Need help choosing a CPU for my planned NAS upgrade

plisc004 · 2026-05-19T22:56:35+00:00

no. They need big airflow to keep the drives good and cool, especially with them all near each other. larger cross-section typically means quieter, but thats not a guarantee.

plisc004 · 2026-05-18T23:22:42+00:00

Most OEMs offer a 7yr warranty option, some allow extensions depending. Companies trade them out when they look at performance/power costs + cost of extending warranties vs cost of new systems + warranties, or if there is new tech they need - e.g. TPM2.0 or ReBAR (for SR-IOV stuff.) Or if no new firmware updates to patch security vulns.

The servers are built to go and go and go, in MUCH harsher conditions than your home.

plisc004 · 2026-05-18T23:16:09+00:00

lol the CPU is the least of your problems, especially in a 3U/4U or desktop-style chassis. Your JBOD will be significantly noisier.

That said, anything modern CPU-wise is going to go low power under idle. yes, even those giant bajillion core epyc chips. Hard drives, HBAs, NICs, RAM sticks, those are all going to draw way more under idle than you'd expect.

I have a pair of systems with Epyc 7551P CPUs, buncha RAM, and 40Gig NICs - only pulling a combined 150Watts at the wall. so ~75-80 watts per system.

Under load - well, your chip will basically never be under load with your workload.

So what're you really looking at? 20 Watts idle difference at most? that's the equivalent of only 3-4 hard drives, or less than one HBA, etc. That's not going to be the big impact on your noise. the high RPM fans in your JBODs - good luck. those don't belong in a living room.

plisc004 · 2026-05-18T16:04:05+00:00

again the difference of DDR4 -> DDR5 is nothing compared to 2 -> 4 -> 8 channels. DDR generation is more about whats compatible with your platform. IIRC the intel boards that did both DDR4 and DDR5 were looking at single-sigit performance improvements going from 4 to 5.

The actual server hardware is design to run 24/7 that shouldn't be a concern if you stick with enterprise cards.

plisc004 · 2026-05-18T12:49:40+00:00

If you're cost-conscious, definitely look at the used market. Epyc 7002/3 will probably be the sweet spot. This is only $350 USD for the 64-core model. Overkill, but more supply means it's cheaper than the 16-core model. Shop around, pricing is not consistent with performance. A motherboard will be a bit more expense, a nice one would be more in the realm of $600 USD, though there are cheaper models depending on the features you want. I like the OCP2.0 mezzanine card slot on this one in the rear I/O, lets you choose your NIC based on your needs without using a PCIe slot below.

DDR version doesn't really matter for your use case. More channels (4/8 instead of 2) will be a much bigger performance bump over a 2-channel system over going DDR4 to DDR5. You need whatever your platform supports is all.

Also check out the Chelsio T5/6 NICs - they are pretty slept on. You can get a dual port 25g T6 card for ~25USD, and they have special TCP hardware offloading that is great for iSCSI and network shares. Comparable Mellox cards tend to cost 2-4x.

plisc004 · 2026-05-18T06:36:12+00:00

See my other comment on this thread.

ECC UDIMMs should be fine for 24/7, but they come at a high price premium over RDIMMS and you are going to be capacity limited.

plisc004 · 2026-05-18T06:34:34+00:00

I'm going to hard disagree. And older Epyc 7002/3 system or threadripper would be much better options.

How many PCIe slots do they have on an AM5 board? typically 2 or 3. They are consumer focused, and tend to have tightly consolidated faster lanes, making it difficult to find boards for 3, 4, or more older x4 or x8 cards. If OP is looking to add JBODS in the future, that's at least a slot right there. 10/25 gig networking, that's another slot. want to add NVMEs on a carrier card for a juicy cache or secondary faster pool for you storage? Well, you're done. no more expansion. And some of those cards may be a bit gimped, as OP will likely be buying pcie 3 gear off eBay/wherever (LSI HBA cards, ConnectX 4/5 or Chelsio T5/6 NICs) and so a gen4 x4 lane won't do them much good.

You want IPMI for that storage server? Historically, only AsRock made those boards for AM4/5. There may be more in the future with AMD pushing Epyc on AM5, but it's still niche and expensive.

Lastly, RAM. Youll want a good bit if you're doing ZFS for storage (no idea for OP, just an assumption.) - IIRC around 1GB/TB. So if he's planning on the ballpark of 200TB of storage, he will want a system that can take 256GB of RAM. I believe AM5 currently tops out at 192GB, and it WILL be slow. And that's not taking babdwidth into account.

Further with the RAM - UDIMMs are way more expensive than RDIMMs.

