When I started my homelab journey back couple-or-so years ago at almost the height of lack of availability and high prices I got myself a little dual core Celeron NUC kit, which I then fitted out with 16 GB of leftover RAM and a 120 GB (later to be upgraded to 480 GB) SATA SSD and installed Proxmox on. Ever since this little thing has been tremendous help in learning new things, getting prepared for certifications and simply running software that I use on a daily basis, such as DocuWiki, Kimai and Tiny Tiny RSS.
And not only that, against recommendations of many I have been running a virtualized instance of unRAID with a JBOD of random hard drives over USB. Overall the only issue I could note is the slowness of things with writes capping out around 40-50 MB/s, which is absolutely fine for my mainly WORM use anyway, so I have been quite happy with the setup, even if I do admit that it’s far from optimal. Or maybe even sub-optimal.
Ever since someone put a curse on me by pointing towards r/datahoarder I have basically reached 42 TB raw storage on random drives, and you guessed it - without any real backups. I do have an old NAS that handles my local backup needs on a mirrored 4 TB setup like a champ, but that can only do so much when the amount of data overall is ten times that. Luckily nearly all of the current data could be replaced with relative ease should the need arise, but I’d still prefer to have at least one layer of security in terms of parity here.
I think it’s time to right those wrongs.
Goals
This project has a pretty simple (here we go with the famous last words…) goal: clean up this whole mess. Really the main problem I have is that my current backup plan for this data is a prayer, and while like I said the data itself isn’t all that important, it is starting to resemble a collection of sorts, and I would like to keep it that way.
To reach this goal I’m going to be building (rebuilding?) an unRAID server with a case that supports up to 10 HDD’s natively and packs a bit more power than my little NUC-that-could. This post is sort of a build diary for myself, and - in all likelihood - a good rundown on what not to do, and how to fix the inevitable issues.
Parts List
While I don’t have a strict budget here, I am trying to keep it down preferably between $400 and $500, not including the 10 TB HDD I will need to get for the parity. The problem of buying computer parts is that you’re always just $20 away from an upgrade, but then that upgrade requires you to change something else somewhere as well, but if you do that then $20 more would buy you… well, you get the idea.
So let’s try to stick to our budget, and let’s get shopping.
CPU
While I just said we’re not on a strict budget here, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t on a budget. Luckily I’m not looking for any monster performance, so ultimately I ended up with two options: Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3600. Former would have built-in graphics that could prove useful, or at least saving some money initially, latter would have more cores and threads, which would cost just a little bit more and require a GPU I wouldn’t otherwise really need, but what if I want to run a thousand simultaneous instances of TempleOS? Choices, choices…
In the end I decided to go with the 3200G to save money by not having to buy a GPU and because 4C/4T is likely going to be a-ok since I’m moving up from a dual core Celeron which handled my requirements quite well anyway.
CPU: $103 Running total: $103
Motherboard
Here I picked AsRock B450 Pro4 R2.0 since it checks all the boxes for possible future upgrades: M.2 slots for cache/VM drives, enough PCIe lanes to add a GPU should I one day need one or another HBA, and four DDR4 slots with support up to 128 GB of RAM - with ECC support with a newer CPU.
Especially for these features this is a really affordable option, and my main computers store was even out of them due to this, but luckily I managed to find another one for the same price elsewhere.
Motherboard: $81 Running total: $184
RAM
Nothing here really matters for me, and I’m basically sorting by cheapest and going with 2x8 GB Kingston Fury Beast running at 3200MHz because it’s cheaper than 2666MHz. For reasons.
RAM: $62 Running total: $246
Power Supply
Here it kinda seems that supply is still somewhat lacking, and with people online either loving or hating every single thing picking out one is no easy feat.
I know that I’m looking for a 650W, at least 80+ Bronze rated one, and Corsair CV650 seems to hit that spot, and like said availability seems rather lacking anyway, so hopefully this one proves a good pick. Easy to upgrade later down the road, so as long as there’s no fireworks it should all be good.
PSU: $54 Running total: $300
HBA
Since I’m going to be moving 5 active drives, adding a parity drive and pooling up couple more smaller drives before starting to replace the smallest drives the six SATA ports on the motherboard, while nice for the future, just won’t be cutting it.
So I went on eBay to get myself an LSI 9240-8i flashed to 9211-8i in IT Mode for just about $50, including the required cabling for a total of 8 drives.
