Soon.
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Ok my server is going through the initial hard drive setup, so I have about 20 hours to kill, so since some of you wanted to know what I did here is a quick brain dump with some pictures!
That list is pretty much all my parts, I dropped the CPU fan for something a local shop had since it was too large so if you are going to duplicate the build find a medium profile CPU fan.
The motherboard had a small issue with where the memory was located so Natucha is out with their general wide design.
Now if you want to do a set it and forget it for trans-coding (e.g. video file that you can watch on your phone without any pre-planning) a good graphic card is a must. I went with the P2000 card for the fact that it is unlocked from the jump, had a TON of community support and testing to validate that it was able to get the job done, and the single slot allows me to rewire some cables so it all fits without any interference. Not bad for a max of a 23 simultaneous stream support.
The SSDs were a pain to get them installed, sure I could have velcroed them to the case and called it a day but I wanted something a little more secure and not as bodgy. Enter the small laptop parts a supply store had for spare, thankfully the holes in the case lined up perfectly for two of them to be installed in case I wanted to do a dual Cache (not planning on it but future proofed it to make sure the option was there).
Now the fans I thought could have been replaced due to noise, thankfully they are great. I heard quieter and louder, the slight hum I get is something that would blend in with my computer. Once I find its permanent home under my desk, should not be an issue. Also I bought an internal USB cable to stick a memory stick there due to Unraid wanting to boot from the device. As long as it is inside the case no chance it will be accidentally pulled out and crash the array.
The main reason for this case: hot swap-able drives. Yes you can upgrade bays to be hot swap-able but at $20 bucks a bay I chose to get the built in option. Also 12 bays should be more than enough. Grand total for the box is 12 HDD+2 SSD+1 NVME+1 USB = 16 hard drives. Also the hard drive is a shucked drive from a WD EZ Store External Hard drive. Its a brand that goes on sale fairly often and the communities validated it. Got 2 12 TB and one 4 TB for now. I had another 10 TB that died due to a power failure on my PSU’s cable, since I was a tad foolish on my first shuck I was unable to RMA the drive, so if you are going down this route, shuck it carefully and keep the parts in the closet for a moment like this. Thankfully my 3 2 TB drives I got earlier was able to be RMAed and waiting to get them back.
That is pretty much it, still setting up Unraid by re-watching all of Spaceinvader One’s tutorials, most of them still holds up but a few have some outdated information since they were posted a few years ago.
If you want an alternative build (which came out a month after I bought everything) Gamer’s Nexus and LevelOne Tech did a collaboration on building it in a MUCH smaller case. Which would be fine for most people. I would warn you about Part 2 since they went with the jamming the square peg into the round hole approach on how they set up their server.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hix0l8cFaMw
Update: Turns out I jumped the gun as new modern builds are flying on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B340ZkHU4Y
Let me know if you have any questions.
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since I was a tad foolish on my first shuck I was unable to RMA the drive
@SuperPichu just successfully RMA’d two 12 TB drives without the enclosures. If you still have it and weren’t denied, try sending the bare drive in.
Anyone looking for an HTPC, or just a small gaming PC, should probably look into this NUC business.
Intel has a new-ish standard for more elegantly putting together your own small PC, and other companies are actually jumping on board. I’m imagining NUC builds are going to cost a bit more than the equivalent Micro ATX. As long as they do things right, whatever they lose in price, they’ll make up for in space savings and all around elegance.
How much maintenance does water cooling need? I might go for it in my next build if I don’t need to do much after setting it up.
My pc is getting old. Built it five years ago and I think the GPU is starting to go. Games stutter and have low FPS like it’s low on memory or processor. Probably a good time to upgrade the whole thing anyway.
If you just want a closed-loop sealed AIO style water cooling, I would say there’s effectively zero maintenance other than cleaning the radiator when you clean out the fans. My NZXT Kraken has been running for like 3 years straight and I’ve done zero maintenance to it at all.
If you want a more custom loop system with clear hoses and such I’m sure there’s more maintenance to them, probably at least annual clean-out, tho it seems some people go more often than that.
I re-rigged what is basically a PC liquid cooling system for my CNC router of all things. I change the liquid probably once a year when I start seeing strange things start growing in the clear section of hose. I just use a water/antifreeze mix, nothing specialty, no silver or bacteria-killer. I had a pump failure after 2 years of use, but probably because I was taxing the poor pump and had to upgrade to basically an aquarium pump. I am pretty sure in the intended PC use it would have been fine. (I have a reservoir on the floor under my router table and it pumps water up through probably 20 feet worth of hose, through a few heat transfer blocks for my drivers, then to my router spindle and then back through another 20 or so feet to a radiator and dump into the reservoir.)