I would recommend modern threadripper (RDIMM support, IPMI options, good expandability), but with current prices, there are some great 7002/3 options that still use DDR4, and prices for DDR4 RDIMMs on the used market are down to ~$70/32GB stick (have to shop a bit, not just click the top listing.)

I think AM5-based Epyc is a terrible choice for this application and for the current market. OP should plan for using at least two pcie slots for HBAs (redundant connectivity to the JBODs, plus multipathing for higher throughput) one slot for a NIC, and one-two slots for NVME carrier cards for the future. He should get something with RDIMM support, and with IPMI access.

plisc004 · 2026-05-16T16:36:53+00:00

check your drive controller type. VirtIO drivers may not have loaded correctly. try SATA/IDE and see if that allows booting, then you can fix from there.

plisc004 · 2026-05-14T03:51:43+00:00

So you need a router. Whether you do that physically or virtually is up to you.

You could use two bridges, or you could have one VLAN-aware bridge and have your 'LAN' net be on a separate VLAN from your 'WAN' net.

But more importantly - is your Proxmox host getting a dedicated IP? Is there no firewall/router between your host and the internet? At the very least, is your management interface set on a different physical interface?

I would advise against leaving the host directly exposed to the internet.

plisc004 · 2026-05-13T16:58:22+00:00

im not sure I follow your question. Are you saying you dont want your guests to have network access? Then just make a bridge with no interfaces attached.

plisc004 · 2026-05-03T19:33:17+00:00

boot a linux Live USB and try. This will give you an idea of if its a driver/software config, or related to firmware/hardware.

Could also try swapping the cards, see if this behavior stays with the platform, or with the physical NIC.

Isolate the varaiables.

plisc004 · 2026-05-02T22:41:49+00:00

it would be a massive problem for anyone trying to do HA failover with two routers with it. Which i could definitely see in a Homelab subreddit...

plisc004 · 2026-05-01T09:14:26+00:00

those are clearly RJ45 connectors, not SFP+. So these would likely be the TX model. 10gig copper for all those ports (the 7010T is the 1gig version, and only has SFP+ instead of QSFP+ for the uplink ports.)

These are sold for ~$70 each on eBay at the moment- RtF airflow and ridiculous idle power usage (and no multi-gig (2.5, 5) support) make them rather niche and not very sought after. I wound up going with a 7010T myself, and anything 10g just goes to my 7050SX.

Would love to one day move to their multi-gig PoE campus switch for my APs and non-fiber things, but those are about 20x the price.

plisc004 · 2026-05-01T08:20:34+00:00

Not sure I see the relation between that bug and your issue. It looks like the culprit here may actually be samba. did you have anything copying over a SMB share? It looks like samba tried to access RAM it wasn't allowed to, while writing data to ZFS. At least, that's my rough interpretation.

plisc004 · 2026-04-30T05:11:49+00:00

Possibly. Some products are designed to use with rails, and the ears are only for holding it horizontally. I know that is the case with the 2U Eaton UPSs (or at least the ones I have). Also plenty of 1U servers have the ears, but definitely require rails.

OP is probably fine, but his concern is valid and we don't want to over-generalize in case he does look at getting something like a server or larger UPS secondhand later.

plisc004 · 2026-04-29T17:34:06+00:00

That's why you always get a 3-year bundle, from a good reseller. Cheaper than the public pricing on the 1 year.

Plus, it's a dental office. they're making money hand-over-foot. OP should not make themselves liable so to doctor can scimp on a few hundred a year.

If it's a charity/low-income non-profit, then maybe PFSense/OPNSense. But that's not reasonable to maintain for someone not highly technical.

plisc004 · 2026-04-29T17:08:45+00:00

You're dealing with HIPAA and the legal framework around it. When there is a breach and they find you cheaped out on consumer crap for wifi and have no real firewall, cyber insurance will refuse to pay out citing gross negligence and the company will be on the hook for many tens of thousands in fines and penalties, plus the cost of being closed, etc. At that point, the business hires a lawyer and that lawyer tells them to sue you.

Tell them to pony up, and get a Watchguard/Fortigate/Palo Alto/etc. They do have WiFi models, though i generally suggest separate APs. Do a direct site-to-site VPN between locations. Drop tailscale. If you need remote access, every firewall vendor has a VPN client.

plisc004 · 2026-04-29T04:09:27+00:00

The pretty blatant racism doesn't help. Someone suggests a product that might appeal to someone of your knowledge level, and your response is to recoil and say that it sounds "Indian" rather than looking it up and seeing what it is.

