Evan Home Storage, Jupiter & Europa Builds

Brief overview of what parts are in Jupiter and Europa

This will just be a quick highlight of what is actually inside these two machines. In Europa’s case, it will be planned specs for the new machine that I will later do a detailed build list on. But for now if you’re looking to replicate some things that I do, read on!

Jupiter

• Server = Synology DS920+ - https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS920+
• Drives = Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Drives, 5400RPM - https://www.scan.co.uk/products/6tb-seagate-ironwolf-st6000vn001-nas-hard-drive-35-hdd-sata-iii-6gb-s-5400rpm-256mb-cache I bought these before Brexit and at the time of writing, Scan UK still do not ship to Ireland. But to avoid custom duties in general if you’re in Ireland, Elara also have these drives - https://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=MME2754941 You also may not need that capacity of drive, it fully depends on your use case for your data. Apart from photos and documents, I also use my NAS as a cold tier for game files so I don’t need to redownload them. But again, you could start small and expand with the Synology expansion unit, just bear in mind what RAID you go with as that will impact your choice of drives

I’m also debating adding an SSD cache to the server, but it depends on how my use case changes. I’m currently researching running Plex and I think a cache where say, frequently played songs are kept in by the NAS, could be handy. Saying that, I’ll wait and see to find the performance, but Synology does have a tool as part of your volume manager that lets you estimate what size of cache you may want. For when the time comes, I’m looking again at Seagate IronWolf, something like this guy may be where I go https://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=MME2754995

Europa

So as I mentioned in a previous post, I want to rebuild this machine into a version two, that’s more purpose built for the task at hand. Part of me always says I should save money where I can on components but other times I think one should spend more to invest in the future, which is probably where I’ll land. It will be consumer parts mostly, the reason I say mostly is that I will most likely be going AMD Ryzen, which unofficially supports ECC memory, which is pretty critical for anything you could be running in the medium to long term. However I also quite like Intel chips for their integrated graphics since it’s one less thing to run in the PCIE slots. But, I think I could just have any generic GPU initially for install of my operating system, then once SSH is up and running, pull that GPU out and throw some other PCIE devices in. While the spec list is not confirmed, this is what I’m thinking of

• CPU = Ryzen 3000 series chip, most likely non-X variant
• Motherboard = B550 ATX motherboard that supports ECC RAM
• RAM = 16-32GB of ECC DDR4 memory
• Storage = NVME boot drive, sata based SSDs most likely in some kind of RAID. Beauty of all this is that it’s very much “it depends” given the machines role
• Power Supply = I have a Corsair 650 watt power supply that’s pretty new, only a few months. So no need for an upgrade there
• Chassis = This is the slightly fun bit where I’m considering a rack mount case. In my future living space, I think since I already have rack mount gear, I could try to find some maybe 3-4U chassis for my primary gaming machine, Europa, then I would mount my UniFi gear as well, maybe install a shelf for other devices. But, we shall see

Like I said before, this list isn’t exactly definitive, there will be another post where I’ll go over the specs I landed on and possibly even the build process. But again the main focus is storage here. Europa I hope will be a nice balance of that and VM experiments, sort of like my sandbox before I move VMs into bare metal cloud.