I’ve recently bought a very similar case, I plan on moving my small pc based server into it shortly, hopefully mine will be a little more simple as it’s already working in a pc case 🤞🏻
DataCenter and Server HW engineer here. Good effort to be fair. Re thermal paste, yes a full spread across the entire surface, but as thin as possible, just microns thick. Im Dell, HP, and IBM certified and they all teach you the same thing. I have a similar setup at home but as an IT guy i just didnt get on with TrueNAS. In the end i wiped the lot and put ESXi on. And Virtualised my NAS in Windows Server 2016 as a file server. And also use VM's for PfSense, PiHole and Ubiquiti. ESX seems to have better power management too, throttling the CPU in quiet times which did actually make a difference to my power bills.
Thanks! That’s all interesting. I found TrueNAS Scale to have a leaning curve but not as bad as I was expecting. I’ve been happy so far but I’m not wedded to it.
I'm the exact opposite, found it refreshing to drop ESXI (or Xcp-ng) at home and go with Truenas core baremetal and proxmox for storage and compute. I did have to do some tweaking with Proxmox (CPU governor for instance) and I've been using FreeBSD/Freenas/Truenas since ZFS has been available in FreeBSD so I'm already comfortable with Truenas. After getting used to it I just prefer ZFS for my home storage so that combination was kind of a no brainer.
I would have designed the caddy's to mount the drives vertically in the case and allow fans at the front. Would also make it easy to change the drives just pop of the top and slid the drive out. Similar to how 45 Drives does their chassis. You could fit more drives that way too.
You could and I’d love to do that but they don’t fit in that orientation in a 3U rackmount chasis. Maybe if there was a slim backplane but this doesn’t.
Solid build. Pretty clear you took your time with your research on the hardware, good mix of bang for buck vs expandability. Currently rebuilding my little home lab and find myself going down the RUclips rabbit hole of DIY home server build (and occasionally gaming build) videos and this was a fun one to watch. If you ever do this again one recommendation I'd make is to test the motherboard out of the case, it's much easier to diagnose problems before you get everything mounted but glad you got everything working in the end. And funny enough I'm thinking about getting the same 3d printer!
love to see you managed things to get it all fit, i made some servers myself but i never go under 4U cases, even than its tight enough, but 4U gives some room for hide psu cables and a fanwall in the center with 3x 120mm fans to keep things quite and always start with a ready hotswapbays, i know its more expensive but saves so much trouble thats worth the money. Also with the cpu cooler you will have lot more choice with 4U cases.
Absolutely agree. I looked at a lot of 4U cases but eventually found that 3U cases had a surprising amount of space. Didn’t anticipate my cooler replacement which I think caused a lot of issues but happy I was able to fix it in the end!
Again, what a wonderful journey. Clear, concise and entertaining. I am thinking of doing this myself and have been searching youtube university for some guidance and reviews of server builds. My question is a simple one- How much power does the server consume? THIS is most important concern I have with these builds. I don't want to have a spectacular server running 24 hours a day that costs more to run than an entire house of air conditioners.
When building PCs I always start off with a minimal config for the first power on.. CPU and one stick of RAM. If it doesn't POST the first time then you've cut out a lot of pondering about what the problem is. Then add in the other components one by one.
@jackrmcconnell NORMALLY, you don't need to remove the CPU protection cover. Placing a CPU into the socket and closeing the latch with 'pop' off the protector, thus preventing accidental damage to the CPU socket pins, however, it doesn't stop people from dropping the CPU into the socket. Dont' worry, the processor only fits in one way, the clamping force from those stock retainers isnt' enough to cause the processor any damage. Overclocking enthusiasts with custom watercooling mods sometimes apply way more force onto the socket at times. As for the space under the PSU, what's stopping you from sticking 2.5" SSD's under the PSU? I stick drives on the sides of my cases with VHB tape, they stay stuck for years, sometimes the tape outlast the life of the SSD. lol (sorry writing this as I'm watching your video). BTW If you contact Evga customer support, sometimes they are willing to send you the odd lead here and there for PSU. I've been a TrueNAS user for the better part of 10 years, very stable software though a little complicated to setup for new users but they have an awesome forum for it's members. BTW, it's good to test the motherboard OUTSIDE of the case, with CPU, RAM and PSU with a display. It's also NORMAL for a PC to start and stop on the first boot especially if it's CPU and RAM has been changed, this is how the UEFI trains the memory. Usually after the second/third reboot the system the display will appear. Server boards tend to take LONGER to boot especially if you have an Aspeed chip on the board since that has an SOC which needs to boot first!
