Crek

ok when I was in my teens and naturally couldn't afford my tech stuff, or needed a lot of help, I had to turn to my father for help - poor parents when they have to deal with kids' "crazy" ideas - ( yes it means I've grown and may have my own family soon ) and since he was a computer user as well, whenever I asked for help getting a specific something, it always ended up by him asking me "WHY on Earth do u need this" and what infuriated me was having to EXPLAIN why this is good and the other option that costs half of half  as much wasn't good enough and after really trying to carefully listen to my elaborate and proof backed thesis, I was never too keen to listen to him giving me the same old reply which always meant : "why do u want to get something OUT OF THE NORM, look and see what people are getting", and by other people, he meant people who , like him, use a PC for forums, mail ... maybe Solitaire, and since at the time I was the only tech savvy person around, it was hard, same goes for internet, whereas my needs were about 500 times grater than his, where I also used to get this word : MANAGE !!!, look at me ...
 
2 decades ahead and I'm still a PC Enthusiast, and now I buy and build my dad's PCs, and a bit more to my liking ( he got used to using 2 screens so much he can't imagine using a PC without them, not to mention mechanical keyboards, which he must be just about the only non gamer to appreciate because he types seriously fast and in 6 different languages written in 4 different alphabets, qwerty keyboards may be great for English but the rest ... keys usage is just too different, Dvorak also made with only one language in mind ) oh and my internet needs are now about 50 times that of his, ( he uses a lot more now ), except I now got my own ...
 
A friend of the family decided he wanted to get into the digital arena at 73 and since we're in the same field and worked together before, I helped him pick a laptop that would get him what he'd need and a bit more, but teaching him how to use a mouse pad and what most stuff u see in windows was, turned out to be long and hard, it's still happening, and boy is it hard to explain to an elderly person that the escape key is NOT ON THE FREAKIN SCREEN, LOOK DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN, AT THE KEYBOARD ... NO IT'S NOT ON SCREEN, THERE'S A SET OF PRESSABLE KEYS UNDER THE SCREEN ... UNDER THE START MENU ... WHERE U ACTUALLY TYPE ...OK, JUST ABOVE THE NUBERS THERE'S A SET OF KEYS ... NOOOOOO THAT'S THE TASKBAR ...  :angry:  never mind, I'm coming over, DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING, and that's not the worst example, so I find myself having to spend 20 minutes to drive the measly 10 Km to his place and 30 minutes of dogfights to park, to go to his place and find out for example that he finally just found out how to minimize Chrome because his Word document was UNDER IT, but worst of all is that what would take me 10 minutes to explain on the phone takes 3 hours because instead of letting me finish, he has his own theories about it, and that's really the very core of BAD, because I often have to go find out in what digital ditch he landed himself this time, and DON'T get me started on Facebook, having to help with stuff I know is 1 thing, but helping with something I don't know is something else, u see Facebook and I had a divorce about 3 years ago, and boy was it a good riddance ...
 
Still this is all a pleasure because as my own career was taking off, he himself was doing the same for me, only for much more serious matters
 
other random stuff would include being at my friend's computer shop, and some customer walks in inquiring about some small PC for the kids , u know JUST for games,nothing big really, and not more than 300-400 US $, I mean how do u even try telling them what they need, in most cases he ends up telling them that he doesn't have any, so they reply that an other shop down the road has them, and since he's the honest type he'd very much like to explain how wrong that is but the customer being always king, ends with him ending the convo with, "go to the other store and get it, but IF ... I mean WHEN it'll go at 5 frames per minute running even average games, PLEASE DO complain, but NOT TO ME" ... either that or me as a customer try to explain that it costs more, funny how a customer listens to other customers a LOT more than to the person running the shop .
 
as someone really interested in the Image aspect of things, having a TV ( preferably not smart ), to which I hook up a PC is a great thing, for many a thing, not JUST watching movies and shows, so, as I go to some showroom to take a look at some TV sets I see, I ask simple questions really, like does this TV have HDMI 1.3 or lower ? and about 107% of the cases the employee has no idea what u'r talking about but worse, he/she tries to outsmart u in the most ludicrous ways, something like this TV is the very latest tech !!! said in a way to make u feel ashamed to ask more questions because u'r so dumb, this usually pushes me to pester them with more legitimate tech questions, even if irrelevant to me,
- Is this TV DLNA certified ?
- but of course sir, imagine if it weren't
- aha, good could I see the logo on it, or anywhere it's mentioned
and after a bit of time frantically looking for anything that might look like it
- it must be in the manual, but this is really the latest trend in tech
if I had a penny for the number of times a senior officer had to be called ...
 
