Home Server Hardware Round-Up

You did what to add another two and a half gig nick to your minis forum single two gig nick what All right i got it out of my system i did the video series on the forbidden router we’ve got the ultimate home server guides on the level 1 forum for building your own zettle casting or your own ultimate media server or your own you know repository of all human

Knowledge for when the internet goes down and you need your own local copy of wikipedia okay well maybe that last one is coming but i wanted to kind of do a hardware roundup for home server because in the past conventional wisdom was hey get some enterprise cast off stuff run that

At home and it’s great you might get a rackmount server that’s uh hot and loud and uses a lot of electricity more and more posts i see on the level one forum a lot of people are not willing to run the enterprise cast off stuff in their home lab i mean sure yes

There are people at home that have a 42u rack or multiple 42u racks i’m guilty of that myself as a matter of fact but uh it can run into a lot of electricity i’ve definitely noticed those energy bills creeping up and that’s not great so i thought we’d do a little round up

Of some of the stuff that i’ve done videos on lately in the last six months to a year because i really think these are incredible tremendous opportunities for building out your home server or rethinking your home server strategy your home lab for the coming years plus also

This is a great platform to learn new skills if you uh are doing a job that you’re not happy with and you want to pivot to something else having a home lab really is a great way to build those skills you can do everything you need to do

On computers even almost as modest as a raspberry pi to do things like clustering ansible devops stuff you can run your own git server that has orchestration and deployment you can do pretty much anything that you need as far as web servers and web technology goes because hey those basically free amazon instances

I’m not sure raspberry pi doesn’t have more horsepower than those so if you can learn on those you can definitely learn on the uh the raspberry pi stuff there’s a lot of software stuff in our home lab series that applies to all of that but we can talk about hardware and

We can talk about it from a power saving angle so first off cast off enterprise thing okay i’ve got a small form factor dell here this is probably uh the direction that you might go in for cast off enterprise stuff this is a 7th gen i think intel so a lot of

Businesses are getting rid of their 7th gen to prepare for the upgrade to windows 11 for the 8th gen or conversely your company is not preparing to go to windows 11 anytime soon because they’re on 6th or 7th gen intel systems this is borderline so modern system is going to

Be much more power efficient than this thing uh this this thing when it’s fully loaded is using a little over 100 watts when it’s not loaded it’s idling it’s like 60 65 watts something like that and the modern alder lake equivalent to this is more like idling at like 35 watts so

It’s like half the idle power i think of 35 watts you probably left the light on and it’s probably worse than that the nice thing about this chassis is that it’s got two expansion slots this particular one has an x16 slot it’s half height because it’s not you can’t put a

Full card in there and then there’s another one that’s pc expressed by four so that’s pretty cool different optiplexes have different pcie configurations some might be x16 by nothing some might be like by four by one some might be x 16 by one it just depends and this is

Borderline like i say the other downside of this is only got a single nick all the time when you’re running stuff in your home lab you want multiple ethernet interfaces if nothing else that makes it a little easy from a virtualization standpoint and this nick you know in this older

Hardware you’re probably not going to find especially workstation well you know commodity data input drone class workstation it’s not going to be faster than a gigabit it’s a real problem now i’ve got a solution for that that i’m really excited about i’m going to show you we’re actually going to add

Another nick without giving up our pcie slot to the asrock desk meat that we did a video on a little while ago so that’s the teaser for what’s coming but as far as older enterprise hardware this is this is what goes now another thing that i wanted to

Ramble about in the power usage conversation this system is my open air amd am4 server and i’ve got three and a half inch drives in here there’s some there’s some good video of this that i covered previously this is rocking an asrock uh rack motherboard it’s am4 16

Cores 128 gigabytes of ram on this platform this is really good this is an incredible home you’re going to spend a little bit of money for this but you know if you’re rocking a 3950x the 5950x is on sale in terms of like power utilization idle

Current blah blah blah this is also will idle on the order of like 40 watts 45 watts especially if you’re not running a lot of mechanical drives and depending a little bit on your power supply you can actually enable a an option in the bios called low idle current which

Will reduce the power usage by like five six watts when it’s idle but that also depends on your power supply because if you turn that on your power supply can’t handle that power supply won’t supply clean power to the system and then it’ll lock up and be weird that’s a whole

Other conversation for another day but for the last several years running am4 for your home server solution it’s quiet it doesn’t produce a lot of heat it doesn’t get hot it is awesome it’s super super awesome it’s great it is a little bit diy because those dell small form factor systems

Are not really you know nobody’s building those out of am4 and the ones that are typically are limiting it to a 65 watt tdp cpu so a 5900 no x would work in that 12 core but the 5950x you can forget it and this is pretty much you know the scythe cooler that

