INSANE Homelab Storage Server

Consolidating storage for my Home Server NAS setup got a bit crazy. My T620 recently lost the motherboard, so I decided to go with an EPYC 256GB RAM uber flash setup. I build and test this awesome 64 core homelab storage beast that comes with 100GbE networking, 20TB of flash storage, over a Petabyte of hard drives, a GPU, and even a Blu Ray drive. Much Gen 4 NVMe
and SAS goodness in this insane storage server!

STORAGE SERVER BUILD
AMD EPYC CPU

Storage Array also Featured in Video

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Digital Spaceport Website

Chapters
0:00 Homelab Storage Server
2:33 Home Server Use Cases
4:01 AMD EPYC H12SSL-i
6:35 Chassis Teardown
7:07 Silverstone 4U Server Case for Epyc
11:39 4U Server Desktop PSU
17:08 5.25 SSD Dock Cage
23:02 128 PCIe Lane Use Case
27:03 DIY 4U Cooling Fan
30:08 100GbE Home Server
32:44 Racking Silverstone 4U
34:01 100GbE Network Testing iPerf
38:55 Install TrueNAS in Proxmox VM
50:18 Petabyte Homelab
51:56 100 Disk Raid 0 Array Test
56:29 Conclusion

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[ricou]

Excellent. Everything is shown, detailed and measured without hiding anything. Very explicit. Nice configuration for a server. Good job.

[Ottetal]

I love that you include all of your findings/failures when building - It gives great insight to your process. That being said, your issue here is the choise of case. It's simply not adequate for what you're trying to do.

[MikeKirkReloaded]

Hooray for finding a way to make all your smaller SSDs useful - sweet build!

[BlenderRookie]

I have my movie and TV show collection saved on a synology NAS. It has been working strong for 5 plus years and only consumes about 40 watts at idle and 60 in use. I have five 12TB ironwolf HDDs 1 drive parity.

[dorinxtg]

I have such a case. It's a Chenbro OEM case, and you don't have enough space for fans, and the design is basically very bad if you want to use all your drives + some PCIe cards. I would strongly recommend to look for another 4U case

[MarloMitchell]

You are a legend man, you are living my dream :) Good job :)

[aaron]

Have you thought of a small display in that spare area. That way at a glance you can see network info, system temps, drive usage or whatever.
or Adding a fan in there is always good to help get the vid cards the freshest coldest air possible

[videowatcher]

I would love to know what U.2 to PCIe adapter card you are using. I'm glad you used this case because I was considering buying it, but now I know I don't want to use it as it would be too cramped for my liking. I loved this video, thank you!

[norgtube]

It's great that you include all your troubles while building but really, you need a deeper case

[scottywed]

Absolutely awesome. Can't wait to see what comes next.

[svenprangemeier]

Cant wait to see your review on your energy bill... Holy smokes, those are some nice toys. 😉

[deadlymarsupial]

This Silverstone RM41-H08 case is only 446m deep compared with the Antec 4U22EPS650 (sadly discontinued) at 558 mm deep.
Other shortfalls in this case is the waste of front panel space that could have been used for removable drive bays as demonstrated by the Antec.
I have two of these Antec cases now 14+ years old and going strong. The only limitation is the pcie slot width is about 1mm too narrow for usb A sockets in horizontal orientation - but I'm not complaining.
I have my cases loaded with IcyDock removable drive bays (5 x 3.5" in 3x5.25", 2x 2.5" in 1x3.5" & 2 x M.2 in 1 x 3.5" (connected to U.2 interfaces on the mainboard).
Even the IcyDock (5 x 3.5" in 3x5.25") were a tight fit in the Antec case but I would compare specifications nonetheless.

I would be looking at either changing the case (but I'd have to shop around to see what else is available).
I can see how you chose Silverstone - I would have most likely done the same, as two days ago I ordered the Silverstone RM46-502I 4U for a comms server so I can have all the I/O & storage facing forwards as it will basically be a hypervisor running all network services (proxmox, pfsense, ubiquiti controller, pxe server, active directory/dhcp/dns, windows based nas for storagecraft back-ups onto NTFS hot-swap removable drive, etc...)

I went hot-swap on the basis that as a career tech it is only a matter of time before the rather fragile sata interface connector on a drive gets damaged so even in my home lab I choose to negate that risk as much as possible and even without the hotswap bays the drives installed directly still are a tight fit in the Antec. Hot Swap with the backups mean that I can take the back-up drive and very quickly install it into the machine for maximum efficiency restore having the backups installed into the machine being restored. Consequentially I'm locked in with IcyDock.

BTW due to the potential for security issues with virtualization of a firewall, the pfsense is cascaded behind a physical nat gateway.

[yourpcmd]

Buy a Tesla, House, or build a server? Choices.

[MinerNine]

Toss some RTV, foam block, or other material around your caged zip tied fan. It will keep air from vacuuming back around the sides.

Enjoyed watching the build!

-Miner4Nine

[kbranchjr]

wow, just wow, the hard drives alone out match my three NAS & mini cluster sever rack

[nadtz]

I worked with a case very similar to that one with similar hardware (H12ssl-i + 7502) and we had problems with U.2 drives getting pretty hot due to lack of cooling, ended up swapping the chassis for Sliger CX4200a's and some 3d printed parts to stuff a bunch of U.2 and sata drives into them. Still that is one heck of a build, I'd personally do it differently but still a cool video.

[ChrisCebelenski]

The key to a good storage server is balance - you've got a ton of storage here, but it's all over the place in terms of performance and capacity. The first bottleneck is going to be memory - you need a lot of it to do things like caching and tuning. Good start with the network too but you already pointed out the bottlenecks trying to use it. Not insane, except you got a lot of eggs in one basket here - when it fails (not if) then it's going to be a real PITA to come back up. It would be better to break this into two (three?) servers with some redundancy built in (ZFS replication? Ceph? depends) I guess insanity is in the eye of the builder - I wouldn't even blink twice to consider it, but probably not as an all-in-1 solution. Been burned too many times now.

[kamaljamwal]

Wonderful video loved it, could you please share the picture of your front panel connectors how you have connected them as I find the JF1 little confusing?

[guyfeldman]

I got a silverstone rm600 which also comes in a rm61-312 variant that has 12 bays of storage. It’s expensive but maybe close to the case with the other caddies. Dual power supply also makes the case more versatile for an ai server

[mochalatte]

This is by far the most inclusive video about hardware used + TrueNAS inside Proxmox. The speeds are just eye popping (i baraly have a 10Gig switch). I wonder though if Digital Spaceport actually has all of this sweet mini-data-center at HOME?? I wonder the electric bill? the noise?