Researching a plex question that took me to reddit which lead me here… what a great looking site BTW. I was thinking of buying an off the shelf NAS to learn and play with networking but after reading through this site I’m 100% building from scratch!
I’ve built my home system, run linux (still a newb at this somewhat) and write small programs so I know my way around a computer enough to go down the wrong rabbit hole but the networking side of things is new to me. I’m hoping some of you fine folks would be kind enough to answer my questions as I dive deeper into this world!
My vision for what I’d like to learn and build is a system that would allow me to:
- host VMs to run different windows environments for testing
- general storage location for other computers on the network
- PLEX
- a cloud host for photos from my phone (maybe owncloud unless others have a suggestion that would work more securely
Any thoughts on which build would work for this the best?
Lastly, thanks for making a space for people like me to learn and grow from!!!
What’s your budget? So far any build would work for what you’ve described
~$500 but I could always do a little more.
A little more use case info:
- I’m interested in allowing maybe 4 or 5 streams for PLEX.
- I have a 1070 gpu that I can use in the build (I’m hoping that I can run a dedicated gpu to a VM so that I can run more intense programs… possible with a NAS build?)
Direct Streams will take more bandwidth resources than CPU. Assuming you’ve got the bandwidth. And GPU passthrough gets interesting (not in a good way) to work with.
I like to “future-proof” myself against my future needs. So, the 4-5 streams in reality is only going to be 2 or maybe 3 streams (depending on how on configure the users) for now.
For the passthrough, I’ve been researching it for my desktop and it seems fairly straight forward (lol, as all things do on paper but in reality the mountain to climb becomes larger when applying it!)… so, I was hoping that doing it on a NAS would be similar in process. But it sounds like you’re saying there is a chance 
“future-proof” is meaningless in this context (or lack of). You’ve not provided any details that so far require more than a NK 1.0. But should you want something newer look at the 2011 based systems. I run nothing newer than 1155/1156 and have no problems running 20ish dockers in addition to several VMs (per system).
hahaha yeah “future-proof” really just means I want the fastest/best-est/most exciting because I have grand ideas… but in reality my needs are simple and may never grow beyond what they are today. That was more tongue in cheek :o)
And wow! The NK 1.0 is that tough? As I say I’m new to this but I thought the builds worked from 1-4 based on newer things being added. I did see that NK 4 is released and was just going to go for it as I thought it was the newest one.
BTW, thanks for helping me take my first steps into learning and understanding all aspects of server builds!