ASRockRack X570D4I-2T, DSM 6.2 Intial Success

[wheats]

Hello everyone!

 

I wanted a Mini-ITX build that had as much Hot Swap as possible. I don't have a lot of room for a rack and I don't really want rackmount equipment besides my networking gear. After two weeks of research I settled on the build below..

 

Chassis

iStarUSA S-917 -  Really this chassis decided the build for me.

• 7 x 5.25" Bays, I wanted to cram as much hot swap in it as I could. It only supports mini-itx so there ya go with the board choice.
• 1 x BPN-DE350HD, Trayless 3 x 5.25" to 5 x 3.5" 12Gb/s HDD Hot-swap Rack. Comes with fan on the cage that is replaceable and had different modes for speed, High, Low and Off. A big plus for me as the case has no fans for intake at the front.
• 2 x BPN-DE250HD, Trayless 2x 5.25" to 3x 3.5" 12Gb/s HDD Hot-swap Rack. Same as above.
• Supports standard ATX PSU
• Note: The chassis comes with only one fan. I changed it to exhaust the hot air out. It's pretty quiet. No complaints so far. May switch it up for a Noctua fan I have lying around somewhere. Very nice build quality IMO. The Door that comes with this chassis is pretty much just a solid blank door with gaps at the top and bottom with filter medium for airflow. I've left it off for now as my drives are idling at 31c at the moment. May throw it on and see how it  Same with the cages. Aluminum built. They feel very solid. I could put it in my living room and it would look only slightly out of place.

 

MotherBoard

ASRockRack X570D4I-2T

• has 2 x RJ45 10GLAN by Intel® X550-AT2 which really was the selling point. I'm waiting for a 10G nic to arrive for my plex box.
• It comes with 8x sata ports via included Oculink cable. I decided not to mess with that and go with an HBA
• IPMI, nice, wasn't a must have but its nice to have.
• In this post by STH they mention the chipset not having a fan on it and it running hot. I will be monitoring those temperatues closely as the chassis I chose doesn't really come with the best airflow.
• Has a 4-Pin ATX power connection. Comes with 24 to 4 Pin adapter.
• Built-in VGA, ASPEED AST2500. Didn't need to get an APU or CPU with an iGPU.
• Note: I did a lot of research on this thing. I had a few major concerns when researching this board:
  • CPU Cooler which was easily addressed. See below.
  • Chipset cooling. I haven't had it up long enough to properly monitor temps. At the moment it is in my garage and the temps here have been 60-75 ish. As stated above I haven't had this for long and might try to 3D print a bracket so I can have a fan blowing directly on the chipset.
  • In my research I found a few people on reddit that had this board. One of them mentioned that he couldn't get it to boot with a standard ATX PSU. He bought one that came with an EPS12V connector. He bought a Silverstone SFX-L 300W. I bought a Seasonic FOCUS GX-650. Mainly to have enough Sata Power for my cages. I worked just fine with the included 24 to 4 pin adapter and the cables weren't too long either.
  • I had some trouble figuring out the System Panel Headers and the USB Headers. I didn't plug in the Power LED cable as its 3 pin connector with a gap between + and ground for some reason. The header has the Power LED connections right next to each other.  Just that and the USB Header cable were left unplugged. Everything else worked fit just fine.
  • The one and only M.2 on this board. "2280, supports PCIe 4.0 x4/SATA3 6.0Gb/s) when use Picasso CPU, only PCIe3.0 x4" That's from the website. I'm not using it currently but might later for the cache drive.
  • Could not find anything about C1E in the Bios or anything about AMD Cool and Quiet which is the AMD equivalent I believe. Xpenolgy booted, installed and has been stable so far. Again, it hasn't been more than a day, but so far so good.
  • Was able to use the NIC, installed it plugged into a 1 gbe port. Tried to get 10G working by using a Brocade transceiver but that didn't work. Did that during my lunch so haven't been able to test. Will go into detail below.

 

CPU

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 - Probably overkill but I wanted something that could unpack my NZBs quicker. It showed up just fine when I SSH'd into the box and did "cat /cpu/procinfo".

 

CPU Cooler

Noctua NH-L9i - If you look at the QVL there's only two listed. I contacted ASRockRack support and was told any LGA 115X cooler should work. The underside bracket is epoxied on to the board so there is no removing it.  A different is mentioned on the STH post about this board as well as another method. This one worked out of the box with only a minor change. I had to use the screws that were used to mount the fan to the heat to mount the actual heatsink. The included hardware was too long. I could've cut them down to length but didn't feel like messing with that. Instead I used those to remount the fan to the heatsink. They're still too long for that but this thing is laying down on its side so it's holding it in place. I will be monitoring temps as I use this.

 

HBA

LSI 9201-16i, SFF-8087 - Came in IT Mode already from Ebay, I think all of them do anyway. No need to mess with anything. I wasn't quite sure if I needed the 16 ports but I didn't want to mess with the Oculink stuff just quite yet. I think I could've gotten away with an 8 port one and used the built in Sata via Oculink. I might test that out later. So far the 9201 has worked perfectly, recognized my drives no problem

 

Kingston Memory KVR26S19S8, these are 8 gig SODIMMS, got two of them, there's a few different slot configurations you can use for the ram I went with A!+B1 I think. The QVL for the board is very short and I didn't want to risk compatibility issues. It isn't ECC but this build is mainly going to be for Plex and I'm not terribly concerned about losing this data.

 

Drives

4 x 14TB WD EasyStores. Shucked.

 

 

Initial Setup: Jun 1.03b & DSM6.2_DS3617xs.  I mainly wanted to make sure it would recognize the 10G nics

 

Played around in the BIOS after initial boot. As stated above I couldn't find anything in the BIOS for C1E or AMD Cool n' Quiet. Wasn't too concerned. All my other hardware showed up just fine. Disabled everything in the boot order besides the USB. I did change other settings but I do not remember them off the top of my head. I did have issues initially getting the thing to boot Xpenology. I had messed around with installing it on some other hardware I had lying around. It showed the "Jun" screen but never got an IP. My initial attempts to boot it didn't work. It didn't recognize the USB as bootable. Keep giving me the same message about not having anything to boot off of. I swapped it out for a different USB drive and redid the steps to make make the USB bootable.

 

One thing to note here. I used the Xpenolgy Tool to do the install. Pretty straight forward. It mentions the Win32DiskImager tool in the steps but doesn't include that specific tool in the Portable Tools section. I downloaded it separately and used it to make the USB for my first test runs. This second time around I used the USB Image Tool that comes with the Xpen Tool. Not quite sure if that was it initial issue. Changed the VID and PID to the new USB ones. I didn't change the mac address because I wasn't able to get that in the BIOS. I'm thinking maybe that or the transceiver I'm using could be why my 10G isn't currently working. I will update on that later when I get a chance to mess with it.

 

Reburnt the img on to my new USB (Oh, I went from a Sandisk one to a PNY. I don't think that really made a difference.)

Changes some more BIOS settings. I don't remember those either. It wasn't much though.

Got the Jun screen again. Went to my PC. Did not see in Synology Assistant but I did see it in my Router. Got the install screen, loaded the image, don't remember which version exactly of DSM 6.2. I can check when I get home tonight.  My drives were recognized. I initially only had 2 of the drives shucked and in there but they worked. Xpenology saw them. I had to SSH in to it and enable SHR because I want to give that a whirl.

 

Made a quick SHR Storage Pool, made a volume. DSM makes it dead simple and I am one happy customer right now!