You definitely want a bit gruntier than that for 40 total feet of hose, and that number of cooling locations, admittedly I haven’t done more than rule-of-thumb sums on it, but I’m pretty sure that’s more head pressure than most PC pumps are built for or able to deal with. Most of them are overkill for intended application, but the intended application is still maybe 5 feet of tubing at most, with no more than about a meter at absolute most of vertical piping. It’s not vertical, but you’re still pumping that water uphill.
I can confirm what @SWATrous said. If you get a pre-existing closed system with a radiator like the NZXT Kraken that we have, then you have to do nothing at all. You just mount it and plug it in properly, and that’s it. It’s just a heat sink that’s fancier, bigger, and quieter.
To be fair, I had started with a fairly simple run with the pump and rad and a tiny reservoir mounted on the gantry so the coolant run was much shorter, maybe 5 feet each way through the Y-axis cable chain. But it quickly would get hot still so moved to the floor reservoir. I’m not a rocket plumbist or anything, so it was a bit of “throw it at the problem and see what the next-weakest link in the chain is” and the pump did quickly stop having the smoke in. And so I got a fairly stout pump to replace it. I don’t remember the specs but it has zero trouble moving the liquid through that hose. (And on reflection it’s probably closer to 15ft up to my spindle and 15ft down, but either way)
I’ve also managed to burn out a few 220v switches over the years, and managed to blow a driver when a crash broke loose nut and shorted some motor wires . Now I use some Italian-made switch that can handle more amps than Thor, and I’ve gone and dumped the hot-snot all in my motor connector covers and totally insulated all possible points of a short.
So whatever breaks next is going to be a fairly strong link in the chain.
I find the easiest solution is the same as yours - Keep fixing the weak link. Only difference is that I would have started larger, because I usually prefer high-flow cooling for that sort of thing. Better to overkill than underkill. Any higher-flow Aquarium pump(as opposed to a trickle pump) should do just fine, you’ve got it locked down.
And yeah, had all those problems before too, though it was swarf rather than a nut, and I’ve blown a bunch of triacs too. The world of machining is pretty much a world of “What could go wrong now? Oh. Well that answers that question.”
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I haven’t been following hardware releases for a few years, is there any big reason I’d want to wait a few months before building a new PC rather than buying everything right now?
I’m looking at this with drives carrying over from my current PC.
There’s a pretty good chance of RTX 3xxx coming out this summer from what I’ve been seeing. So I’ve been kindof waiting for what that looks like. But it’s not like an RTX 2070 is any slouch. But I figure it’ll start showing a more mature hardware platform for ray-trace and things. So if that has any merit to you it might be worth weighing the wait.
Hardware prices are actually like to increase in the next 6 months due to production halts and shortages with Covid-19. There could be delays for new hardware lines as well.
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Good point. I decided to say “fuck it” and pulled the trigger.
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Yea I was going to build a computer soon, but I’m now worrying about income disruptions.
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Looking for hard drive recommendations and a sanity check. This is a home NAS mainly for backup. 8TB seems to be the sweet spot.
- Seagate BarraCuda 8TB — Newegg $152
- Toshiba N300 8TB — Newegg $209
- WD Red 8TB — Newegg $229
You can buy and remove the enclosures from EasyStore drives. These are sold by BestBuy and are the helium filled ones. The 10 TB drives are currently $180 and the 14 TB drives are currently $250.
The only consideration is that if your power supply supplies 3.3v to the drives they won’t power on. You can solve this a variety of ways. My server isn’t affected, but people often just use kapton tape on the connector if it does.
If you’re willing to wait, WD Red 8TB were $150 each on Black Friday at several places. No idea if/when they’ll hit that price again, and the 2 I ordered from B&H were back-ordered for 4 months, but $230 seems like a lot to spend on them.
That’s a cute hack. This is my backup data, though, so I don’t really want to tinker with a power pin or think about a slightly different drive firmware in an unexpected use case.
I’m going with WD Red 10TB.
I could wait, but I’m also stuck inside for the foreseeable future. Upgrading the disks in my server is fun way to spend an evening.