Little update on my colo at UKServers.com, the Asrock B650D4U motherboard died on me, which looks to be a common fault with that model of board after doing some research, there’s a bad revision of that board which has a much higher failure rate. I’ve now swapped the board out to a TUF GAMING B650M-PLUS WIFI, since the board was only £120, and the IPMI on the Asrock wasn’t the best. I can monitor Voltages, Disks and Fans via the OS on the B650M-PLUS, so the IPMI isn’t telling me anything extra, and I have a JetKVM for OOB. To lower power consumption I also swapped out the U.2 drives to WD SN850X, I’ve seen no difference in performance even during large database imports 40GB+.
I also noticed while the main load failed over to pve-2 which is the Minisforum MS-A1, the NVMe drives were really warm (55-60c~) and the CPU was mostly around 79c even at 5% average load, which is way too warm for my liking at only 5% usage. So after fixing PVE-1 I also swapped out PVE-2 to a B650M-PLUS as well and removed the MinisForum.
I really like the MinisForum form factor and design, but I think they should be a bit bigger to allow better cooling for both the CPU and the M.2 slots. MS-S1 is a step in the right direction, but I think for a “homelab” needs to be something between a MS-S1 and MS-A2/01. Maybe a different layout, so it still fits in 1u but their deeper and wider and put the M.2 on the other side perhaps.
Physical Hardware
Server pve-1 (TUF GAMING B650M-PLUS WIFI)
– AMD Ryzen 9 7900 12-Core
– 192GB DDR5
– 2x 4TB WD BLACK SN850X
Server pve-2 (TUF GAMING B650M-PLUS WIFI)
– AMD Ryzen 7 7700 8-Core
– 192GB DDR5
– 2x 1TB WD BLACK SN850X
Server pve-quorum
– Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
– 1GB Memory
– 64GB Amazon Basics A2 Micro SD Card
Mikrotik RB5009 Router/Switch
– 10 SFP+
– 8 Ethernet ports
