Explaining the selected hardware

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When hardware is in a list like in the article that lists all hardware used, it’s hard to explain exactly why that hardware was chosen, what it’s advantages are, disadvantages, etc.. That’s what this article will be about!

The motherboard

For the motherboard recently an interesting option became available the MinisForum BD790i SE! This is a Mini-ITX motherboard and at first glance you might pass by it, but it’s a little powerhouse if built out correctly and it’ll give you the expandability and CPU power for a price less then you’d otherwise pay for just the CPU!

The main thing about the BD790i SE are 4 things:

• Built-in CPU, a Ryzen 9 7940HX
  • This is a 55w-70w mobile Ryzen CPU of the ZEN 4 generation with 16x full cores that can turbo up to 5.2Ghz!What this means is that you have great energy efficiency (since it’s a mobile chip) combined a lot of horsepower (it comes close to the desktop 7950x!This CPU also comes with built-in graphics!
• Built-in Cooler
  • Next to having the CPU built into the motherboard it also comes with a pre-attached cooler, just add a fan and done!
• 2x Gen4 M.2 Slots
  • For fast storage it comes with 2x Gen4 M2 slots with full bandwidth, perfect for VM storage and NVMe cache for the HDDs
• 1x Gen5 x16 PCIe Slot
  • For further expansion it comes with a Gen5 x16 PCIe slot
    • We’ll be using this with a Gen4 PCIe bifurcation card to add 4x extra expansion slots for things like SATA ports, 10Gbit networking, etc.

What the board doesn’t have are SATA ports! You’d think, well that’s odd, won’t we need those for a NAS? Yes we do but as described above we’re going to fix that in a different way using PCIe bifurcation (cutting up the x16 slot in 4 times a x4 slot!) and adding the cards (in M2 form factor) we need for our build (this can vary from SATA ports, 10Gbit networking ports or even a Coral TPU accelerator if you so desire!). Please see more about this in the section down below!

All of the above only costs $399! That’s motherboard, CPU and Cooler. That is an insane price for that combination, if you’d have to buy equivalent ZEN4 desktop parts generally the motherboard will set you back around $200 and then you still need a CPU, if we’d take the Ryzen 9 9700x (12 cores, lets say performance equivalent to mobile 16 core we’re using) that would be another $360 at least. No cooler or anything like that and we’re talking $560 and we’re getting parts we don’t actually want, the Ryzen 9 9700x has a 170w TDP so it’s a lot less energy efficient then our mobile chip.

That makes the MinisForum BD790i SE $161 cheaper for in my opinion a better solution, awesome deal and platform to build on!

Memory

For memory you need DDR5 SO-DIMMs (2x). You can choose a 32GB, 64GB or at maximum a 96GB kit I went with.

If you are going to run VMs and also a fairly sizable ZFS pool you want a good amount of memory for it to perform well. I’d say at minimum go with a 64GB kit but if you can swing it (remember this is targeted at running for 5 years) go with the max you can cram in there and that is the 96GB kit.

*On the MinisForum BD790i SE this memory will run at 5200Mhz speeds

NVMe storage

The purpose of this NVMe storage will be tri-fold:

• Mirrored boot drive for Proxmox
  • We will have a mirrored partition for Proxmox so that if a single NVMe drive dies you will still be able to boot the system!
• VM storage
  • Either in mirrored form or not (with cluster replication) we need some nice and fast storage for our VMs
• ZFS L2ARC (and maybe SLOG)
  • You can create a few extra partitions and use this space as an L2ARC (SSD based read cache) and/or mirror SLOG device (but there is no power protection built-in!). This can help give you some extra speed from the HDD based ZFS volume depending on the workload you have

For the above reasons I actually went with a bit older NVMe drive, the Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB. The reason for this is because these NVMe drives are built with slightly older flash memory technology which is actually beneficial beneficial since it’s able to handle more writes then newer more modern variants can handle!

I compared the Samsung 990 Pro, WD SN850x and these FireCuda 530 drives. And while those 2 models might edge it out in performance (somewhat, not by much) their endurance figures are very different:

• Samsung 990 PRO 2TB
  • 1200TBW
• WD SN850x 2TB
  • 1200TBW
• Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB
  • 2550TBW

Just that alone means the NVMe SSDs will last at least twice as long as the other 2 models, for the same price (or less). I’ll happily give up maybe 10% performance difference for 2x the endurance!

NVMe heatsinks

I recommend getting 2x NVMe heatsinks to make sure they stay at the proper working temperatures. Although we are going to have plenty of airflow in the top cabinet the way I have configured the Jonsbo N3 it’s best to add some NVMe heatsinks to make sure that during long writing operations they don’t overheat.

In the list I’ve placed links to generic NVMe heatsinks including thermal pads and what I hope to be better quality fasteners then what you normally get included!

The Case

For the case I’ve selected the Jonsbo N3 case. I’ve built in it before during this livestream because I wanted to check it out and I liked it a lot!

It’s a small case but still allows for a Mini-ITX motherboard with 8x 3.5″ SATA HDDs.

But it also offers a very nice and spacious top compartment that’s able to handle good cooling for the CPU and with a bit of modification also allows you to house some extra hardware with good cooling like a PCIe x16 BiFurcation card! The decent amount of room also allows some nice modifications we’ll go into in some of the next articles!

Power Supply

As a power supply you can use an SFX power supply but depending on your usage, this might not be the right way to go!