4K TV, GREAT !, is it HDMI 1.4 or HDMI 2.0 , aka 30 or 60 hz, to which the answer is , u'r living in the past sir, this TV is a 240 hz TV or 900 hz, missing the point, innocently, but finding bigger numbers than the ones u mentioned is always a good selling point
 
it's a bit like having a clerk at a media store who wants to show he's a know it all at u'r expense , normally I ask those for a movie: Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part 2" ( which he hasn't made ... yet ) and let them delve into it for a while at the end of which they tell me they JUST ran out of stock, I do admit once I got a laugh with a clerk who knew

Thanks @leadeater for this more than valuable and welcome info, indeed I wasn't stuck on raid 10 but somehow feel like eventually fixing it is more foreseeable , given that parity is 1 on 1, it may be silly actually.
all 3 machines it will be serving as well as the backup computer are windows 10 indeed so SMB 3, I was considering windows server 2016 and shared samiscool51 on the idea that the OS has just been released and prone to the usual bugs but now that u say it's been doing good with u, that's a good sign, and after all it can only get better
 
I'm now reading about Queue depth and what this dictates in raid scenarios
 
I'll be checking out the raid card u generously suggested, although I do already have a windows server 2012 license for the moment, I'm also looking into tiers,what they are and how they operate, so far I may not go into them because as far as I'm reading, I may not need to, but that may change, one thing I'm sure of however, is that I'll be building me a NAS after all and use Windows Server for OS
 
 
Things on the internet go in all directions, without necessarily a good enough explanation for either
thanks again for all the spot on info, and the great pointers, I certainly did appreciate u sharing a stats of a system setup u've used
now at least I have more focus and can move forwards in research, some things are totally new to me, and for those also thanks for the right track

thanks @scottyseng , a 5KVA UPS is already installed, giving me up to an hour of extra time with the load it has during brownouts, kinda common here, so awareness is pretty much a must, and seems like I'll be building my own NAS , that means total freedom in cooling solutions and yes it opens a lot of doors for me as opposed to modifying a pre-conceived NAS, I have a now storage pc running 5 7200 and 3 10.000 HDDs, so yup, I'm aware of the heat, and I may actually start with seagate 10 Gb drives and now re-assessing raid level that I may use, as for case since I have some space I have a LianLi PC-P80 laying around, 3 140mm fans at the front, surplus Rosewill HDD cases at my friend's also have 120mm fans of their own at their back for every 4 HDDs, that's push-pull for HDDs CPU will be jealous, those will not hold any SSDs anyway so Sata 2 is more than ample speed for each HDD.
 
still have a lot to read but I think I'm good

ok when I was in my teens and naturally couldn't afford my tech stuff, or needed a lot of help, I had to turn to my father for help - poor parents when they have to deal with kids' "crazy" ideas - ( yes it means I've grown and may have my own family soon ) and since he was a computer user as well, whenever I asked for help getting a specific something, it always ended up by him asking me "WHY on Earth do u need this" and what infuriated me was having to EXPLAIN why this is good and the other option that costs half of half  as much wasn't good enough and after really trying to carefully listen to my elaborate and proof backed thesis, I was never too keen to listen to him giving me the same old reply which always meant : "why do u want to get something OUT OF THE NORM, look and see what people are getting", and by other people, he meant people who , like him, use a PC for forums, mail ... maybe Solitaire, and since at the time I was the only tech savvy person around, it was hard, same goes for internet, whereas my needs were about 500 times grater than his, where I also used to get this word : MANAGE !!!, look at me ...
 
2 decades ahead and I'm still a PC Enthusiast, and now I buy and build my dad's PCs, and a bit more to my liking ( he got used to using 2 screens so much he can't imagine using a PC without them, not to mention mechanical keyboards, which he must be just about the only non gamer to appreciate because he types seriously fast and in 6 different languages written in 4 different alphabets, qwerty keyboards may be great for English but the rest ... keys usage is just too different, Dvorak also made with only one language in mind ) oh and my internet needs are now about 50 times that of his, ( he uses a lot more now ), except I now got my own ...
 
