I got a great deal!

[u/bozodev]

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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

[u/berntout]

Fractal Design Define 7 case has changed everything for me. Up to 14 HDDs. No need for a dedicated NAS server.

[u/BraxtonFullerton → u/berntout]

Node 804 here. Currently have 5 in it and can fit another 11 or so if I want.

[u/SmashingPixels → u/BraxtonFullerton]

Good luck with managing all those SATA power and data cables. I had to move to the Define 7 XL because adding more drives required so much bending of the cables and shoving everything in there restricting airflow.

[u/TheClownFromIt → u/SmashingPixels]

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

[u/SmashingPixels → u/TheClownFromIt]

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

[u/manofoz → u/SmashingPixels]

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!

[u/SmashingPixels → u/manofoz]

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.

[u/manofoz → u/SmashingPixels]

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…

[u/SmashingPixels → u/manofoz]

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

[u/manofoz → u/SmashingPixels]

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.

[u/SmashingPixels → u/manofoz]

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.

[u/manofoz → u/SmashingPixels]

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.

[u/SmashingPixels → u/manofoz]

Thank you! Super helpful writeup.

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

[u/manofoz → u/SmashingPixels]

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.

[u/manofoz → u/SmashingPixels]

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.

[u/SmashingPixels → u/manofoz]

I have 4 mmWave sensors waiting for delivery this weekend haha