NAS Build 2019 Step 5 - Final Parts Delivery

If this is your first time seeing this series, I recommend starting at the beginning:

Building A New Nas
You can find the entire series below, this is the 6th post in the series.

Bundle of stuff

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This bundle of stuff should be Motherboard, SAS Expander, and ram.

CPUs

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I am using two Xeon 2690 v1 with a PassMark of 13660 per CPU and single threading rating of around 1800. While this is a dated CPU, it's still pretty fast and has 8 cores a processor. This will destroy any commercial NAS like Synology and Qnap and will be able to run Plex, Virtual Machines, and most anything else you can throw at it.

I ordered these CPUs off eBay and actually got two for less than the price of a single one in my original plan.

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Both CPUs came in (was really fast delivery!).

Motherboard

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This motherboard is huge and heavy. Even though this is a used motherboard pulled from an enterprise server, it looks brand new.

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A bulk of the weight are these huge chunks of copper. You don't get heat sinks like this anymore. I won't be using them as they won't work for a 135W TDP processor such as the 2690 v1 which is a shame as they were included and are very small. I'll give them to my friend to recycle for a few bucks as he frequently is selling copper piping.

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One of the great things about this motherboard is the built-in LSI 2008 SAS controller. This controller has 2 Mini SAS can handle 8 6GB/s hard drives when using break out cables. This would normally be another $40-50 add-on. It also has a Mini SAS for another 4 3GB/s hard drives. I won't be using this and instead will be using a SAS expander.

I will need to flash the onboard SAS controller into IT mode. This will allow the operating system to see each individual drive rather than act as a RAID controller. This is important for most modern software raid solutions like ZFS and Unraid.

SAS Expander

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Instead of breaking out each of the two Mini SAS ports to 4 SATA/SAS cables, you plug them directly into a SAS Expander and you can get up to 24 drives off the onboard controller and this add-on card. I will be using 15 drives using this setup.

10Gbit Ethernet

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Technically this isn't for the NAS at all. The motherboard not only includes the SAS controller but also has a $100-$150 dual 10Gbit NIC onboard! This Dual 10Gbit Nic is for my main workstation so I can get above 125MB/s transfer speeds. My plan is to have a direct connection to the NAS from my main workstation and everything else will use 1Gbit link. Eventually, when 10Gbit switches are reasonable I can build out a storage network.

This is also serving as my server for Virtual Machines I do not have to worry about 10Gbit links to my servers. I will be replacing a Synology NAS and two Dell R610's with this server.

At this point, I have everything I need to build a working system without a data array. The drives should be in any day now.

NAS 2019 Build Series

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