A friend of the family decided he wanted to get into the digital arena at 73 and since we're in the same field and worked together before, I helped him pick a laptop that would get him what he'd need and a bit more, but teaching him how to use a mouse pad and what most stuff u see in windows was, turned out to be long and hard, it's still happening, and boy is it hard to explain to an elderly person that the escape key is NOT ON THE FREAKIN SCREEN, LOOK DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN, AT THE KEYBOARD ... NO IT'S NOT ON SCREEN, THERE'S A SET OF PRESSABLE KEYS UNDER THE SCREEN ... UNDER THE START MENU ... WHERE U ACTUALLY TYPE ...OK, JUST ABOVE THE NUBERS THERE'S A SET OF KEYS ... NOOOOOO THAT'S THE TASKBAR ...  :angry:  never mind, I'm coming over, DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING, and that's not the worst example, so I find myself having to spend 20 minutes to drive the measly 10 Km to his place and 30 minutes of dogfights to park, to go to his place and find out for example that he finally just found out how to minimize Chrome because his Word document was UNDER IT, but worst of all is that what would take me 10 minutes to explain on the phone takes 3 hours because instead of letting me finish, he has his own theories about it, and that's really the very core of BAD, because I often have to go find out in what digital ditch he landed himself this time, and DON'T get me started on Facebook, having to help with stuff I know is 1 thing, but helping with something I don't know is something else, u see Facebook and I had a divorce about 3 years ago, and boy was it a good riddance ...
 
Still this is all a pleasure because as my own career was taking off, he himself was doing the same for me, only for much more serious matters
 
other random stuff would include being at my friend's computer shop, and some customer walks in inquiring about some small PC for the kids , u know JUST for games,nothing big really, and not more than 300-400 US $, I mean how do u even try telling them what they need, in most cases he ends up telling them that he doesn't have any, so they reply that an other shop down the road has them, and since he's the honest type he'd very much like to explain how wrong that is but the customer being always king, ends with him ending the convo with, "go to the other store and get it, but IF ... I mean WHEN it'll go at 5 frames per minute running even average games, PLEASE DO complain, but NOT TO ME" ... either that or me as a customer try to explain that it costs more, funny how a customer listens to other customers a LOT more than to the person running the shop .
 
as someone really interested in the Image aspect of things, having a TV ( preferably not smart ), to which I hook up a PC is a great thing, for many a thing, not JUST watching movies and shows, so, as I go to some showroom to take a look at some TV sets I see, I ask simple questions really, like does this TV have HDMI 1.3 or lower ? and about 107% of the cases the employee has no idea what u'r talking about but worse, he/she tries to outsmart u in the most ludicrous ways, something like this TV is the very latest tech !!! said in a way to make u feel ashamed to ask more questions because u'r so dumb, this usually pushes me to pester them with more legitimate tech questions, even if irrelevant to me,
- Is this TV DLNA certified ?
- but of course sir, imagine if it weren't
- aha, good could I see the logo on it, or anywhere it's mentioned
and after a bit of time frantically looking for anything that might look like it
- it must be in the manual, but this is really the latest trend in tech
if I had a penny for the number of times a senior officer had to be called ...
 
4K TV, GREAT !, is it HDMI 1.4 or HDMI 2.0 , aka 30 or 60 hz, to which the answer is , u'r living in the past sir, this TV is a 240 hz TV or 900 hz, missing the point, innocently, but finding bigger numbers than the ones u mentioned is always a good selling point
 
it's a bit like having a clerk at a media store who wants to show he's a know it all at u'r expense , normally I ask those for a movie: Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part 2" ( which he hasn't made ... yet ) and let them delve into it for a while at the end of which they tell me they JUST ran out of stock, I do admit once I got a laugh with a clerk who knew

ok when I was in my teens and naturally couldn't afford my tech stuff, or needed a lot of help, I had to turn to my father for help - poor parents when they have to deal with kids' "crazy" ideas - ( yes it means I've grown and may have my own family soon ) and since he was a computer user as well, whenever I asked for help getting a specific something, it always ended up by him asking me "WHY on Earth do u need this" and what infuriated me was having to EXPLAIN why this is good and the other option that costs half of half  as much wasn't good enough and after really trying to carefully listen to my elaborate and proof backed thesis, I was never too keen to listen to him giving me the same old reply which always meant : "why do u want to get something OUT OF THE NORM, look and see what people are getting", and by other people, he meant people who , like him, use a PC for forums, mail ... maybe Solitaire, and since at the time I was the only tech savvy person around, it was hard, same goes for internet, whereas my needs were about 500 times grater than his, where I also used to get this word : MANAGE !!!, look at me ...
 
2 decades ahead and I'm still a PC Enthusiast, and now I buy and build my dad's PCs, and a bit more to my liking ( he got used to using 2 screens so much he can't imagine using a PC without them, not to mention mechanical keyboards, which he must be just about the only non gamer to appreciate because he types seriously fast and in 6 different languages written in 4 different alphabets, qwerty keyboards may be great for English but the rest ... keys usage is just too different, Dvorak also made with only one language in mind ) oh and my internet needs are now about 50 times that of his, ( he uses a lot more now ), except I now got my own ...
 
