PC Sherdog PC Build/Buy Thread, v6: My Power Supply Burned Down My House

[KaNesDeath]

@KaNesDeath I think I recall you buying a similar SSD last year with the same specs, Mick mentioned that it uses the same components as the P41SSD but from a different brand? Are you experiencing any of the same issues? I think you'd be fine but just wanted to check, seems like this is pure a SK Hynix issue. I haven't seen reports from the other drive the Solidigm P44 which has the same components to have any problems.

Thanks for the heads up. Ive been using the 2TB P44 since July of last year with no problems.

Sorry to hear about your misfortune : (

 

[maximus__]

The drive might be going bad. You should download HWInfo and see what the sensors indicate for it. Sectors could be "bad". Signs of imminent drive failure. You could also run a Diskcheck.

Alternatively, sometimes, the SATA port you use to connect to the drive might be going bad. You can try just connecting the drive to another SATA port on the motherboard assuming there is one. The SATA cable itself is another potential culprit. They are cheap to order to test that potential point of failure out.

I tried about 2 years to fix it and ended up giving up. It's still functioning, but I am limited to about 200gig on my c drive. I might play around with it and see what I can fix. Looking in it's filthy, so it might just need a clean.

 

[Slobodan]

Thanks for the heads up. Ive been using the 2TB P44 since July of last year with no problems.

Sorry to hear about your misfortune : (

Yeah looks like it's only SK Hynix that has the issue, could be a bad batch I dunno but won't be taking any more chances. Got it from Amazon and they accepted it for a return so I'll be going with the WD SN850X for my boot drive.

 

[val_lixembeau]

Anybody here have experience building a home server for NAS/media serving? I've been looking into different options and hoping for a sanity check: it seems to me that getting a refurbished Dell PowerEdge R730XD is a better option than trying to build something from consumer parts. Compared to a consumer option it'll have better redundancy (ECC, dual PSU, drives on sleds), cheaper repairs, remote access, more cores for containers/vms, more memory, faster SAS hard drives, and can still be equipped with an NVMe drive for L2ARC and a GPU for video encoding. Am I missing something here, or is refurbished enterprise gear really the way to go?

It depends what your priorities are.

I've been running machines in the basement for Plex and Seafile (ie: self-hosted cloud storage) for a decade-ish.

Personally, I would go for more, cheap machines and faster modern CPUs than single, super reliable machines. If you are serving media I think you benefit more from CPU because you will likely be transcoding. I've never been able to get GPU-assisted video encoding to work reliably in Linux.

Then instead of setting up RAID I prefer just doing backups to a whole separate machine. I think this takes some heat out of the chassis and protects me against bad OS updates more which to me are a bigger risk.

 

[Slobodan]

Who fried their Power Supply?



I put in the new SSD, and everything was fine then I decided to swap out a case fan with this new one I got from Thermalright. I forgot to switch off the power supply after taking all the cables out, I installed the new case fan and then put all the cables back in then plugged in the power cable and the RGB lights flashed and turned off, PC wouldn't boot. Tried taking the power cable out, holding the case power button to let it cycle the power, didn't work.

Troubleshooted with another power supply and everything turns on do it confirmed my power supply is fucked.

And it was a high end power supply too, what a fuck up by me.

 

[Madmick]

Who fried their Power Supply?

View attachment 1042819

I put in the new SSD, and everything was fine then I decided to swap out a case fan with this new one I got from Thermalright. I forgot to switch off the power supply after taking all the cables out, I installed the new case fan and then put all the cables back in then plugged in the power cable and the RGB lights flashed and turned off, PC wouldn't boot. Tried taking the power cable out, holding the case power button to let it cycle the power, didn't work.

Troubleshooted with another power supply and everything turns on do it confirmed my power supply is fucked.

And it was a high end power supply too, what a fuck up by me.

Holy shit, you have the worst luck. I've left the power supply on so many times doing this, and I've never gotten burned.

 

[Slobodan]

Holy shit, you have the worst luck. I've left the power supply on so many times doing this, and I've never gotten burned.

I should say, it didn't catch fire and I didn't get hurt, it just died and can't supply power any more.

