PC Builds

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Core i7 Skylake PC Build - November 14, 2015

It’s been 4 and a half years since I built my Sandybridge based workstation and it while it isn’t a terrible performer, I do more video and photo editing than I did in the past and wanted a machine with more power. Since Intel finally came out with the Skylake line of processors and the next upgrade won’t come out for a while I decided to do a new build now. In order to keep costs down I reused the case, power supply, storage devices and video card from my previous workstation. This limited my costs to $520 for a new motherboard, processor, and RAM.

Parts List

  • Case – Antec Solo (reused)

  • Power Supply – Corsair 450W (reused)

  • Motherboard – ASRock H170 Pro4

  • Processor – Intel Core i7-6700 (3.4 GHz, Quad-Core, 65W)

  • RAM – 16GB Crucial DDR4 2133

  • SSD – 500GB Samsung 840 EVO (reused), 750GB Crucial (reused)

  • Hard Drive – 2TB Western Digital Green (reused)

  • Video Card – EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB, EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SC 2GB, EVGA Geforce GTX 1060 SC 6GB

  • Optical Drive – Samsung Blu-ray Burner (reused)

  • Anker USB 3.0 Expansion Panel (old case has no USB 3.0 support)

This build is essentially a motherboard, CPU, and RAM swap from the previous system. Since this case is old enough to not support USB 3.0 I decided to add a USB 3.0 expansion panel to one of the front drive bays for convenient access. I also stuck with the stock CPU cooler for this build since they are actually pretty quiet and this CPU generates considerably less heat then the Sandybridge it replaces.

Software

Windows 10 installed perfectly and runs great on this machine, as expected.

Power Usage

  • Idle – 42W

  • 1080i MPEG2 to 720p MP4 H.264 Compression (Freemake Video Converter) – 85W

  • Bluray Ripping (MakeMKV) – 54W

  • MKV Bluray Rip to MKV 1080p Compression (Freemake Video Converter) – 95W

  • Adobe Lightroom RAW to JPG Conversion – 94W

Update-New Graphics Card & CPU Cooler (August, 2016)

After upgrading the graphics card in my gaming PC to a GTX 1060, I rolled the GTX 960 that I took out into my main desktop. This will be a substantial upgrade over my old GTX 750 Ti and be much more suited to my 1440p monitor when performing graphics oriented tasks.

While I had the case open I also installed a much more substantial CPU cooler, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. Intel’s stock cooler is not bad at all, however, when performing intensive video compression I definitely noticed the fan working a lot harder and decided to upgrade to a more capable cooling system. The new cooler has lower pitched fan noise and is quieter overall as well.

Update-New Case (July 2017)

PCs rarely need optical drives anymore, and many new cases forgo the 5.25″ drive bays required for them, which reduces the case size and allows for a much cleaner case layout. My old case was getting long in the tooth and I wanted a more modern setup with USB 3.0 ports built-in to the case so I re-cased this PC build using a Fractal Design Define C case. It’s a few inches smaller in height and depth than the old Antec case while providing tons of room for everything I need. The 3.5″ drive bays are in front of the power supply at the bottom of the case and there are SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard mounting panel. Taken together the case is very well laid out and results in a very clean build.

Since I still use my Blu-ray drive from time to time I needed an external enclosure to mount it in. I went with the Vantec NST-536S3-BK and it works very well. It uses USB 3.0 and is plug and play with Windows 10. I have noticed no difference in performance between using the drive in this enclosure compared to being installed in the PC and plugged straight into the motherboard.

Update-Gaming PC Parts (September 2017)

I like the idea of having a dedicated PC connected to my big television but it is also kind of silly to maintain two high powered PCs in my house at the same time. To simplify things I rolled the key parts of my gaming PC build into my main workstation: the GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card and the Crucial 750GB SSD (my Steam drive). The swap went very smoothly thanks to how robust Steam is at finding games already installed on a drive and I didn’t have to re-download anything.

This arrangement makes the most sense for me since all of my most powerful components are now together in one machine and I have one less Windows box to maintain. I can also take better advantage of my 27″ 1440p monitor’s higher resolution vs my 1080p television, one of the main advantages of PC gaming in the first place.

FreeNAS Server - December 22, 2012

After two hard drives in my Home Theater PC failed this summer, almost resulting in some significant data loss, I decided to move toward a better local backup solution. My previous backup strategy involved syncing hard drives on my HTPC. Although this was a simple and effective solution, it wasn’t the most efficient use of my hard drive space and it doesn’t provide much redundancy. After looking at my options I decided that a FreeNAS Server was the way to go.