I’ve got on this and the other rest of the system i’m really happy with this the open air is really awesome if you want something that’s a little bit more uh i’m going to run vmware and i’m going to get a lot of stuff and money is no object

This is the intel nok this one is actually based on a xeon and it has air correcting so dims in it which is just bananas it has two pci express expansion slots x16 or it’ll run it by eight by eight this is just a desktop class xeon

So it’s not anything super fancy but 32 or 64 gigabytes of ram is possible and we have dual built-in intel mix plus thunderbolt if you’re rocking vmware the thunderbolt’s not going to help you but if you’re running other operating systems you may be able to use the

Thunderbolt to have even a little bit more connectivity for pci express or whatever another four lane something like that but there’s also an m.2 on board here so if you need more nics i’ll show you how without actually using a pcie expansion slot we’ll come back to

That then i’ve got these two systems from mini’s forum this one i think is a 5700g it only has a single 2.5 gigabit nick so dims it has one m.2 and sata we’re gonna add another nick to this as well at least potentially i’ll show you

You can kind of you’re already typing in the comments what i’m about to do this is the other minis forum system this is the one where you can add a gpu to it after the fact it’s got a door here you just pop the door off the

Bottom and then you pop it in this little storage rack thing and then you got a full pci express expansion slot which you can add a nick to or whatever else but on the inside this actually has two m.2 slots one here and one here in

Addition to the m.2 e key which is up here for the wi-fi but it only has one built in 2.5 gig nick we can add two more next to this no problem without using our pcie expansion slot and finally super micro i’ve done some videos on some super micro servers this

Is a six core it’s it’s a xeon base this motherboard has two built in one gigabit nics you can of course add a 10 gigabit half height card over here didn’t even open it for this video boom look at that intel x550 half height dual 10 gigabit

Connections and it’s gonna take up a pci express by four interface this is really awesome but you know what else is pci express before your m.2 check this out this is an intel i225v on a very short m.2 card two and a half gigabit on that tiny little thing

All of a sudden a whole world of possibilities have opened up for us that were previously unavailable now you might be thinking well there’s no there’s no ethernet connection on this how’s it gonna do it let’s get a pin header and the pin header has a breakout cable that goes to this

It’s definitely not ideal in terms of a lot of things signal integrity two and a half gigabit uh there’s some some rules that may have been bent a little here but two and a half gig and it’s just because it’s on a a slot cover doesn’t mean that

You have to use it on a blank slot and actually in the box you’ve also got the half height cover so with things like our dell small form factor you can totally use that and it’s fine you could you know the small form factor desktop this would fit in that and be

Fine it will fit in our this system which it does have an m.2 it’ll work we can get creative i get another one for another project so what does that look like well in our minis forum in this one we would actually pop out our m.2 storage and switch to sata for

Storage and then we would add it here and then we would have two 2.5 gigabit mix on our eight core ryzen system and then this would make a heck of a router that is insanely high powered it can run virtual machines and can have 64 gigabytes of memory and a whole bunch of

Other things that are really exciting so if you’re going to rock the desk meet for a home server you can do some really awesome things you can use two three and a half inch drives in here two two and a half inch drives and it’s got dual m.2 ports for whatever

Now the m.2 port on the back with the pin header it’s probably not going to clear and there’s not a mounting screw anyway so when this is in place you know it’s a little problematic but there is enough room for the m.2 on the other side and that will still leave our

Connection for our gpu but you wouldn’t use a gpu on a home server except maybe for transcoding but it will still leave our other m.2 slot free on this side so we can have one m.2 for storage and one m.2 for additional networking or we can go hog wild and install you know

A 10 gigabit card or a multi-port 10 gigabit card on the back and have 10 gig ports here or even 25 gig ports plus our onboard two and a half gig port plus another two and a half gig port so we got four network ports in this tiny little thing

Now i will tell you that they do actually make m.2s that have dual nicks so you can get one m.2 that has two two and a half gig mix on them although the lead time for those was too long for this video so i decided to get just two

Individual m.2s with the 2.5 gig because i think that’ll work really well for my use case we also should talk a little bit about clustering because you can take a bunch of these small form factor machines and in software build one uh cluster that shows up in

Your network as one device but actually has a lot of high availability and failover and a lot of really fun stuff like that you can run kubernetes in a cluster on a real hardware cluster and it’s still only using like 90 watts of power so all this is really cool and like i

Say i’m sort of foreshadowing a little bit ryzen was definitely the low power option for lots of horsepower eight cores if you’re willing to pop the top off of this and live with a with a machine that basically has you know half its network card hanging out of the top this will