 

[jefferz]

The Xeon E5-2697Av4 is 2016Q2, so definitely aging, but stepping up to a R740 with a Xeon Gold 6136 is still 2017Q3 and gets a lower passmark all-core and only a 6% better single core. I'm not planning on running anything heavy, just file serving, Jellyfin, Pi-hole, and maybe something like ZoneMinder in the future if I get a POE security camera or two. Maybe spin up a Debian to mess around in big-dataset Matlab projects.

Long term data integrity is more the goal. I was thinking of using TrueNAS Scale and running RAID-Z2, which means 8+ drives to hit my minimum storage target of 40TB, assuming 8TB 12Gbps SAS drives. I'm planning on ripping all my media -- including 4k disks which can be 50GB a piece -- and, as I understand it, once a zfs pool has been setup you can't add more drives after the fact so I've got to go big right out of the gate if I want to be using this setup for another 5+ years.

Assuming I get something that'll run me a decade I don't mind spending $2000 (ammatorizes to like $20 a month). An i5-12600k build with a rackmount case and resertified 12TB sata drives is still going to run ~$2300, with none of the redundancy or remote management tools. The R730 would be ~$2200 with room to go expand from 128 to 256 GB of memory or add a P4/P40/Quadro P4000 if cpu transcoding didn't cut it (should be fine, passmark is 20k for a single xeons and only ever one stream).

Wendell just released a video testing a dual socket 2011 E5-2660 server.

 

[JBSchroeds]

Wendell just released a video testing a dual socket 2011 E5-2660 server.

Interesting video, but I don't think it's all that applicable to the type of setup I'm looking at. Those Kioxia SSDs are SAS4 and are like $600 a pop at the low end and $1500 for anything with capacity, so it's also not really comparable to what an $80 SAS3 HDD will do. I also looked up the stats on the various CPUs he mentioned throughout the video and they're all significantly slower than the E5-2697A v4, Gold 6148, or EPYC 7371 in the R730XD/R740XD/R7425 systems I've been researching.

But I do appreciate the continued information. I've priced out my various options among the three PowerEdge versions compared to using my current 3600G or doing a build with a 7700 (non X). As far as cost goes, 3600G < R730XD < 7700 < R7425 < R740XD going from ~$900 at the low and ~$2,250 at the high (not including bulk storage drives, which is another $500-1,000 depending on count/capacity/type). I find the R7425 with EPYC 7371 quite appealing (should idle around 150W compared to 200W for the Xeons), but the place I've been doing my configurations at (newserverlife) doesn't list the R7425 LFF chassis on their configurator even though they are cross-compatible with the R740XD and are listed in Dell's own documentation. I might have to shoot them an e-mail and see if it's a custom configuration they could do for a nominal labor upcharge.

 

[Slobodan]

Holy shit, you have the worst luck. I've left the power supply on so many times doing this, and I've never gotten burned.

Wanna talk about luck, going through some old stuff, I find my old Galaxy S9 that I put away in 2019. Swollen battery! Fuck knows when that happened.

 

[avenue94]

If anyone is curious on what PC OEMs pay for components versus the average Joe Schmo, a fairly recent Dell roadmap leaked.

 

[king hippo]

built a PC in 2016 with watercooling and everything. never maintained it after almost 8 years and in it's last year, the res developed a crack and had to constantly refill it with water every week cause of the leak. never took it apart to clean the cpu block or give it new tubing or anything lol.

 

[JBSchroeds]

The computer I built my father ~10 years ago (FM2 platform) is badly in need of replacing. It worked fine on Win7, but it's runs like crap on Win10 and I doubt it can handle Win11 when 10 goes EOL. He only uses it for e-mail, facebook, and youtube, so I was going to set him up on Linux Mint (he's not tech savvy enough to notice the difference). I priced out a basic build for ~$400 [PCPP] which isn't terrible, but I'm open to alternatives. I also found a mini-pc on amazon from a company called Beelink [LINK] that is of comparable specs that's currently on sale for $260 (EDIT: nope, back up to $330), and if I can save more than a hundred dollars I'll gladly do it -- assuming they're decent.

So, anybody have experience with one of those mobile-chip mini-PCs? Or know of solid sub $400 options? I know there's a lot of refurbished business computers available but I'd rather stick to something new.

