Requirements

Posted the following on r/homelab:

Hi,

First time poster, long time home lab builder.

I'm looking at building a new rackmount server for the home, specs are:

at least 16TB of storage after RAID-1 (so 32TB), keeping the current 4x8TiB, ideally with room for expansion, at least one 8TiB spare

32GiB RAM (current has 1.3GiB in swap with 16GiB onboard)

8 CPU cores is fine, v2 has 10 cores and is mostly idle

low noise (not fully silent, noctua fans are fine)

low power (not sure how much power is in use now)

some remote management, some standard like IPMI or serial is best, would tolerate HDMI with a NanoKVM

rackmount (4U, max 21" depth, ideally 3U and less than 20" depth), must fit a a 4-post rack like this

2000-5000$CAD budget (1500-3500$USD)

I currently have a [CSE-733TQ-500B][] Supermicro case with a [ASUS PRIME X470-PRO][] board, 16GB of Kingston memory and a AMD Ryzen 5 2600x. I'm not happy with that build:

the box is huge (20" x 17" x 7", tower)

yet the 4 SATA drives are all crammed together in this tiny enclosure

the 2600x doesn't have a GPU, so i had to use an extra GPU card

the OOB management is non-existent: I tried setting up a serial adapter to get the BIOS over serial but got garbage

The enclosure issue is a huge problem. Even with only the first two 8TB Ironwolf drives in there, they reach 46°C and 51°C, with the 4 drives, it burns up to 55°C and 61°C. There's essentially no cooling there, fully enclosed.

Because of this post, I'm considering a Sliger case, possibly a CX3701 (3U, 10 x 3.5" drive slots), but I worry about cooling: how can those 10 slots possibly cool down without a fan? So I'm also looking at the CX4712 (4U, 10 x 3.5" + 2 x 5.25"), which has room for cooling fans for the drives. I like the upgradability through the 5.25" slots as I'm bound to pivot to SSDs eventually, possibly in the lifetime of this build, but perhaps that's overkill.

The Sliger cases also seem expensive to me, and have free shipping only to the US (I'm in Canada).

Ideally, I'd keep the current board to save on costs, but I feel it's close to EOL anyways (it's 5 year old), so I wouldn't mind building from scratch. Wondering if I need mITX or mATX or a full ATX build. Worried about finding a board with enough SATA connectors or messing with incompatible expansion cards.

Considering staying with AMD, but open to other opinions. I like the low-power, so also considering Ampere.

RAID is software (ZFS), OS is Debian (of which I am a developer).

I'm sparing you the absolutely horrid view of the two-post rack right now: building this server would be a good step in the right direction in cleaning all this up.

Thoughts? Thanks!

[CSE-733TQ-500B]: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/archive/chassis/SC733TQ-500B [ASUS PRIME X470-PRO]: https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/PRIME-X470-PRO/

Research

Silent rackmounts

SilentPC 2u Xeon server: 2245$, 3 x 3.5" drives. Not great.
eRacks QUIET2: 1400$, 3 x 3.5", still not enough drives
QuietPC 2U Breeze D5: 1600$CAD+, 4 x 3.5"?

Reddit recommended Dell R270 in 2022, maybe using normal rackmount servers is an option?

Sliger

Michael Lynch built a budget NAS in 2022 with the Fractal Node 304, a clever 6 x 3.5" drive mITX case (yes, it must be crammed in there). (Sold by Canada Computers at 155$.)

He updated it in 2024 to this Sliger 3U trayless case with room for 10x3.5" drives, 4x2.5" SSD mounts, two 120mm exhaust fans, for 340$, about the price of my original Supermicro case. It's a Mini-ITX build though, and I have a full-sized ATX board, which he regretted because of limited expansion:

If I were to do this over again, I would have bought a rack-mounted chassis that has slots for six to eight 3.5" hard drives and a motherboard with either multiple PCI slots or at least eight SATA ports.

I asked sliger for a spec. I think those cases look amazing, and probably the next build.

From what I gathered from reviews, they are seen as too expensive for the build quality, but I kind of like the design. It's really bare though: no power supply, backplace, essentially nothing. An alternative I've found on reddit is Chenbro.

They seem to have trouble finding me a case that's 23" while still providing cooling for the drives. They typically send me towards Icydock type solutions, in which case I could just slot a FatCage into my existing 5.25" slot (189$USD at B&H).

They dohave the CX4712 but it's 25" deep, 2" deeper than the current server. I'd like to keep this within the 19" rack size which depths are apparently "600 mm (23.62 in), 800 mm (31.50 in) or 1,010 mm (39.76 in)", and I'd target the shorter depths. The rack I'm targeting shrinks down to 22" (and up to 44"), for example.

Update: seems like it's either the CX4712 or the CX3702, but which doesn't have direct fan. They say it has decent airflow, but it could be an issue for my warm drives. They're working on a 12-drive top-loaded 4U case that would be 17" deep that might pre-order in May with shipping in June, so maybe I'll wait for that.

Local rackmount suppliers

Those are interesting local suppliers of Gigabyte servers:

Other providers:

http://www.atic.ca/ built marcos v2, still no HTTPS?!

Other reviews

Created 2025-04-02 14:44. Edited 2025-04-07 16:13.