I have a dedicated article for this but TL;DR if you are going for a low power build with only a few disks, using the HDplex PSU is going to save you a lot of power, if not and using 8x disks, the difference isn’t near that much and you use a normal SFX PSU or the HDplex 250w GAN depending if you also want to have extra cooling for the PCIe x16 BiFurcation card.

Since I like a challenge and efficiency I’m going with a slightly odd choice and that’s a HDplex 250w GAN power supply. It’s much smaller then a normal SFX power supply and it enables me to add a bit more cooling to the case which isn’t possible otherwise!

It will require a little bit of cable trickery and maybe adding a separate buck-converter but I will again explain that using a dedicated article!

Fans

For the fans we need 2 types:

CPU FAN
2 options here really in my opinion:

• Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM
  • Awesome fan, can be used directly with the included screws
• Phanteks T30 PWM 120 mm
  • An option that gives slightly better performance without extra noise and it’s slightly cheaper!

Case FANs

• 4x Noctua Redux 92mm PWM

These are slightly worse then the full fat Noctua fan but also cost about half and for that, they perform great! I’ve also run Redux fans for years and they don’t die as quickly as cheaper fans out there for instance.

Fans additional hardware

To fully optimize the fans and especially noise we need a bit of extra hardware:

2x PWM fan splitter

To be able to control the fans dynamically (the motherboard can do this automatically from the BIOS!) you need 2x fan PWM splitter cable. You will need 1 for the fans in the top cabinet for the CPU, memory and PCIe add-in cards. And then a second one will be connected to the 2x fans that are for cooling the HDDs in the lower cabinet of the Jonsbo N3 case.

2x Fan cable guard

The 2x 100mm original fans in the lower cabinet come included with a cable guard each, you can reuse those on the 2x 92mm Noctua you are going to install there.

But the 2x 92mm Noctua fans installed in the top cabinet could also use some of these guards so I recommend getting 2 extra. On the Aliexpress website these are listed as 90mm metal fan guards but those fit fine.

4x 92mm Noise reduction gasket

To try and minimize noise as much as possible I recommend to use some 92mm noise reduction gaskets, these decouple the fans from the metal housing (a lot of the housing internally is also decoupled this way!) preventing noise from the motors to be amplified by the metal shell.

12x screw noise reduction o-ring

To try and minimize noise even more I’ve used o-rings on the screws so that there is no plastic-to-metal or metal-to-metal contact. How much this really makes a difference, it’s hard to say but when I’m building something that is going to last 5 years and is supposed to be low noise, I try to pull out all stops!

Other extra hardware

Next to the above main components we’re going to need some extra hardware to complete a basic build. For items that are optional I will list them with a Purple # in front of them!

PCIe Bifurcation card

A PCIe bifurcation card is a card that slots into the x16 slot on your motherboard and breaks it out to 4 times x4 slot in M2 form factor. You could use it to run an additional 4x Gen4 NVMe drives for instance, if you wanted to build a purely NVMe NAS.

But we’re going to use it to breakout to a few different cards to give our little NAS the IO we require! Using this method of the PCIe bifurcation card it actually turns a somewhat limited motherboard in regards to expandability into a very versatile platform that’s able to handle various tasks in a very small package!

We actually getting access to the full amount of PCIe lanes a modern desktop system has to offer (2x 4 from the built-in M2 slots, 16 for the PCIe slot makes a total of 24 PCIe lanes!). This gives access to a huge amount of IO in a very very tiny form factor!

I tested 3 different BiFurcation cards and I recommend the linked one in the hardware guide since I had the best experience with that one. I has no problems running at Gen4 speeds so everything you connect including NVMe drives will run full speed.

6-Port SATA ASM1166 M2 controller

In my build I’m going to be using 2x 6-Port SATA ASM1166 M2 controller as the controllers for my HDDs. I’ve experimented and also tested the normal favorite option of using an LSI card by I found that this LSI card used a lot of power and with extensive testing I was not able to find a performance difference vs the 2x ASM1166 controllers. A scrub of 8x 14TB drives runs at about 2GB/s so each of the 8 disks is able to reach their maximum of 250MB/sec at the start of their platters.

The 2x 6-Port SATA controller cards are also fully compatible with the SATA protocol and I was able to flash the firmware of my Seagate Exos X14 drives and readout their SMART information without a problem. I’ve also stressed them with hours and hours of data transfers with dmesg or ZFS having 0 complaints.

10Gbe networking card

Although the MinisForum BD790i SE comes equipped with onboard 2.5Gbe networking (which works fine) for my needs (ZFS Cluster replication, NAS functionality, etc.) I want to have 10Gbit networking or even 2x 10Gbit if possible. (It is if you only use 2x SATA controller)

I will be investigating adding a 10Gbit card to the onboard WiFi slot too and see how well that performs in the future!

I will also be investigating a Gen3 x4 special card with 2x 10Gbe ports onboard, sadly this card is not yet available so I will be testing it in the future!

Other options

Extra NICs
Next to the above there are other options you could consider! If you want to use the server also as a firewall you can get dual-NIC 2.5Gbe M2 cards for instance. You might have to get slightly creative where you mount these ports but it’s certainly an option!

Coral TPU accelerator
If you want to real-time analyze your security camera footage you can get a M2 based Coral TPU accelerator card and add that to your system too!

Extra Serial ports
You can get M2 cards with extra serial ports on there.

And well, anything M2 form factor based really, with the bifurcation card each of these gets their own Gen4 x4 lanes so there is lots of bandwidth available! Especially if you go above and beyond with M2 to PCIe riser cards and cables you could even connect an extra graphics card or other full PCIe card but that goes a bit beyond these articles and I have not tested this specifically.