Current dell r610 with dual e5504 cpus and 64gb ddr3 I got for free are starting to not cut it and my synology NAS is a slow piece of garbage with terrible UI.
Use Case:
Looking to build an unraid server for storage and transcoding for plex mostly. I also want it to be able to run a windows server VM if I want to for AD/wifi controller/monitoring, and other docker containers like Sonarr, Radarr, torrenting, unrar-ing, etc. I want to use a QSV intel CPU of 8th gen or higher to serve up 5++ 1080p transcodes, and possibly hvec 4k content in the future, but that will probably be direct-played. I hope to have between 2-4 4-8TB drives with one parity for 10-25tb of space. This will be on my home network with a gigabit symmetrical connection and gigE throughout the house, but I could connect it via fiber SFP or 10gigE to my backbone if there became a reason to(so far no reason because I want it all in one box)
I’ve read the OTiS guide, Nas killer 4.0, Anniversery 2.0 guide threads and come up with a parts list.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LRwJXv
CPU: i5-9400 165$
COOLER: ARCTIC Freezer 12 cpu cooler 27$
MOBO: ASUS Prime H310I-PLUS (LGA 1151, 1 pci, 2 ram, m.2 2280, 4x sata 6gb/s) 91$
MEMORY: Patriot Viper Elite 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-2666 Memory 124$
STORAGE: WD_Black SN750 500GB NVMe m.2 SSD 69$
CASE: Fractal Design Node 304 MiniITX case 92$
PSU: Corsair CX450m Semi-modular 70$
unraid 60$
Hitachi HE8 8tb SAS drives 110$ each (x3 = 330)
LSA SAS 9210-8i card 30$
Cable Matters Internal Mini SAS to SAS Cable (SFF-8087 to SFF-8482) 20$
Total=748$ before HDDs, 1078$ after.
The m.2 NVME drive will be used as an unraid cache and to store plex app data, and possibly store a single small VM in the future. My main question is, is this overkill? I’d be really happy if I could get the price down 150-200$ but I don’t want to run into a situation where I decide to add something to my server and find its not powerful enough, at least for the next ~5 years. I’m not going to be gaming on it or anything too intensive but I want it to feel fast(plex buffer times, etc). It almost seems like a celeron 4900 box with DAS would do the job a lot cheaper, but I get into this thought loop where I saw "well if I can get a MUCH better processor for only 50-100$ more, thats pretty worth it to me, maybe I can reduce the cost of the other parts more instead?
Organized questions:
Is this overkill? Where can I reduce the price the most without impacting my requirements?
Is this PSU sized appropriately(wattage) and is this a good value choice? I don’t know if its worth it for gold/plat/titanium PSU rating or if there are deals I can wait for like slickdeals or r/buildapcdeals.
Maybe it would be better value to go server hardware? I could use the 64gb DDR3 ram from my current box but that’s about all I would want to salvage, maybe the PSU if possible(have 2).