Did you install a stand off on the NVME SSD? It worried me when you said you tightened it hand tight. With a stand off the screw bottoms out and tight is tight. I have seen so many new builders not install the stand off and bend their NVME drives and you can short out your board as well.
I did, yeah. I didn’t show that bit but I installed it when I put the CPU cooler on. The “hand tight” bit I mentioned was because I couldn’t find the proper screw but I did end up finding it in the SSD packaging.
I’m working on that part now. Now that I’m running TrueNAS Scale, I’m planning to repurpose all my old drives into an offsite backup and use replication to send it there.
A good question. I looked into it but couldn't find anything with enough computing power when it came to VMs with a competitive price. I also wanted something open source and not using a proprietary OS - coming from using Drobos for storage, this was important to me. I also found it was much cheaper to build something than to buy something and I can more easily replace parts and upgrade things if I want to. Plus, because it's rack-mountable, I can put it in my existing, and mostly empty network rack. I'm very happy with what I've built and it's been running solidly for months now.
Ok, fair points, made well. Bit OTT IMHO but then again, when i tell people i have a 32TB NAS, i get much the same questions. VM's aren't something i use daily.@@jackrmcconnell
@@jackrmcconnellthis is also why I went with building my own server - burned by proprietary stuff. I now have three TrueNAS servers and will never go back.
Was a pleasure to play a small part in this build, loved your voice note updates during the build and loved the level of depth in the video!
Incredibly grateful to you for your help!
I’ve recently bought a very similar case, I plan on moving my small pc based server into it shortly, hopefully mine will be a little more simple as it’s already working in a pc case 🤞🏻
Good luck. You’ll probably be fine. I know I was a bit ambitious with mine!
DataCenter and Server HW engineer here. Good effort to be fair. Re thermal paste, yes a full spread across the entire surface, but as thin as possible, just microns thick. Im Dell, HP, and IBM certified and they all teach you the same thing. I have a similar setup at home but as an IT guy i just didnt get on with TrueNAS. In the end i wiped the lot and put ESXi on. And Virtualised my NAS in Windows Server 2016 as a file server. And also use VM's for PfSense, PiHole and Ubiquiti. ESX seems to have better power management too, throttling the CPU in quiet times which did actually make a difference to my power bills.
Thanks! That’s all interesting. I found TrueNAS Scale to have a leaning curve but not as bad as I was expecting. I’ve been happy so far but I’m not wedded to it.
I'm the exact opposite, found it refreshing to drop ESXI (or Xcp-ng) at home and go with Truenas core baremetal and proxmox for storage and compute. I did have to do some tweaking with Proxmox (CPU governor for instance) and I've been using FreeBSD/Freenas/Truenas since ZFS has been available in FreeBSD so I'm already comfortable with Truenas. After getting used to it I just prefer ZFS for my home storage so that combination was kind of a no brainer.
I would have designed the caddy's to mount the drives vertically in the case and allow fans at the front. Would also make it easy to change the drives just pop of the top and slid the drive out. Similar to how 45 Drives does their chassis. You could fit more drives that way too.
You could and I’d love to do that but they don’t fit in that orientation in a 3U rackmount chasis. Maybe if there was a slim backplane but this doesn’t.
Solid build. Pretty clear you took your time with your research on the hardware, good mix of bang for buck vs expandability. Currently rebuilding my little home lab and find myself going down the RUclips rabbit hole of DIY home server build (and occasionally gaming build) videos and this was a fun one to watch. If you ever do this again one recommendation I'd make is to test the motherboard out of the case, it's much easier to diagnose problems before you get everything mounted but glad you got everything working in the end. And funny enough I'm thinking about getting the same 3d printer!
Thanks! Definitely would build just the bare minimum and test sooner if I were doing it again. It's good advice.
love to see you managed things to get it all fit, i made some servers myself but i never go under 4U cases, even than its tight enough, but 4U gives some room for hide psu cables and a fanwall in the center with 3x 120mm fans to keep things quite and always start with a ready hotswapbays, i know its more expensive but saves so much trouble thats worth the money. Also with the cpu cooler you will have lot more choice with 4U cases.
