Dark

Absolutely agree.

There is no reason for them to remove the product listings if they don't believe that they were in the wrong to some degree, even if it's CYA. Not that it's really a question at this point, the wrongdoing is blatantly obvious but the outcome in court is not.

Appears Casetify has finally removed the 'inside out' collection from their site, which displays some degree of guilt on their behalf.

Dual Epyc 7601 Multi - 6873 Single - 108 OpenGL - no score (poor quality screen shot over rdp)

You'll almost certainly need to add a GPU, the Aspeed AST2400 BMC provides vga but won't handle much graphically. The processor itself is fine.

which ever DNS you choose, put a pi-hole between you and that provider.

If this is for plex then get a chip that supports quicksync. 6700t / 7700t (8700t when available). ASRock H270M-ITX/ac - $100 7700T - $300 Corsair LPX 3000mhz 16GB kit - $200 (pick whichever ram you want) This would serve Plex much better than an E3 xeon.

Finding an x86 NAS in that price range won't be easy and most likely will need to be sourced from the used market. ARM based appliances are likely to not support smooth transcoding, if any at all.

I don't see how backing up pictures and MP3s are worth $500 in hardware when there are simpler, cheaper, and safer solutions available.

Slim ODD power is plenty for an SSD. It would be wiser to replace the ODD with a slim odd to 2.5" sata drive adapter though.

Compute is no better than what he currently has and it wouldn't be an ideal solution for someone looking at a storage solution. You're limited to 8x 2.5 or 4x 3.5 drives.

R410 and R710 are ancient. He also doesn't want to buy used. The Silver 4108 isn't bad but the base clock is slow (the 6700k offers higher compute capability). Check out the Xeon-D 2100 series chips, may or may not be up your alley. *edit* the passmark score I looked at for the 4108 was referencing a dual socket setup, so I bolded my correction.

First off, what's the use case? (what will the server be handling besides Server 2016)

For roughly 1TB of data, I would recommend Amazon Drive. Pictures are stored for free and 1TB is ~$60/yea. Regarding RAID, you should always consider RAID6 over RAID5 due to the likely chance of losing another disk during a rebuild.

I had that exact NUC model in the past, mounted to the underside of my garage workbench. It handled basic tasks in Windows 10 but it always felt a bit sluggish (even with an SSD), so I would comfortably say that performance with a VM running within Windows will be sub par.

Non-raid SAS cards = HBA (host bus adapter) E5-2687W v2 would be better CPU, but not a comparison for cost. If you have a lot of H265 content then it may be more beneficial to run a more current generation processor with QuickSync support. Dual home cases exist but the premium usually outweighs the benefits (the money would be better spent on 2687w cpus IMO).

Replace the fans in the front of the case with ones that offer much higher CFM (probably going to need something in the 100+ range). Or, just go straight to the solution with 240cfm deltas...but buy ear plugs. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835213001 Doing it with air means it's going to be loud.

Plex or DLNA.

IIRC, using an 'unsupported' storage drive in a Proliant G series server will result in the fans running at full speed. Something about not receiving a proper temperature output from the SAS interface on the drive.

Is the Vega iGPU not supported by the Plex hardware transcoding feature?

And definitely take @Mikensans suggestion to boot ESXI from a USB thumbdrive. No point in losing a disk bay if you don't have to. As for SSD, I've been using them in my cluster for awhile now (2x 1TB 840 Evo, no raid, just two datastores, and an array of 2TB 850 Pros hosted by a QNAP). I haven't noticed any performance issues with the single SSD datastores. ESXi does support unmap and most recent SSDs have decent garbage collection. As for the raid controller, present SSDs in pass-through mode (set them as non-raid if there is no pass-through option) and create an array from spinning disks.

Depends on the server. Some require specific fans for proper operation and some servers won't even power on properly without the correct part.

disable the bond and try the transfer again.

It would get a little convoluted but you could get this: http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-4-m-2-ssd-modules/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SKU Item Qty Unit Price --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SKU-086-01 SQUID PCIe Carrier Board for up to 4 M.2 SSD modules 1 $ 367.38 USD (M.2 key M) (x16 PCIe upstream interface, full size bracket) The follow options are available for the same price: - Low profile PCI Express bracket - x4 and x8 PCI Express upstream interface SKU-086-34 SQUID PCIe Carrier Board for up to 4 M.2 SSD modules 1 $ 465.00 USD (M.2 key M) Gen 3 (x16 PCIe upstream interface, full size bracket) The follow options are available for the same price: - Low profile PCI Express bracket - x8 PCI Express upstream interface And two/three of these: And these:

amfeltec.com is a place to look. Parts like this aren't cheap. http://amfeltec.com/splitters-gpu-oriented/?view=list http://amfeltec.com/products/flexible-x4-pci-express-4-way-splitter/ http://amfeltec.com/products/pcie-expansion-backplane/