A friend of the family decided he wanted to get into the digital arena at 73 and since we're in the same field and worked together before, I helped him pick a laptop that would get him what he'd need and a bit more, but teaching him how to use a mouse pad and what most stuff u see in windows was, turned out to be long and hard, it's still happening, and boy is it hard to explain to an elderly person that the escape key is NOT ON THE FREAKIN SCREEN, LOOK DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN, AT THE KEYBOARD ... NO IT'S NOT ON SCREEN, THERE'S A SET OF PRESSABLE KEYS UNDER THE SCREEN ... UNDER THE START MENU ... WHERE U ACTUALLY TYPE ...OK, JUST ABOVE THE NUBERS THERE'S A SET OF KEYS ... NOOOOOO THAT'S THE TASKBAR ...  :angry:  never mind, I'm coming over, DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING, and that's not the worst example, so I find myself having to spend 20 minutes to drive the measly 10 Km to his place and 30 minutes of dogfights to park, to go to his place and find out for example that he finally just found out how to minimize Chrome because his Word document was UNDER IT, but worst of all is that what would take me 10 minutes to explain on the phone takes 3 hours because instead of letting me finish, he has his own theories about it, and that's really the very core of BAD, because I often have to go find out in what digital ditch he landed himself this time, and DON'T get me started on Facebook, having to help with stuff I know is 1 thing, but helping with something I don't know is something else, u see Facebook and I had a divorce about 3 years ago, and boy was it a good riddance ...
 
Still this is all a pleasure because as my own career was taking off, he himself was doing the same for me, only for much more serious matters
 
other random stuff would include being at my friend's computer shop, and some customer walks in inquiring about some small PC for the kids , u know JUST for games,nothing big really, and not more than 300-400 US $, I mean how do u even try telling them what they need, in most cases he ends up telling them that he doesn't have any, so they reply that an other shop down the road has them, and since he's the honest type he'd very much like to explain how wrong that is but the customer being always king, ends with him ending the convo with, "go to the other store and get it, but IF ... I mean WHEN it'll go at 5 frames per minute running even average games, PLEASE DO complain, but NOT TO ME" ... either that or me as a customer try to explain that it costs more, funny how a customer listens to other customers a LOT more than to the person running the shop .
 
as someone really interested in the Image aspect of things, having a TV ( preferably not smart ), to which I hook up a PC is a great thing, for many a thing, not JUST watching movies and shows, so, as I go to some showroom to take a look at some TV sets I see, I ask simple questions really, like does this TV have HDMI 1.3 or lower ? and about 107% of the cases the employee has no idea what u'r talking about but worse, he/she tries to outsmart u in the most ludicrous ways, something like this TV is the very latest tech !!! said in a way to make u feel ashamed to ask more questions because u'r so dumb, this usually pushes me to pester them with more legitimate tech questions, even if irrelevant to me,
- Is this TV DLNA certified ?
- but of course sir, imagine if it weren't
- aha, good could I see the logo on it, or anywhere it's mentioned
and after a bit of time frantically looking for anything that might look like it
- it must be in the manual, but this is really the latest trend in tech
if I had a penny for the number of times a senior officer had to be called ...
 
4K TV, GREAT !, is it HDMI 1.4 or HDMI 2.0 , aka 30 or 60 hz, to which the answer is , u'r living in the past sir, this TV is a 240 hz TV or 900 hz, missing the point, innocently, but finding bigger numbers than the ones u mentioned is always a good selling point
 
it's a bit like having a clerk at a media store who wants to show he's a know it all at u'r expense , normally I ask those for a movie: Mel Brooks' "History of the World Part 2" ( which he hasn't made ... yet ) and let them delve into it for a while at the end of which they tell me they JUST ran out of stock, I do admit once I got a laugh with a clerk who knew

You can't plug in monitors to a second GPU in SLI anyway, the outputs get disabled. As far as m.2 drives go, just unplug all the others when you're installing windows, then plug em back in when you're done with that and set them up - It's pretty good practice to do this when you're installing windows anyway because windows can put that small 300mb boot partition thing on any random drive in your system, screwing you for other applications.

a single 980 can run 2 4k monitors. It wont be a pleasurable experience gaming but for productivity, it'll blow it outa the water! You can game on one 4k monitor (expect around 20-30fps in games on high settings) but I wouldn't really recommend that on a single 980 at 4k. A single 980 can run 3 4k @ 60hz + 1 HDMI + 1 DVI, all at the same time! Possibly more with a MST hub which splits Display port connections turning a single one into 3 (not sure how these work with 4k screens or how they scale at all! lol).
 
If you want to game on a single 4k screen and have a second 4k screen display netflix or whatever, it'll be fine