tl;dr my retired parents have rack space available for me to use adjacent to their home theater and I need to replace my old setup with a better, more reliable rack build.
Prior to this, I had an old Raspberry Pi attached to two disks via USB and it worked but wasn’t super reliable. I replicate both ZFS and btrfs datasets from my homelab over to their network and the Pi obviously wasn’t the best option for this, particularly when buffering large snapshots with limited memory. I definitely need something purpose-built for this to avoid the Pi’s pitfalls.
After a recent remodel, my dad put in a half-rack and I’ve got about a foot of space to work with. The only caveat is that the rack is adjacent to their theater room, so I’d really like to avoid unnecessary noise, otherwise there’s a good chance the server will get kicked out of the house.
From the homework I’ve done so far, it seems like I should get a generic 4U case and build it myself given that most enterprise rack equipment isn’t optimized for silent(ish) operation. I’m happy to do this, but it’s been years since I’ve been in a cold aisle racking equipment and so could use some advice if anyone has experience with similar requirements.
Those requirements summarized are:
- Needs to be quiet - I can probably replace many stock fans with Noctua ones.
- Primary purpose for this server will be remote backup storage. I’ll be replicating snapshots and so could really use several bays for disks.
- My old Pi-based setup was a pain in the ass to maintain without remote management, so something like IPMI to administer it when it breaks would be a huge plus.
My open questions:
- What’s a good generic 4U chassis for this? Ideally something I can modify a bit with things like after-market fans.
- What’s a good mainboard/CPU combination that won’t require hideous amounts of cooling and thus a big heatsink?
- If anyone has completed similar builds (rack server for remote storage in a living space), any suggestions you might have for the specs (i.e., I don’t ever foresee running big hefty VMs on this thing, but quick I/O would be great)
What you did not address in your requirements is the network speed. If it is plain old gigabit than almost any cheap motherboard cpu combo will do. Additionally do you want ecc or satisfied with zfs built in safety features and redundancy? Thirdly energy consumption… How much is too much?
Old enterprise gear can be silenced pretty easy if you are willing to go the extra mile, and most have ipmi built in, and if you are lucky can get it for real cheap. Examples: 1 2 3
But the downside is the horrendous energy consumption relative to what it provides. Unless you throw away the inside and put in new board cpu etc… but that’s a whole other conversation
If complete new than you depending on the ecc choice I can advise two direction.
One. Get something like N100DC-ITX or N100M put in an additional sas/sata controller and Bob’s your uncle.
Two. Get an older Ryzen pro desktop second hand and do the same as above but this time ecc is an option. Example
For both of these option you could use your old pi as a kvm
As for the case if new and hotswap or easy/fast swap is not a requirement, than a cheap Rosewill 4u will do. Otherwise get a used Supemicro server just for the case and backplane.
I have a self-built system for pretty-much this built around a Supermicro board X11SCH-LN4F with Xeon E-2146G. I have 8 drives (not hot-swap) in a ZFS array, plus nvme for the OS, and I use Noctuas all round. Not silent but quiet enough. Idles around 80w and I run a number of containers/VMs on it as well as storage. I went with a low end 4U case with shallow 45cm depth.
The motherboard takes up to 128GB ECC UDIMMS and has 4 ethernet ports (plus a 5th for IPMI) and a good number of SATA ports (I am running 8 drives without additional cards).
I have enterprise rackmount gear as well and my DIY box is in a different league silence-wise (and efficient low-idle CPU wise as well).
If building today, the equivalent current CPU is, I think, E-2246G.