The Archive Server

Ah, the unsung hero of my home setup yet I’m not sure I’ve not posted on it in over a decade.

For a long time I’ve had a machine for holding backups and files I just don’t need on my laptop or main desktop, and so I called it an ‘archive server’. That means it’s main job is being storage really. For a long time it’s been made from retired desktop parts, but it came to the point where the the current incarnation was using up to 13 year old parts, and I have no real need for new desktop parts, so there was nothing new coming down the line.

Therefore, I decided to get a new CPU, motherboard and RAM combo, and swap those out, and hopefully they’ll last another decade …

What’s going away?

OK, so let’s review what was in there but wont be soon:

Yes, that’s a Sandy Bridge CPU and DDR3 RAM, and also a 3rd party air cooler, which I’ll be re-using. The reason there’s 16GB is because I had four x 4GB sticks, which came out of a couple of different machines a long time ago. That’s still plenty of RAM for what this machine did (and what the future will do) as it’s just running a server OS with no GUI. The motherboard was certainly not a server board - very few 6Gbps SATA ports (x1), and the rest were actually 3Gbps SATA ports. Not terrible, but not great either. It is why I added the PCIe to SATA 6Gbps board.

  • Graphics: On CPU (headless) The 3470 has a built in GPU, and before that I had an A6 ‘APU’ (CPU+GPU) as AMD calls them. The APUs seem to have gone away now outside of consoles, but I still like the idea of not having a discrete graphics card in my archive server, since I think it’ll save some power, and it’s just one less thing to cause trouble. I can’t back any of that up, just my thinking.

‘Headless’ being that this machine has no local monitor and lives on a shelf in a closet. All work on it is done via SSH from somewhere else, and it has no GUI / DE installed.

So what’s new?

I was looking around for a decent value-for-money chip, which would itself impact mobo and RAM selection. As I mentioned, APUs arent a thing any more and AMD only do on-chip graphics in chips which have the ‘G’ moniker, though it seems the 7000 and 9000 series will have more selection, which coincidentally sees a reduction in the Ryzen 3 range.

Anyway, in early 2024 AMD released the GT range, kind of a last hurrah for the 5000 series, and the AM4 platorm, and I’m thankful for that. I chose the slower new GT - the 5500GT, which comes with a Vega GPU for those times when I need to hook it up to a monitor, but also for some transcoding if I need too - I’m not planning to, but you never know.

It certainly has the speed I’d need in a server, but also it has a TPU of 65W - less than the old CPU and so hopefully it’ll draw less power at idle, and yet still be able to ramp up for any workloads that need it.

I’m also keeping the Choten air cooler I bought four years ago since it’s been an efficient and quiet cooler. Mind you, I did have to go into the loft and search through a few boxes to find the AM4 attachment kit! I also used some new thermal paste, which I know is supposed to be re-applied every couple of years, but I just never seem to remember. The 5500GT does come with AMD’s Wraith Stealth cooler, and it has fair reviews, but I think the Choten is better, so I’ll see if I can sell it on.

TeamGroup might not be a super well known name in memory, but over the years I’ve used quite a few of their SD cards in Pi’s and I even used some of their SODIMMs in a cheap old Thinkpad, and I’ve never had an issue. Of course, previous performance is no guarantee of future returns, but for a server I didn’t need massive over clocking, just base speeds and reliable. Let’s see how they get on.

The mobo was probably the second thing I deliberated about most. Whilst to me this machine is a ‘server’, a real server mobo is much more expensive, and other enthusiast mobos are seen to be for gamers. Hence I go this one in ATX format, which has devent power protection and capacitors doesn’t have WiFi, but sadly does have on-board LEDs. You can turn them off in BIOS though. I got the ATX version, as it has a second 16x PCIe slot and one more PCIe 1x port. Also, I find they cool better in my house. I’ve had quite a few ASRock boards, for my builds, or ones I’ve built with friends and they’ve always been solid, despite initially being seen as a budget oriented brand.

The Intel NIC I got for two reasons - as much as the onboard Realtek 2.5Gbps NIC should be fine, I’ve sometimes had the odd issue with them, especially for things like WoL, so I bought the add-in Intel based NIC for that, and in the future if I turn this into a firewall, this may well benefit from the two ports.

  • OS: Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS. OK, this technically wasn’t a change, but I did re-install it as I wanted a clean install after nearly 4 years and I wanted home on it’s own partition again. I still have to be careful since Ubuntu Server on install just takes 100GB of the drive for its partition. Sure, it doesn’t need much more as a server OS, but in my case that meant there was over 350GB just left, so I used that for /home and I can use as a buffer or temp storage for some reason.

What’s staying?

This did actually make a notable difference, especially when doing scrubs on btrfs drives and some of the bigger copies. I’ll be using it in the new machine, though it’s not so important.

These remained unchanged. SMART and btrfs scrubs suggest they’re OK, but I will start looking to swap out the Barracudas; that said, they dont get a lot of hammer really.

This remains unchanged. It’s a big, heavy steel box.

I only recently replaced this at the beginning of 2024 so I’ll be keeping this.

  • Graphics: On CPU (headless)

No change here. Whilst it limits CPU selection, any add in card will add power requirements, and likely some kind of fan nowadays and is simply something else which can go wrong.

In Conclusion

So that’s it. A bit of a shake-up in archive server land, and I just hope the new stuff holds up as well as the old stuff.

One question I had going into this was why not do what I’d done before - upgrade the desktop and move the old parts into the archive server. The desktop is now mostly 5 years old save the GPU which is 1.5 years old, but I just don’t need more power on the desktop at the moment, and in a couple of years when I might feel I do, I wonder if my future is just a MacMini again or just a docked laptop. Who knows, but that was the conclusion I hit after thunking a lot on it.