unRAID NAS Upgrade Time and Suggested Hardware?

[jrbisk]

With US Black Friday and the general Christmas Shopping Season quickly approaching, I thought it might be a good idea to start looking at my options to replace some of the components in my aging 7 year old unRAID NAS.  I am in Canada, but we do see some pretty decent sales here as well.  Here’s what I’m currently running

750 Watt Antec Power Supply

Rosewill RSV-L4500 chassis

CPU - Intel Core i7 3770

Mobo - P8H77-V LE (6 SATA connectors)

RAM - 4 x 8GB DDR3

2 x IBM M1015 SAS Controllers - one card is using 2 x “SFF-8087 to 4 SATA connectors” cables connect 8 internal SATA drives and the other card is using 2 x “SFF-8087 to SFF-8088” cables to connect to a 2U Supermicro DAS for an additional 12 drives

PCI Express SATA controller (only because I didn’t have enough SATA connections for the 15 internal drives)

 

My main use for the server is to host Plex.  I usually have 3 or 4 people streaming remotely (transcodes) and 1-2 streaming locally to an Apple TV, Shield TV or Roku (usually direct play).  I also run a single Win10 VM that I use when I’m away from home or need to do something that I can’t on my Mac or iPad.  The Rosewill chassis 15 drive bays are all full and I’ve got 5 or so drives in the 12 bay Supermicro DAS.  I would love to be able to add a GPU so that I can do hardware transcoding in Plex.  I think my biggest fear at this time is that either the CPU or motherboard will die and that would require replacing the CPU, motherboard and RAM, so I think that would be what I’m looking to replace in the immediate future since the other components could be replaced as onesie twosie.  Anything that can be done to reduce the number of SATA and SAS controllers would probably be a good idea as well.  I'm considering AMD based on the lower prices, but would also consider Intel.  I'd like to keep my budget around $500 CAD for this project if possible.

[Electronics Wizardy]

What cpu usage do you normally sit at under load?

 

Id look at a used supermicro 24ba 4u case. That way you get more bays. And you can normally get those with a sas expander, so you only need one sas card, and get something like a dual 2011 motherboard for more cpu power.

 

 

[jrbisk]

CPU usage isn't terribly high since the CPU can hardware encode 2 of the streams.  I don't allow transcoding of 4k content by killing a stream with Tautulli.  I'm not planning on changing the chassis since the Rosewill case is suiting me fine at this time.  I'm also trying to conserve power (especially at idle) if at all possible, so I'm not sure if going Xeon is the best direction?

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, jrbisk said:

CPU usage isn't terribly high since the CPU can hardware encode 2 of the streams.  I don't allow transcoding of 4k content by killing a stream with Tautulli.  I'm not planning on changing the chassis since the Rosewill case is suiting me fine at this time.  I'm also trying to conserve power (especially at idle) if at all possible, so I'm not sure if going Xeon is the best direction?

Do you need more transcoding power? Your current cpu seems to be fast enough.

 

I don't see a reason to upgrade from what you have listed. Performance is fine, and that board should still last a while longer.

 

How much do you care about power usage? How much power are you pulling now?

 

Those supermicro cases are nice, and would let you not have to have an external sas exclosure.