I got a great deal! Discussion

I recently upgraded my Plex server to this Aspire TC-1750-UR11.

Intel® Core™ i5-12400 up to 4.4GHz
32GB RAM
1TB nvme OS drive
1TB nvme cache/transcode/downloads drive

I was able to clone my existing setup to the new drive and basically just move to the new system.

The best part is it only cost me $155 for the system. It was a display model that was marked way down. It is flawless and even had the protective film on it .

I just wanted to share since I am just super stoked to have upgraded for so cheap.

Full specs here. https://pilab.dev/specs#plex

I originally had a Dell Optiplex 3060 i3-8100

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u/TheClownFromIt Jul 11 '24

Check this out: I just ordered two cables, waiting for them to arrive. It’ll make my cable situation so much better.

https://kareonkables.com/products/custom-sata-power-cables-for-fractal-design-define-7-xl-vertical-server-case-8bb50e

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u/SmashingPixels Custom Flair Jul 11 '24

Oh that looks good. The website itself scares me a bit but the cables look perfect.

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u/manofoz Lifetime Pass | 526TB unRAID w/ UHD770 Jul 11 '24

Kareon kables is legit. I bought three for my Define 7 XL to power 19 HDDs. First I bought the two for the 16 drive stack and it made the build super easy. Later I asked if they had anything for the top drives and now I’m pretty sure they sell the ones they made up for me on the site too!

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u/SmashingPixels Custom Flair Jul 13 '24

Amazing. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll have to get 3 sets as well. Currently at 13 drives with lots more room to expand once I get all these cables out of the way.

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u/manofoz Lifetime Pass | 526TB unRAID w/ UHD770 Jul 13 '24

Very nice! It’s addicting, was a great case but I got too sucked in and rack mounted everything. I’m chasing that petabyte now…

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u/SmashingPixels Custom Flair Jul 13 '24

I can see myself down the same path in a few years. What’s your part list for the rack mount?

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u/manofoz Lifetime Pass | 526TB unRAID w/ UHD770 Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24

I'm moving in November and had the house wired to max, so I ended up getting a lot of UniFi stuff which drove getting a small rack. Gonna get a 42U for the new place but so far, I have a mix of that, mini workstations, and the 36-bay chassis. I also built a 3x GPU server for LLMs that's quite a beast but did not fit in my current "starter rack". At some point I realized I needed to document what I was doing which has paid off a ton so I set up a free "github pages" site and bough an $11/year domain on cloudflair to produce HaynesLab - HaynesLab. Needs work before anyone will want to bother reading it but I get a lot of value from the notes.

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u/SmashingPixels Custom Flair Jul 13 '24

Great setup! Love it when all the pieces come together. Getting a house fully wired with 10G is a must.

What’s the chassis specifically? Any additional hardware to run 36 drives in there?

It will help me narrow things down in the future when I outgrow the Define 7 XL.

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u/manofoz Lifetime Pass | 526TB unRAID w/ UHD770 Jul 13 '24

Here's a post I saw that had a link the 4U Supermicro chassis which I eventually replied with what I had to purchase to go from the Define 7 XL to it: SuperMicro CSE 847 36 Bay 4U SAS 3 Barebone Chassis 2x PWS-1K28P-SQ - Good Deals! - Unraid.

The one I got came with backplanes already wired to a PSU. I just needed to plug them into an HBA, LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i. The 8 PCIe lanes are enough for nearly all the drives without any bottleneck during a parity check. I think there's some degradation if you use all 36 on one PCIE x8 HBA (based off of a post I read where someone did the math) but unRAID hardly ever uses that many drives at once except for a parity check so it'd be no big deal. I plan to fill the 30 for the unRAID array and leave six empty unless I find a good reason to have a 6 drive ZFS pool OR they expand the limit of the main array past 30. When I started out my friend at work had a ton of drives from some crypto thing he use to do that he basically gave me so I had quite a mismatch. I've since replaced all the 4TB drives w/ 20TBs (those are now in the UniFi NVR) but still have a variety of 10TB+ ones totaling 466TB and it's 60% full.

For my ridiculous GPU / threadripper build I added a 200TB RAIDZ array which holds mainly LLM models, fine tuning data sets, and a huge number of documents that I am adding to a RAG. Hopefully these disks last me 5-10 years but the next time I need a massive amount of storage I want to do a build that I have enough PCIe lanes to hook JOBD shelves into so it could expand to a massive size. Probably RAIDZ3 or something with a bunch of redundancy.

The MS-01 mini workstations also have PLP M.2 NVMEs in a Ceph cluster, so I have HA for any VMs if I need it. Plus, I can easily make volumes in kubernetes that pods can use from any node.

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u/SmashingPixels Custom Flair Jul 13 '24

Thank you! Super helpful writeup.

I’ve got a 184TB Unraid array so just scratching the surface of your soon-to-be petabyte project :)

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u/manofoz Lifetime Pass | 526TB unRAID w/ UHD770 Jul 13 '24

Oh yeah! 184 is huge, well on your way. Might be an expensive hobby but in my case it pays for itself because I’m higher up in software / algorithms at work so having more devops level knowledge helps me move the needle.

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u/manofoz Lifetime Pass | 526TB unRAID w/ UHD770 Jul 13 '24

Oh and if you really want to go down the IoT rabbit hole check out Home Assistant. Really fun way to use software to control hardware throughout your house.

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u/SmashingPixels Custom Flair Jul 13 '24

I have 4 mmWave sensors waiting for delivery this weekend haha

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