Purchasing Used Low Power Server Hardware for a DIY OPNsense or Minimal TrueNAS Build

Video Description

If you search for used hardware, often you can find good prices on older hardware that you can repurpose for projects such as a low-power OPNsense or a lightweight TrueNAS build. I found that the Intel Atom C2758 can be purchased at a reasonable price around $100 USD or less depending on the amount of ECC RAM is included, which is not bad considering you can still purchase new C2758 boards between $415-475 USD (and those do not incluce any ECC RAM!). The great thing about this board is that it should use approximately 30-40 Watts (the TDP for the CPU is 25W), has IPMI, ECC RAM, and multiple Gigabit Ethernet interfaces which makes for a great budget friendly, low power server motherboard. Since there is a PCIe 2.0 x8 expansion slot, you should be able to utilize a 10 Gbps NIC if you need extra throughput. I forgot to include a screenshot but with 2 SSDs and 2 hard drives, the system idles around 39-40W. Not as low as some mini PCs but lower than older Xeon and many standard consumer grade boards. Perhaps there are some power saving features I could tweak in the BIOS. In this video, I will do a brief demonstration using the board as an OPNsense system and a TrueNAS replication backup server to show its versitility for basic needs. My ultimate plan for this motherboard is to use it for my TrueNAS replication backup server. Since I'm using slower 3.5" hard disks, this board should perform well enough as a replication target for my bulk storage. The reason I know this will be sufficient is that I'm currently using the ZimaBlade as a simple replication backup, and it is only using a fraction of the CPU. The cores are slower on the C2758, but it has 8 cores instead of 4 so it should be able to handle several tasks in parallel. In addition, I'll be able to utilize a 10G SFP+ NIC to reduce the amount of time needed to perform the replication backups from my primary TrueNAS. After purchasing the board, I found mention of a CPU bug that could cause the system to not turn on unless you solder a resister on some of the TPM pins. Yikes! However, newer revisions of the CPU fix the glitch. On the STH website, I found the stepping revision value of the new CPU revision. Fortunately after removing the heatsink off the CPU, I was able to verify that I had the newer revision board so it should be a stable system! STH reference for the C2000 C0 Stepping Fix: https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-c0-stepping-fixing-the-avr54-bug/ Amazon affiliate links (thanks for the support!): be quiet! 600W SFX PSU: https://amzn.to/3R2cLtS Supermicro A1SRi-2758F motherboard: https://amzn.to/4i6fzBe Tom Lawrence reviewed this board for pfSense several years before I produced this video if you want to see more information about this hardware for use as a firewall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqrQ88hpaJE Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 02:43 Supermicro A1SRi-2758F 07:57 be quiet! SFX 500W PSU 08:42 Completed build 09:54 OPNsense experimentation 12:39 TrueNAS replication server 15:31 Conclusion EP69 Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvdHQkQv8KpwMnKkitmUVTQ/join