Parts List

Hardware

For my server build I not only wanted to keep the cost down, I also wanted it to be as quiet and power efficient as possible. I chose the case because of its noise reduction features in addition to its build quality and 6 hard drive bays. The motherboard offers 8 SATA ports and 4 RAM slots for future expansion. I was planning on using an Intel Celeron processor, but the Pentium G630T is more efficient, generates less heat, and doesn’t cost much more. I considered reusing some of my 2TB Western Digital Green drives from my HTPC, but in the end I decided to get 3TB Red Drives instead. Besides their larger capacity, they are specifically designed for this application as well as offering a better warranty and support from the manufacturer.

Software

FreeNAS has a lot of useful documentation, but I found Engadget’s tutorial to be a better starting point for basic setup. This got me started with basic CIFS sharing that I can access with both my Windows & Linux PCs. I set up my 4 hard drives as a RAID Z2 array which should be able to survive one hard drive failure without affecting performance and two hard drive failures without data loss. After creating the array, I ended up with about 5.5TB of space available for storage. This should be more than enough for the foreseeable future, but I can always get two more hard drives and recreate the array to increase my storage capacity. Another key part of this setup is the recognition that my server will be used for backups only, never as the sole repository of data.

I ran into some issues, however, when I tried to RSYNC from my HTPC to the FreeNAS box. Using a scheduled RSYNC every night is how I plan to backup my media files and is critical to my local backup strategy. After a lot of Googling and experimenting I discovered how to properly setup the permissions on both the FreeNAS server and my HTPC in order to be able to RSYNC properly.

For my purposes I only have a Guest account on the FreeNAS server. This account does not require a password and has full access to all of the files in the share. On the HTPC side I setup Ubuntu to mount the remote share every time it boots by modifying the “/etc/fstab” file with the following line:

//192.168.10.200/Archive /mnt/Server cifs guest,uid=joe,gid=joe 0 0

In this application 192.168.10.200 is the IP Address of the server as permanently assigned by my router. “Archive” is the name of the CIFS share I created on the FreeNAS server. The directory “/mnt/Server” is the local directory on my HTPC that I created to mount the server’s share to. CIFS (Common Internet File System) is the file sharing standard. The next three additions are key to getting the permissions correct: “guest” is the user ID on the FreeNAS server, “uid=joe” designates my user ID on my HTPC, and “gid=joe” designates my group ID on my HTPC. When the server’s share is properly mounted I then had to make sure that the files I planned to share gave full read/write access to both my user and group.

With these set properly I can now RSYNC my media files from my HTPC to the server with the following command:

rsync -avru –delete –progress /local_directory/ /mnt/Server/remote_directory

Conclusion

Now that I have my permissions and RSYNC issues resolved, I am very pleased with my FreeNAS server. With the fan speeds set low it is very quiet and over a week of use it had an average power usage of 48 Watts. File transfer speeds are also pretty good over my newly installed Gigabit network. FreeNAS is a versatile platform and I look forward to learning more about it in the future.

Update – More Hard Drives & RAM (June 2013)

I took advantage of a price drop and bought two additional 3TB WD Red drives and two more sticks of 8GB RAM. This brings my total storage capacity to almost 11TB. In this current configuration the server uses 54 Watts on average.

Update – No More RSYNC

I decided to stop syncing between external drives and the server. It has enough redundancy & reliability that I now use it as the default storage location for all my media files, as well as for backups from my main workstation.

Update – CPU Upgrade, SSD Boot Drive (November 2018)

After playing around with the Plex plugin I decided to upgrade my CPU to help with media transcoding. The old Pentium would choke on some of the higher quality files I have. I also wanted to upgrade while older processors that are compatible with my motherboard are still available. The Core i5 definitely improved the transcoding and doesn’t use much more power than the Pentium.

I also swapped in a spare 120GB SSD I had laying around to replace the USB sticks I had been using for the boot drive. The sticks seem to go bad every couple years and the SSD is much faster, so it made sense to upgrade.

Update - Hard Drive Upgrades & RAM (February 2021)

While my original 3TB hard drives are all still operational, I was gradually running out of space on my server. I decided to upgrade all six drives and double the space on my server by installing six new 6TB Western Digital Red Plus drives, which gives me about 21TB of usable storage (RAID-Z2). It's a big investment, but I need the space and this allows me to use the server for more types of data storage & backup.

Since I have a spare SATA port on my motherboard I was able to upgrade the hard drives using the "Replace Drive" feature in FreeNAS. This method requires you to connect the new drive and then tell FreeNAS to replace one of the existing drives with the new one. FreeNAS then resilvers the new drive (which in this case took about 7 hours per drive) and removes the old one from your data pool. You can then disconnect the old drive and move on to the next. When you have replaced all the drives the pool's size will automatically increase to account for the new drive's larger storage capacity. This method also minimizes the risk of data loss versus replacing a drive outright as you would with a failed drive.

I also upgraded the ram to 32GB.