvidia Quadro T400 some months ago with the view that, if I could get it working and running transcoding for my Plex server then I would migrate the Plex instance from my Proxmox server (HP 805 G2 mini) to a Docker container (something I'm fairly new to) on the new build and leverage the T400's capacity for all but AV1 encoding. Hence the primary reason for the upgrade, future expansion!
## Side Note. I chose my gpu based on the info from here: https://developer.nvidia.com/v…de-gpu-support-matrix-new and picked the lowest cost (2nd hand eBay) Quadro GPU that was both available and did everything I need it to. As you read on it'll become apparent that I'm very much a bang for the buck kinda guy! And in all fairness, I bought the T400 as a kind of: if it works, great! If not the I've only spent £80 ##
Anyway... enough rambling! The new system was found on AliExpress for £110. See here: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005534289486.html
I thought it was a pretty good deal to be honest! The motherboard was brand new, a Machinist X99 E5-K9 (https://machinist.site/x99k9), though I suspect the chipset may be older. The I/O is fine but there's a distinct lack of fan headers prompting an add-on purchase (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005932061735.html), something to be improved for v3 of the board!
The RAM, 2 x 16GB sticks of Machinist branded Micron ECC, allegedly new but I don't feel it's worth the hassle to investigate further.
And the CPU, an E5 2680 v4 with 14 cores and 28 threads clocked at 2.4Ghz with a 3.3GHz Boost (I know... it's practically glacial by today's standards but I don't have the readies lying around for today's quivalent).
The CPU cooler was next and I thought I'd put some more of my cash and faith into AliExpress. See here: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005170272660.html
For £11 I wasn't expecting much but even under a synthetic load, it maxes out the 14C CPU at 40 Celcius. Bang for the buck indeed!!
The new components were stuffed into the old Corsair 350D with the same two 6TB Ironwolf drives and Samsung 850 PRO 256GB. The install was a bit problematic if I'm honest but it was my own fault for not crossing the I's and dotting the T's. I also wanted to reinstall OMV fresh so all the drivers and stuff would be installed for the new hardware. I had the T400 in the top slot, which has 3 miniDP ports, but no miniDP cables at all, and no built in Intel Graphics or rear I/O for a display. I have most cables, just not that one! So then I swapped out the old GPU (R7 580) gpu's to install OMV on the drive until I could get a webgui. Then reinstalled the T400 for production and continued. I also bought a cable on Amazon for £10..
I'd already done the prep work for the reinstall, going through every part of the configuration tree in the WebGUI and noting the settings in a text file. So completing the reconfiguration was more tedious than complex.
I'm now two weeks in and everything is peachy! Plex server is now migrated, again something more tedious than complex, and my CPU usage tops out at about 15% under a normal load. (Touch wood) So far so good, here's hoping it'll plod along for the next 10 years like the last one!
I do have one question if anybody's any previous experience in a similar situation:
I have the two 6TB drives in an EXT4 software Raid 1. I'm looking to purchase another two shortly with the view to expanding into an 8 bay NAS chassis and filling it with more drives. I obviously don't want to continue to expand the Raid 1 but I wonder what the performance of a 4/6/8 drive array might be in raid 5 on this setup instead of an overly redundant Raid 10 array moving forward?
The move to a Raid 5 would theoretically involve offloading the data from the current Raid 1 array to one of the new 6TB drives (it will be protected with my life), the building a new 3 drive Raid 5 with the two old disks plus one new one, transferring the data from the copy I made earlier then format and import the copy drive to the array for a total of four 6TB drives. Is this method dumb? Would I be better off renting a Backblaze server for a month and using it as temporary cloud storage?
If you've made it this far the congratulations, my ramblings are famed by friends and family! Thanks for reading!
