New Server

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

This week I finally replaced my eleven-year-old home server. I used the same company, AVA Direct but this time got a custom configuration. I needed a fast computer with a reliable motherboard, but one that was quiet and with hot-swapable drive bays. The configuration is:

Supermicro X11DAi-N motherboard 2 x Intel Xeon 4214 3.2GHz 12-core processors 128GB Kingston Dual-Rank DDR4 ECC SDRAM (8 x 16GB) 960GB Micron 7450 PRO M.2 NVME SSD Fractal Design Define 7 XL case

I am reusing the media drives I had in my old server since I recently replaced them with Western Digital 4TB WD Red NAS drives. The new server is three times faster on my typical workloads, has five times more memory, and the system SSD is eight times larger.

After having a server for 30+ years that made a noticeable noise, this server is almost silent — you have to concentrate to hear it, which is kind of odd. I knew that low-power servers could be made very quiet, but I didn't think this was possible for large servers, but obviously it is. We will have to get used to it.

Hopefully this server will last for a decade like the previous one. The server was almost usd $5k but considering many people use it everyday, and it should last a long time, it seemed like a good investment.