Marc's Public Blog - Public

After 25 years of running on donated hardware, magic.merlins.org aka marc.merlins.org aka ledtranceguy.org finally migrated to a server I built from scratch, for cheap, and was about 60 times more power efficient than the previous server (Dell Poweredge 2950). The Dell was almost 3 times slower since the hardware dated from 2006, and took more than 20 times more power (including the spinning rust drives).

The more Raspberry Pi specific posts are here:

Using Raspberry Pi5 as a Server With Raid1, Btrfs, and Multiple NVME M2 or Sata Drives

Using a Raspberry Pi 5 (Rpi5) as a Server With Btrfs, Raid1, Serial Console and Dual NVME/SD Card Recovery Boot

Before you see the non professional looking mess of wires I built with 2 rPi5 and reclaimed/recycled drives (I only bought 2 new boot 2TB NVME for boot as I want those flash drives to work a long time), I considered another Dell server I had laying at home, not even sure where from or why. Looking it up, it was a Dell DSS1510 which seems to be a cheaper version of the R430. It's a very professional looking server with redundant power and all, and I did consider it, especially since Dell seems to use capacitors that don't just die years later and take the motherboard down with it.

room for 8 2.5 Sata flash drives plugged into an unknow raid card

this shows the MB similar to R430 but with lots of stuff missing to save money

Research showed it was a system from 2016, an upgrade from my existing 2006 server :) but at the same time, do I really want to "upgrade" again to a server that is almost 10 years old? The colo I'm in (via.net, now nextlevel), nicely asked me if I could use less power for the monthly rate they are giving me, and this server can still peak at 200W. Even if it only takes a bit more than 100w, my double rPi5 solution takes less than 30W, probably between 10 and 20W when idle, and that's for 2 computers, giving better high availability and failover

Good search said:

Single-Core Performance: The Raspberry Pi 5 and the Xeon E5-2620 v3 are remarkably close in single-core speed. The Pi 5's modern ARM architecture allows it to match the much older, higher-power Xeon core for single-threaded tasks. Both significantly outperform the ancient Xeon 5140 cores.

Multi-Core Performance: The Xeon E5-2620 v3 remains the leader due to its 12 threads. The Raspberry Pi 5 is second, still much faster than the dual Xeon 5140 setup.

Power Efficiency: The Raspberry Pi 5 maintains its huge advantage in efficiency, delivering similar single-core performance to the Xeon E5-2620 v3 while using vastly less power.

With 2 rPi5 I'm actually faster than the DSS 1510 for maybe 1/10th of the power, so not a bad deal :)

So here is the end result I built:

2 rPi5 with 32GB pro sdcard that will never be used except for recovery (I don't trust sdcards for long term use)

each system is setup to boot from 2TB NVME, top of the line Samsung 990 Pro. This is the one place where I spent money since drives are almost always the weak link long term

magic, server #1, has a leftover 2TB Sata M2 plugged via a USB3 adapter which gives very high performance, although it's really just a backup device I can failover and boot from if the NVME were to die (and I can do all this remotely)

moremagic, server #2 has 2 1TB Sata drives I had laying around plugged into an M2 Sata controller, allowing 6 drives total (middle of picture below)

The 2 things I had to engineer is using each server as a serial console server for the other one, as explained on my Using a Raspberry Pi 5 (Rpi5) as a Server With Btrfs, Raid1, Serial Console and Dual NVME/SD Card Recovery Boot blog.
The next thing was how to get 5V power for those sata drives. My first solution was just to steal it from the GPIO port:

But I found a dual sata power cable I had laying around and a 3 pin female plug with the right plastic bits to make it almost impossible to plug backwards (which would likely destroy the drives):

this

to replace that

The last relevant bit is to find those hard to find USB-C power supplies that give 5A on 5V (normally it's 3A max), although you could also get a real 5V power supply and feed the rPi through the GPIO pins, but that would bypass some protections. In the end, my very professional setup that did take many days to build and test, looked like this:

oops, forgot to protect the back so it doesn't short when touching metal, duct tape to the rescue

the new setup on top fo the existing poweredge server running for a while as recovery/emergency

And for shits and giggles, still found an original VA Linux server going strong, as a rack spacer :)

Power Cycling

Since the rPi5 sadly doesn't have full firmware support over serial (output only, no input to select the boot menu or do anything, really), expecting any kind of BMC functionality like power cycles is of course over optimistic. Due to this lack, I ended up adding a 3.3V controllable relay activatd power outlet that moremagic can toggle via GPIO (so basically moremagic can power cycle magic if it's truly hosed):

Moremagic is back!

I had magic and moremagic for many years (if you know the significance of those names, you are an ubergeek and you can Email me to brag, it's well deserved). Moremagic however died in Sept 2024, so I was running with no backup server for over a year, which was not good given that I'm not always home and could have suffered serious downtime if magic had died.

Now I'm back with 2 servers, on the same network which is not ideal, but they are both redundant filesystem-wise and capable of taking over one another's duties if one were to die (likely the power supply I assume).

Power Cycling

Moremagic is back!

Further reading