Give you dual two and a half gig nics plus two usb plus two more usb plus usbc displayport and hdmi this is insanely powerful this would be a really nice portable machine you can still rock that two and a half inch sata ssd uh but yeah you are coloring outside the

Lines a little bit maybe i could design a 3d printable top a replacement a replacement printable top for the minis forum machine where the the ethernet plug is on top and so it’s uh it’s definitely frankenstein’s minis forum but that’s definitely an option however there is a challenger on the horizon and

I was going to make this video after i got my hands on some more hardware but it has been basically unobtainium this is an alder lake i3 12 100 this cpu is like 80 on sale yeah you had to have a micro center or you got to wait for the right

Coupon or you got to wait for the right e-tailer you got to go to ebay but four alder lake p cores alder lake is very very fast on a single core much faster than amd especially when we’re talking about you know a lower end six core part in terms of single thread performance

When we’re talking about networking and doing traffic filtering and samba and that kind of stuff single thread performance is still king and four p cores with hyper threading in a network appliance is really incredible and you can also step up to the 12 400 this is about 200 although you can get

It on sale for like a 120 this is the i5 12 400 this is six alder lake p cores so here’s the critical piece of information the w680 motherboard i’ve had multiple contacts tell me the w680 will support error correcting memory for the i5 12400 so you could rock ecc

The other nice thing is that when it’s idle that 12 400 is going to be pretty sippy on the power now when it’s when it’s doing something it’s going to use a lot of power and not a lot of power but you know it’s going to use more power

But if you if you’ve built something that’s really really fire breathing around this six core alder lake cpu there are motherboards with the w680 chipset that are advertised out there that have even onboard 10 gigabit and that’s probably worth the price of admission a couple of hundred dollars

So you know for five hundred dollars with six alder lake p cores it’s gonna run circles around everything except dedicated silicon because dedicated silicon for doing packet routing is gonna use less power and uh and and just be better at it but it’s gonna be a little less flexible so

Really interesting stuff and that’s bordering on you know the best case scenario for something like this where you’ve got the remote management and the ipmi the w680 motherboards do have remote management they have the a speed and they have everything else and so i think that this as an option

For home labing and home routering even though this is a new cpu it is so much faster than some of the old cast off enterprise stuff at a relatively low cost that it may not make sense especially when you consider the fire breathing behemoth you know the dell r720 server

Here this this this option is going to pay for itself in electricity energy savings in a very short order so we don’t have a w680 are there other options well there are low-cost b660 motherboards we get the azeroth uh 660m steel legend this motherboard is actually kind of overkill for

Uh even the 12 400 you could probably step down to an even less expensive approximately hundred-ish dollar motherboard now again these don’t make great network appliances because you’ve only got the single nic in this case i think this is the one that has the two

And a half gig nick but we’ve got two m.2 slots plus four on board sata or six onboard sata actually so six onboard sata ddr4 yeah it’s not going to run error correcting memory that’s kind of the downside but you can have six alder lake pecors and then for another twenty dollars

Two two and a half giganics or forty dollars three two and a half giganics and you haven’t used any of your pci express expansion slots if uh 10 gigabit will do it for you well you could do a dual port 10 gig nick on ebay those are usually like 40 50

Bucks so that’s maybe a little better but these won’t do two and a half or five gig they’ll only do one or ten gigs so a little bit of a little bit of a wrinkle there and so with this platform you could build you know the forbidden

Router or the or the ultimate home server or just use something like this as a home lab server appliance it’s totally fine i really do like this option except for the lack of error correcting memory if error correcting memory on the w680 chipset works with the i5 that’ll be

Really impressive it’s not really much of a departure if it works at the i3 historically intel has permitted ecc memory to work with a lot of the pentiums and i3s at the very low end in you know lga 1200 and older machines like this

This super micro if it had an i3 in it it’s got a z on it the xeon is much better but if it had the i3 in it it would still support error correcting memory because of the chipset on the motherboard that’s just a market segmentation thing it’s not a technical

Thing intel could totally allow ecc on this motherboard but then it would be up to azrock to actually test and confirm that that works and that’s not the can of worms that intel wants to open so we’re just stuck waiting on w680 motherboards that i can’t get my hands

On even though they were announced months ago anyway i think alder lake is promising but lack of parts means that you know if you want to go for the ultimate power saving it’s still rising and it’s still it’s fast enough with an eye toward the future alder lake p-cores in your network

Appliance is going to beat the pants off of even old xeons and uh maybe we can do some videos to prove it what kind of benchmarks would you like to see i don’t know i really think we can do some really interesting stuff here all right enough rambling let’s actually do

Something exciting if you want to participate join me in the forums level one i’m wendell i’m signing out and i’ll see you there You