Kebe Says - Dan McDonald's Blog

Twelve years ago I built my first Home Data Center (HDC). Six years ago I had OmniTI's Supermicro rep put together the second one.

Unlike last time, I'm not going to recap the entirety of HDC 2.0. I will mention briefly that since its 2014 inception, I've only upgraded its mirrored spinning-rust disk drives twice: once from 2TB to 6TB, and last year from 6TB to 14TB. I'll detail the current drives in the parts list.

Like last time, and the time before it, I started with a CPU in mind. AMD has been on a tear with Ryzen and EPYC. I still wanted low-ish power, but since I use some of HDC's resources for work or the illumos community, I figured a core-count bump would be worth the cost of some watts. Lucky me, the AMD Ryzen 7 3700x fit the bill nicely: Double the cores & threads with a 20W TDP increase.

Unlike last time, but like the time before it, I built this one from parts myself. It took a little digging, and I made one small mistake in parts selection, but otherwise it all came together nicely.

Parts

• AMD Ryzen 7 3700x - It supports up to 128GB of ECC RAM, it's double the CPU of the old HDC for only 50% more TDP wattage. It's another good upgrade.
• Noctua NH-U12S (AM4 edition) CPU cooler - I was afraid the stock cooler would cover the RAM slots on the motherboard. Research suggested the NH-U12S would prevent this problem, and the research panned out. Also Noctua's support email, in spite of COVID, has been quite responsive.
• ASRock Rack X470D4U - While only having two Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) ports, this motherboard was the only purpose-built Socket AM4 server motherboard. It has IPMI/BMC on its own Ethernet port (but you'll have to double check it doesn't "failover" to your first GigE port). It has four DIMM slots, and with the current BIOS (mine shipped with it), supports 128GB of RAM. There are variants with Two 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE) ports, but I opted for the less expensive GigE one. If I'd wanted to wait, there's a new, not yet available, X570 version, whose more expensive version has both two 10GigE AND two GigE ports, which would saved me from needing...
• Intel I350 dual-port Gigabit Ethernet card - This old reliable is well supported and tested. It brings me up to the four ethernet ports I need.
• Nemix RAM - 4x32GB PC3200 ECC Unbuffered DIMMS - Yep, like HDC 2.0, I maxxed out my RAM immediately. 6 years ago I'd said 32GB would be enough, and for the most part that's still true, except I sometimes wish to perform multiple concurrent builds, or memory-map large kernel dumps for debugging. The vendor is new-to-me, and did not have a lot of reviews on Newegg. I ran 2.5 passes of memtest86 against the memory, and it held up under those tests. Nightly builds aren't introducing bitflips, which I saw on HDC 1.0 when it ran mixed ECC/non-ECC RAM.
• A pair of 500GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSDs - These are slightly used, but they are mirrored, and partitioned as follows:
  • s0 -- 256MB, EFI System partiontion (ESP)
  • s1 -- 100GB, rpool for OmniOSce
  • s2 -- 64GB, ZFS intent log device (slog)
  • s3 -- 64GB, unused, possible future L2ARC
  • s4 -- 2GB, unused
  • The remaining 200-something GB is unassigned, and fodder for the wear-levellers. The motherboard HAS a pair of M.2 connectors for NVMe or SATA SSDs in that form-factor, but these were hand-me-downs, so free.
• A pair of Western Digital Ultrastar (nee HGST Ultrastar) HC530 14TB Hard Drives - These are beasts, and according to Backblaze stats released less than a week ago, its 12TB siblings hold up very well with respect to failure rates.
• Fractal Design Meshify C case - I'd mentioned a small mistake, and this case was it. NOT because the case is bad... the case is quite good, but because I bought the case thinking I needed to optimize for the microATX form factor, and I really didn't need to. The price I paid for this was the inability to ever expand to four 3.5" drives if I so desire. In 12 years of HDC, though, I've never exceeded that. That's why this is only a small mistake. The airflow on this case is amazing, and there's room for more fans if I ever need them.
• Seasonic Focus GX-550 power supply - In HDC 1.0, I had to burn through two power supplies. This one has a 10 year warranty, so I don't think I'll have to stress about it.
• OmniOSce stable releases - Starting with HDC 2.0, I've been running OmniOS, and its community-driven successor, OmniOSce. The every-six-month stable releases strike a good balance between refreshes and stability.

I've given two talks on how I use HDC. Since the last of those was six years ago, I'm going to stop now, and dedicate the next post to how I use HDC 3.0.