$470 Replace Drobo Unraid Server

Hey all!

I stumbled upon this community randomly while researching drive shucking to expand the capacity of my Drobo 5D which had one remaining slot left. That one slot and my ever growing data hoarding pile has been on my mind for a long while and figured I’d address the issue when the Drobo could no longer handle all the data. I came across someone else talking about having put the $375 Entry Level build together which opened my eyes to how much headroom I could give myself at a really great cost to performance ratio. Over the next 2-3 weeks, I acquired all the parts below and got it all working in beautiful harmony. I ended up opting for a bit more processing power with the X5670s and as a result figured I’d need the active cooling from the Arctic Freezer 12s.

It’s still early days so far but I’ve gotten Plex up and running as well as a number of other plugins and I’m excited to venture out to see what else I can do with my server. So far on the short list of things to do is to look at setting up Nextcloud, Syncthing automation for Sonarr and Radarr running on a seedbox, and OpenVPN for remote access.

Part Model Price
Case Rosewill RSV-L4500 $109.99
Motherboard X8DTH-6F Supermicro Dual LGA1366 $115.00
CPU 2 x Intel Xeon X5670 2.93GHz Six Core $39.95
CPU Heatsink 2 x Arctic Freezer 12 $43.98
RAM 24 GB (6 x 4GB) Nynix PC3 10600R DDR3 ECC $30.00
PSU EVGA 650 GQ, 80+ GOLD 650W $55.55
Case Fans Arctic P12 PWM PST (5 Pack) $27.99
Arctic F8 PWM PST (5 Pack) $22.99
Cables 2 x Mini SAS to 4-SATA Breakout Cable $13.49
2 x StarTech 4X SATA Power Splitter Adapter Cable $11.90
$470.84

Testing outside the case Like you’re supposed to!


It’s been a great experience and I’ve learned a ton so far and am continually learning even more as I get things set up and troubleshoot issues throughout the process. Thanks to everyone in the community for your help so far and I look forward to hanging out and contributing to the community as best I can!

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Solid looking build! Very clean cable management as well. I also had a Drobo before making the transition to an actual server so I know the feeling. What OS are you running on your server currently?

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Thanks! Currently just running Unraid but have recently set up a Ubuntu VM to explore Linux a bit more since that’s relatively unfamiliar territory for me.