Looking for some advice: Out of box or DiY

[JWard]

Hello there,

 

I am looking for some advice, I run a home plex media server on a 5 year old Fujitsu tower server running Windows 8.1 and I am looking at replacing this for 2 main reasons:

 

1. I am running out of space and will need to add drives to it in the future

2. Whilst not overly loud it does make a humming sound and it's just enough to annoy you when trying to sleep at night.

 

In the last 2 months I've also replaced my main PC rig meaning I have some spare components sitting around such as: 

 

i7 6700k

16GB 3200Mhz DDR4

ROG VIII Ranger Z170

NZXT H440 Case

Corsair HX850i (probably overkill for a NAS!) 

 

As far as I know, the only additional things I would need to turn my old rig into a NAS is a new CPU cooler (repurposed my previous cooler) and some new NAS HDD's. I assume using SSD's would be pointless for this type of build. Would adding a 10G network card be beneficial for future proofing? 

 

Whatever choice I go with, I want this new system to last me at least another 5/6 years before needing to upgrade again. I don't have the requirement currently to transcode multiple 4K streams etc however I would like the system to be capable of doing that (say upto 4 streams at once if this is possible?). I also want a system that is quiet and can be left on 24/7. 

 

In terms of what I am looking to do, would I be better going with a DiY solution or would I be better off buying an Off the shelf solution and just adding drives to it. Appreciate any advice given! 

 

 

 

 

[Mophead]

DIY would be the best route imo. 

10Gig nic - yes

 

SSDs - definitely not pointless! I'm a big fan of unraid, and using them as a cache drive is a dream - when you write data to your server, instead of having to dump data on disks directly, you can write to the SSD - resulting in perceived better performance. Unraid will then move the data to the drives over time from the SSD. File paths will remain the same. 

 

If you lookup things like 24 bay hot swap chassis in good ol' Google, you'll find some inspiration. /r/homelab is great also.