PSU: $50 Running total: $350
Case
I know that I’m going to need space for relatively large amount of drives I’m going to need a bigger case. Something like the Fractal Node 804 would technically fit the bill, but I’d prefer not to have something cramped since for once physical space isn’t too much of an issue. It’s issue enough so that I can’t just go for a rack that I’d push into some dark corner, but a tower is no problem at all, and it’ll hopefully help with the cooling/ventilation in hot environment as well.
I found the SilverStone CS380 Mid Tower for decent price and with 8 hot-swappable HDD caddies (and two 5.25” bays for further easy upgrades) it sounds like a perfect option. Once again I hear both good and bad about the case and its airflow capabilities, but I reckon we’ll cross that bridge once we get there.
“Best” option here likely would have been the Fractal Design Define 7 XL, however they’re nearly twice the price and filling up the CS380 should take time anyways so we can look at that in the future unless I just go the sensible route and rack everything up.
Case: $120 Running total: $470
Grand Total
And there we go, basically spot on with the set “budget” and covering everything that is needed for a fully functioning system.
Now you might be asking, “Why not buy a used system and upgrade that?”. The answer is simple: it doesn’t make any sense financially.
I did look at something like Z420 and other r/homelab-approved options, but sadly local pricing on second-hand anything is absolutely bonkers, so while I could save $100-150 upfront by buying a used system, I’d need the new and larger case anyway, more memory, likely new PSU and probably even some adapters to use that PSU because of course they’re proprietary things, and if something dies, it’s all on me.
I have nothing against using pre-owned parts, but when the price comes so close anyway I’m more than happy to pay a little more to get that 3 years of warranty for all my parts, even if it was all just for the peace of mind.
Build Phase
Last computer I built from the ground up was an Athlon something or other well over a decade ago, and ever since I’ve been mainly using laptops due to the need to travel a lot, and even once I started to settle down I went with a pre-built simply because I got a nice deal on one, but the basics haven’t changed so I wasn’t expecting any issues with the build (assuming no DOA parts), and I didn’t run into any, really.
Did the computer power on with the first press of the power button? Obviously not, it never does, but the issue was that the PSU wasn’t plugged into the extension cord I ran, so after that cock up everything was up and running smooth. The CS380 was pretty easy to build in, no blood was drawn and while I did end up with little rat’s nest due to one more SATA power ribbon overall I think that even cable management ended up quite nicely.
Memory speed needed to be set in the BIOS, but after that we’re all caught up and can move to… well, move unRAID.
Moving unRAID
Quite frankly unRAID is easy to move since it’s all running on an USB drive and the system is loaded into memory upon boot, so really the only question mark were the drives in my JBOD. Given how they’re all passed through individually and recognized by my virtualized instance of unRAID it should all be golden, but I did take screenshots of the drive details and arrangement just in case, although I’m not sure if the drive order matters to unRAID in the first place. Better safe than sorry anyway.
Slapping in the drives, checking that the hot swap function works as it should, I see all of them detected correctly and proceed to reset my config (“Tools” - “New Config”) which is needed since all the drives show up as “missing” given that we are now missing the JBOD box from between the drives and the host. I set the drives to the same arrangement as before, and the array starts up perfectly.
I also took the time to add a small 120 GB SSD I had laying around and moved my appdata directory there so that I can have better performance, which granted I still haven’t found lacking anyway, especially once I start generating video previews and whatnot.
How Does it Hold Up?
In short, the system works pretty much exactly as I expected. Having test driven the system for few days now I can say that FTP transfers at full gigabit spike the CPU usage to 40-50% and the temps with seven drives in the array hover around 40 C on average with high density drives (10 TB) being around 45-50 when under some prolonged load. So the temps are indeed a little on the higher side with this case, then again the ambient temperature in my living room is around 30 C most of the day, so probably adjust accordingly. Nevertheless, improving the airflow is likely part of the roadmap at some point. Which takes me to…
Next Steps
Oh yes, barely even started and already thinking about upgrades, great. Although everything is really going to revolve around storage space for now, so first things first I’ll need another 10 TB HDD so that I can get parity up and running to sleep my nights a bit better, and then move on to replacing the smaller drives with larger ones.
I’ve also been eyeing a StarTech 2x5.25” to 3x3.5” hot-swap sled which would bring a total supported drives in this case to 12, which in turn would mean 100-110 TB of usable storage, building which would take up some time and money for sure. At $100 or so with shipping and whatnot since they’re not sold locally it’s a little on the higher side price wise, but at the same time it would probably make life a bit easier in the long run.
But for now I am happy with the system and how easy the build overall was, so from this point on it’s just about that datahoarding.