Is it worth upgrading an existing computer?

[dfal47]

I have available to me at a low price an Hp z420 workstation 

It has the Xeon E5-1620v2

Stock mother board with c602 chipset

8gb ddr3 1066 ram

1tb HDD

600w power supply 

 

I know this unit is more of a work station but I have it available to me and I am currently looking to set up a local PLEX server and nas/ backup type system for home use . I'd like some opinions on if it's worth it to upgrade the existing components or just buy a nas that can handle Plex server duties 

 

Thank you .

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Should work pretty well as a plex server stock, maybe add some drives.

 

How much storage do you need?

 

 

[dfal47]

I think 1tb is fine for now but once I start adding the movie collections I'll go up. I'll likely get a 256gb ssd for boot and day to day stuff and add three 4 tb drives. Mostly it'll be 1080p streams but maybe a 4k once In a while in the future. Do you think it could use more ram or maybe a mid-level graphics card?

[Tinish Maheshwari]

Single 4tb hdd is huge enough for 1080p in future.

[dfal47]

Just now, Tinish Maheshwari said:

Single 4tb hdd is huge enough for 1080p in future.

I have nearly 2 tb of music alot of hires stuff and a huge catalog of CD rips. ( Every payday I go to the used CD store and buy 5-10 new to me CDs).

 

Maybe 12tb is a bit extensive I agree maybe .

[Tinish Maheshwari]

Do you rip CDs for movies or music? CDs size is very less compared to bluray. I rip bluray 1080p around 15-20 gigs. I have hundreds of movies, mostly on bluray. 

I also rip TV shows with 3gigs each episode. 4 4tb drives works for me well enough.

I'm planning on 4k, I might also need to upgrade.

[Windows7ge]

For the core components what you have should be sufficient for what you want to do. If you ever decided to host some VMs or something computational though I'd buy more RAM and maybe something like the E5-2690v1 (can be found for ~cheap).

 

I personally think the LGA2011 platform is still very powerful today even though it's two sockets old now. There's a lot you can still do with it, I wouldn't chuck it for new hardware if you want it to do something server/workstation related.

[dfal47]

Like most of us the upgrade itch was very strong but I think I made some semi lateral moves.

 

I ended up getting an msi rx570 for a good price, which led to 64gb of micron pc3-14900 ecc ram, which lead to an e5-2690-v2 which lead to a ASUS Sabertooth X79 which lead to a new case and a corsair rm850x and all the supporting goodies that come with a case including a Noctua nhsu9 cooler . I ended up with 4, 2tb drives in raid 1 and basically 2 machines . 

 

Im pretty happy with both. The HP will serve as my light duty 3d modeling and backup machine for work. The other will become the media server .

 

Think you everyone