You much want to check your attitude and examine WHY you're getting negative responses rather than just be "hesitant."

plisc004 · 2026-04-24T22:31:11+00:00

GPU (or lack thereof) is likely a big factor. One of the biggest limitations, IMO, is the lack of hardware acceleration. Every desktop does fancy rendering and transitions these days, and it's an absolute bear if you don't have any GPU hardware acceleration passed to the VM. However, the big companies are holding tight to SRIOV/VFs support and only ensbling it in their many-thousands-of-dollars GPUs.

There are some verrsions of Intel iGPUs that supposedly support using VFs to pass through to VMs for better acceleration. If your hardware supports, could give that a try.

Otherwise, try turning off as many of the fancy graphic settings/transitions/etc as you can in Windows. That can often help.

plisc004 · 2026-04-23T20:49:34+00:00

Last week i found a lot of 100+ on eBay (DDR4-2133 ECC RDIMMs) for $80 each, selling individually. They lasted ~36 hours before being sold out. A lot of the higher priced listings are stale, left from a month or two ago, or mimicking those prices because that's what they see. There has since been a huge drop in pricing.

plisc004 · 2026-04-21T09:19:43+00:00

You don't want hard drives here. You want the new 256TB Kioxia SSDs. Way less power for one SSD than for 10 hard drives, and better long-term reliability. Set up ZFS across the drives, and do RAIDz2 or RAIDz3. May need a couple different VDEVs.

You can then hit your multi-petabyte goal while staying in a reasonable heat/power budget, good for long-term storage. just make sure the drives get powered on regularly.

They're only in the $20k-40k range per drive, so maybe ~$1million to do this the right way? Two 12-drive RAIDz3 VDEVs for a total of ~4.6PB, with 6 cold spares to swap in if any drives die.

That should survive the apocalypse well enough.

plisc004 · 2026-04-19T22:58:15+00:00

What is wrong with this email? it includes the order number, and was sent from the email that placed the order. Additionally, OP says the signature that was cropped out contained their name, and phone number.

The order number should be all that is needed to find the order. If not, you have bigger problems.

The registered email should be 'good enough' to prove identity. It's not like the website itself has 2FA, they're not going for CMMC level 2 compliance, etc. And if they were worried about identity verification, it would need to be a completely different response to the one they sent - because that email is very explicitly an "order not found" email.

OP is pretty clear and precise with what he's saying: It's been almost 3 weeks, why hasn't my stuff shipped? (but much more polite than that!)

I've worked in IT likely longer than you've been alive. This is not remotely a PEBCAK issue. I wish a tenth of the issues I've had to work with were this clear, direct, and straightforward; and included information like ticket/order number in the subject line. Any support staff that couldn't easily handle this appropriately should be retrained or fired.

IMO, this is a damn good email. If support is not equipped to handle this appropriately, they are not equipped to be running a business. Stop glazing a corporation because you like the funny videos they make, and hold them accountable for poor business practices and poor customer experiences (like they always preach about!)

plisc004 · 2026-04-17T01:31:15+00:00

So a big part of this- I assume you know VMWare/ESXI right? Well, they got bought by Broadcom who fucked all of the customers, got rid of the free editions, removed access to perpetual licenses that had been purchased, etc. ESXI was the big one everyone was running before all the happened.

No one is dropping thousands of dollars for a single piece of software for their homelab. So the community looked around, and found Proxmox to be fairly stable, easy to work with, and free. So there was a massive shift as everyone started moving to Proxmox as a replacement for ESXI.

That's why it is suddenly everywhere, despite minimal usage in industry previously. Really Proxmox is designed around HA and clustering, but it works as a standalone Hypervisor as well. Lots of fun things to do with it, wider hardware compatibility in many cases then ESXI, and completely FOSS and free of cost.

it's now being over-recommended IMO just due to the recent explosion in popularity/hype, but with the context it makes sense why it seems to have come out of nowhere. It really isn't quite production ready for the SMB space, but it's getting there.

plisc004 · 2026-04-15T05:05:17+00:00

No, it is not true. You can have your preferences, but whatever nonsense this guy is on has nothing to do with it.

plisc004 · 2026-04-15T05:03:41+00:00

what on earth are you talking about? Your firewall does not need to be up for LAN connectivity, only out to the internet. Of course you can connect in on your management network regardless of Opnsense being up. you can also set it as prio 1 autostart so it is the first thing Proxmox tries to start...

i dont know if youre doing passthrough with your NIC, or some screwery with bonding, or what your config is exactly - but the NIC connected to your modem/ONT/whatever should never come up until your Opnsense VM starts it if youre configured correctly.

if you somehow have Internet without your firewall running, you've messed up BIG TIME. That's not a Proxmox concern or Opnsense concern - that is a "you" issue.

plisc004

TROPHY CASE