 

[Slobodan]

The computer I built my father ~10 years ago (FM2 platform) is badly in need of replacing. It worked fine on Win7, but it's runs like crap on Win10 and I doubt it can handle Win11 when 10 goes EOL. He only uses it for e-mail, facebook, and youtube, so I was going to set him up on Linux Mint (he's not tech savvy enough to notice the difference). I priced out a basic build for ~$400 [PCPP] which isn't terrible, but I'm open to alternatives. I also found a mini-pc on amazon from a company called Beelink [LINK] that is of comparable specs that's currently on sale for $260, and if I can save more than a hundred dollars I'll gladly do it -- assuming they're decent.

So, anybody have experience with one of those mobile-chip mini-PCs? Or know of solid sub $400 options? I know there's a lot of refurbished business computers available but I'd rather stick to something new.

That Beelink system is great for this purpose. That's a damn good deal, I would get it

 

[jefferz]

The computer I built my father ~10 years ago (FM2 platform) is badly in need of replacing. It worked fine on Win7, but it's runs like crap on Win10 and I doubt it can handle Win11 when 10 goes EOL. He only uses it for e-mail, facebook, and youtube, so I was going to set him up on Linux Mint (he's not tech savvy enough to notice the difference). I priced out a basic build for ~$400 [PCPP] which isn't terrible, but I'm open to alternatives. I also found a mini-pc on amazon from a company called Beelink [LINK] that is of comparable specs that's currently on sale for $260 (EDIT: nope, back up to $330), and if I can save more than a hundred dollars I'll gladly do it -- assuming they're decent.

So, anybody have experience with one of those mobile-chip mini-PCs? Or know of solid sub $400 options? I know there's a lot of refurbished business computers available but I'd rather stick to something new.

I know this sounds absurd, but have you considered a Mac Mini?
My parents are tech illiterate, and were always calling me with questions/problems. I ended up getting them Mac products, an iPad and an Air, and I rarely get calls anymore to help them with tech.

 

[jefferz]

New Thermal Paste Applicator Removes All the Guesswork​

Cooler Master introduced a new line of colored paste, the CryoFuze 5. 6 available colors.

 

[JBSchroeds]

I know this sounds absurd, but have you considered a Mac Mini?
My parents are tech illiterate, and were always calling me with questions/problems. I ended up getting them Mac products, an iPad and an Air, and I rarely get calls anymore to help them with tech.

Nope, I had not. I can't stand Apple as a company, but their products are usually pretty good (if overpriced). Unfortunately a Mac Mini starts at $600, 50% more than building a desktop myself and more than double one of those Beelink boxes. The 5500GT in the self-build and the 5560U in the Beelink are similar or better than the M2 in the benchmarks I looked at, so the Apple Tax is definitely at work.

The Beelink SER5 with 5560U can be had for just $230 right now if you've got Prime, so I think I'm going to order one. If my father doesn't like it for whatever reason I can just keep it and use it as an emulation box for the living room. I'd been thinking of upgrading my RetroPi3B+ to a Pi5 but by the time you get the board, active cooler, case, NVMe hat, drive, and 25W wallwort you're staring down $200, and for $30 extra a 5560U absolutely slaughters it (and with none of the Pi jank).

EDIT: yup, just ordered the Beelink.

 

[jefferz]

Nope, I had not. I can't stand Apple as a company, but their products are usually pretty good (if overpriced). Unfortunately a Mac Mini starts at $600, 50% more than building a desktop myself and more than double one of those Beelink boxes. The 5500GT in the self-build and the 5560U in the Beelink are similar or better than the M2 in the benchmarks I looked at, so the Apple Tax is definitely at work.

The Beelink SER5 with 5560U can be had for just $230 right now if you've got Prime, so I think I'm going to order one. If my father doesn't like it for whatever reason I can just keep it and use it as an emulation box for the living room. I'd been thinking of upgrading my RetroPi3B+ to a Pi5 but by the time you get the board, active cooler, case, NVMe hat, drive, and 25W wallwort you're staring down $180, and for $50 extra a 5560U absolutely slaughters it (and with none of the Pi jank).

EDIT: yup, just ordered the Beelink.

Just the base Pi has gotten too expensive. The 4gb is $60.
Their business model has changed. It used to be about getting lost cost computers to the masses, now all they care about is selling units to manufacturers. I believe there's an IPO coming out, or already has.

Unless you need the GPIO header, there are so many more options out there. A popular one is the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 mini with a Sandy Bridge i5 and 8gb of ram for under $50 delivered to your door from ebay.