New Unraid/Plex/Sonarr/Radarr Build suggestions?

Been using a lenovo ts140 for the past few years, but i’m now up to around 20TB of data, and would like to just update my unraid server completely - hitting 100% on the CPU fairly often. There would be a max of 3-4 users streaming at once, and maybe 1-2 transcodes at a time. Hoping to spend around $500 max if possible. Any suggestions?

Probably be good to list the specs of your Lenovo, so folks don’t have to Google it.

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I’m looking to just build a whole new system and give the lenovo to a friend

Currently, it’s a TS140 with an i3-4150 @ 3.50 GHZ, 8GB DDR3 ECC, 120gb SSD Cache, 12TB Parity Drive, and 22TB storage, but 2 of those storage drives are still external as the case doesn’t have the space for any more internal drives

Sounds like a good reason for an upgrade, storing the drives internally is pretty important.

Definitely not ideal, I’d love to be able to shuck these drives finally so I’m open to any suggestions

The unRAID and *arr apps portion takes fairly low compute power to do effectively, if you don’t do any virtualization (VM’s). You’ve been running on 2C4T with your current CPU. That your CPU has hit 100% isn’t itself a problem. CPU’s can run fine at high utilization. But that also means you don’t have any overhead for times of higher utilization or new things.

If you could add 8th/9th gen QuickSync capability to your Plex, that would offload quite a bit of compute need. For example, just adding an HP290 and offloading Plex there might give you the breathing room you need very cheaply. The HP290’s can still be had but take some patience waiting for them to come back in stock.

If you wanted an all in one box, you might look at a socket ll51 motherboard. An i3-9100 cpu could be had for $100. It is a 9th gen 4C4T w/ QuickSync, which would allow native unRAID QuickSync. This would bring you to DDR4 RAM which has been more expensive, but 16gb would be fine for what you’re doing and not too expensive.

Others here will surely chime in to give their input. Hope this provides some help. Good luck finding the right build for you.

Thank you so much! Someone has suggested pairing an HP290 with a NasKiller 4 but I’m not quite sure how that would work.

Yeah, there are multiple ways to achieve goals. No matter what, evaluating your setup and planning a new setup is fun. Take your time. Try to find a solution that gives you upgrade options.

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Thank you for all your help! i’m always open to all options

Did you ever make a build? I was wanting to build basically the same machine for the same price…if you don’t need to buy storage, my build should technically work for you if you want to check it out or JDM put up a new thread showcasing some builds that you might be interested in

Check out the multi tasking nas sample build

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