Absolutely agree. I looked at a lot of 4U cases but eventually found that 3U cases had a surprising amount of space. Didn’t anticipate my cooler replacement which I think caused a lot of issues but happy I was able to fix it in the end!
Again, what a wonderful journey. Clear, concise and entertaining.
I am thinking of doing this myself and have been searching youtube university for some guidance and reviews of server builds.
My question is a simple one-
How much power does the server consume?
THIS is most important concern I have with these builds. I don't want to have a spectacular server running 24 hours a day that costs more to run than an entire house of air conditioners.
Thank you! Your question prompted me to test it with a meter. At idle, running some docker containers and a VM, it’s drawing 107 Watts on average.
great work on the 3d printables. i have one i need to design and hopefully find someone to help print for my HPE proliant ec200a
When building PCs I always start off with a minimal config for the first power on.. CPU and one stick of RAM. If it doesn't POST the first time then you've cut out a lot of pondering about what the problem is. Then add in the other components one by one.
That's good advice. If I ever build a machine again, I'll definitely be doing this.
@jackrmcconnell NORMALLY, you don't need to remove the CPU protection cover. Placing a CPU into the socket and closeing the latch with 'pop' off the protector, thus preventing accidental damage to the CPU socket pins, however, it doesn't stop people from dropping the CPU into the socket. Dont' worry, the processor only fits in one way, the clamping force from those stock retainers isnt' enough to cause the processor any damage. Overclocking enthusiasts with custom watercooling mods sometimes apply way more force onto the socket at times. As for the space under the PSU, what's stopping you from sticking 2.5" SSD's under the PSU? I stick drives on the sides of my cases with VHB tape, they stay stuck for years, sometimes the tape outlast the life of the SSD. lol (sorry writing this as I'm watching your video). BTW If you contact Evga customer support, sometimes they are willing to send you the odd lead here and there for PSU. I've been a TrueNAS user for the better part of 10 years, very stable software though a little complicated to setup for new users but they have an awesome forum for it's members.
BTW, it's good to test the motherboard OUTSIDE of the case, with CPU, RAM and PSU with a display.
It's also NORMAL for a PC to start and stop on the first boot especially if it's CPU and RAM has been changed, this is how the UEFI trains the memory. Usually after the second/third reboot the system the display will appear. Server boards tend to take LONGER to boot especially if you have an Aspeed chip on the board since that has an SOC which needs to boot first!
That’s all good to know, thanks. I may well add SSDs for caching under the PSU at a later date.
did you not get a backplate for the cpu cooler, or was that not needed on this cpu?
I did, yes. Was an ‘X’ shaped piece of metal.
Did you install a stand off on the NVME SSD? It worried me when you said you tightened it hand tight. With a stand off the screw bottoms out and tight is tight. I have seen so many new builders not install the stand off and bend their NVME drives and you can short out your board as well.
I did, yeah. I didn’t show that bit but I installed it when I put the CPU cooler on. The “hand tight” bit I mentioned was because I couldn’t find the proper screw but I did end up finding it in the SSD packaging.
Do you back your data up ?
I’m working on that part now. Now that I’m running TrueNAS Scale, I’m planning to repurpose all my old drives into an offsite backup and use replication to send it there.
@@jackrmcconnellI found the same thing, you get 1 NAS then you need another as a backup, and then you think but what happens if .......
Why not just use a NAS? I have a 32TB Qnap that works far better than a server for storing data.
A good question. I looked into it but couldn't find anything with enough computing power when it came to VMs with a competitive price. I also wanted something open source and not using a proprietary OS - coming from using Drobos for storage, this was important to me. I also found it was much cheaper to build something than to buy something and I can more easily replace parts and upgrade things if I want to. Plus, because it's rack-mountable, I can put it in my existing, and mostly empty network rack. I'm very happy with what I've built and it's been running solidly for months now.
Ok, fair points, made well. Bit OTT IMHO but then again, when i tell people i have a 32TB NAS, i get much the same questions. VM's aren't something i use daily.@@jackrmcconnell
@@jackrmcconnellthis is also why I went with building my own server - burned by proprietary stuff. I now have three TrueNAS servers and will never go back.