Timothy11

@TheAgnda Thanks, this is exactly the information I was looking for (could not find it anywhere).

@Koxicain Thank you for posting I was looking for approximate price for this board and this was the first useful bit of information that I found.

It is very easy to make a minecraft server, you just download it and install. (https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Setting_up_a_server)

An old i5 should work well, you will probably want at least 4GB of RAM. You can then use a Linux distro for the os if you can find one that you like, but I like using the free windows server hyper-v 2016 as this includes the latest windows storage spaces as well as the hyper-v server. This makes it easy to manage software raid and server installs for things like Plex.

Looks like you are A bit stuck. I would normally suggest a Wi-Fi mesh with each access point connected back to the router with Ethernet (like the unifi access points) Do you have a crawl space on the roof? If so you could get a data line between the roof and the router (ether Ethernet or Ethernet over power) then daisy chain a few access points together with Ethernet just running across the crawl space. You could do the same under the house if you did not get enough signal in the ground floor assuming that you had a crawl space there as well. The only problem with this is that the access points in the roof can get very hot in summer.

How much storage do you want? How many drive redundancy do you want? What to you consider fast enough? If you answer these question we should be able to give you better advise.

The SSD will need to be just for the Storage Pool, but can be used for multiple Storage Spaces on the pool. For example I have three spaces all on the same pool that has 3 3TB HDD and 2 120GB ssd. One space for games (Raid 0), one for important data (Raid 1, this splits across 3 disks fine so you should be able to just add one disk to your pool and run the Optimize drive usage, this will give you 7.5TB of usable space but it you can use parity it will give you 10TB), one for large storage (Raid 5). All of these spaces use the same ssd as a write cache. It is worth noting that you will need two ssd drives for the cache if you are using a redundant storage as the cache for a redundant storage also has to be redundant (raid 1).

To create a Parity (raid 5) Storage space you will have to ... Add a new disk to the Storage Pool Create a new Storage Spaces on the Pool that using Parity Copy the data from the Old Storage Space to the new Storage Space (Will run into issues if the existing space is using too much of the Pool's space as you will need enough space to have the data on both the Old Storage Space and the New Storage Space at the same time). Delete the Old Storage Space. If you do not have enough space to copy the data from the Old Storage Space to the New Storage Space You could back up to a NAS or external drive and then restore from there. Also note that if you are not using a SSD's as a write cache, writing to a Parity Storage space is very slow 30-50 MB/s (With a SATA SSD cache you can get burst write speeds of over 1 GB/s).

If you can not run Ethernet the best alternative is Ethernet over power, you can get a device that plugs into a PowerPoint next to the router and one in your room, you can then plug an Ethernet cable into each of them. This only works if the power points are on the same cuircit but they should be. This is much better than Wi-Fi but not as good as actual Ethernet.

I just download the latest driver version and crossfire is working!!!! Have attached Time Spy result and power draw was at about 790W during the GPU sections. corsair_link_20170922_21_16_52.csv

Should be fine to drop in any GPU as long as you can power it, but do not change the RAM unless you check the compatibility list online and check which slots it should be put in or you will find that it does not post.

I got a reply from Sapphire.

If the house is brick there will be a cavity between the outside wall and the inside will, drop an Ethernet cable down it (this is the best way but not the cheapest or quickest solution)

probably not, just put them in and if one does not show in device manages then go looking at bios settings.

It is plug and play, I did some testing on mine last night before putting my new rx vega in. Your PSU will be fine here is the power consumption of my rig running timespy benchmark. 480x Crossfire TimeSpy.csv