New Home Server

Much like my other recent article about my workstation upgrade, I decided to give my home server a big performance boost. This machine has went through many hardware iterations. Here are just the CPUs that I can think of: Athlon X64, Xeon X3000 series, Celeron 847, i3, and most recently, a Haswell i5-4590. I have also experimented and learned many different storage technologies due tothis journey. It began with mdadm+LVM, then onto ZFS in Solaris > Openindiana > OmniOS > Linux, and now, I’m back to using Ubuntu 22.04 with SnapRAID + mergerfs for my bulk media and ZFS for my boot pool and Docker containers. This has proven to be a very flexible solution for my home server media setup.

All of this is re-purposed gear or used gear. This setup works great and is a huge performance improvement over my old setup. Adding all this CPU horsepower consequently impacted the total power draw of the system over a single CPU system with new architecture. At idle, the power draw went up about 65 watts over the i5-4590 system with 1 HBA + SAS Expander. At full load, that difference is a whole lot bigger 🙂

Home Server Parts List

CASE: Norco 4224
PSU: EVGA Supernova 750 G2
MOBO: Intel S2600CP
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon e5-2670 v1 SR0KX (16 physical cores and 32 threads total)
RAM: 16x Hynix 8GB DDR3 ECC RAM (128GB total)
CPU Heatsinks: 2 x Supermicro SNK-P0050AP4
OS HD: (2) Intel S3700 400GB in ZFS mirror (an Intel 730 is shown in the pictures below).
HDs: (8)HGST He8 8TB, (8)WD Red 6TB, and (8)HGST NAS 4TB. Using SnapRAID with triple parity + mergerfs for 128TB usable
HBAS: 3x Dell H310’s flashed to the latest P20 IT firmware
ADDON: Mellanox X-2 Connect 10GBe over fiber to my workstation upstairs
ADDON: Intel AXXRMM4(+Lite) Modules for iKVM

This server hosts my files via SnapRAID + mergerfs, and employs Docker containers for a number of things including: Crashplan, Plex, Plexpy, Unifi, etc.