New home network / server build?

[chris7797]

Ok so just an FYI about me.  I know just enough about building PC's to get my self in trouble.  When it comes to networking and stuff like that I know almost nothing and my biggest issues is picking motherboards and video cards.

I have gutted a bedroom and am making it a home office and installing a network cabinet with a 48 port switch. I Will have 5 computers connected to it 4 tv's PS4's and so on everything will get internet that way im hoping.  So my server will be my Plex server and storage for all the PC's.  

I have a old NZXT Phantom Case I will be putting it in.

 

The parts I have Picked so far are:

 

Processor = AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (should be able to handle what ever I toss at it.) ( I could go with Intell i59600k same price and can use on board graphics so don't need video card. What MB to get though?)

https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-5-3600/p/N82E16819113569?Item=N82E16819113569

Motherboard = Asus TUF gaming B550-Plus (I picked for the 6 sata ports and the 2.5Gb Lan)

https://www.newegg.com/asus-tuf-gaming-b550-plus/p/N82E16813119313?Item=N82E16813119313

Ram = Corsair 32Gb

https://www.newegg.com/corsair-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820236678?Item=N82E16820236678

Power  Supply = Seasonic Prime PX-850 Platinum (Went with Platinum for Efficiency) 

https://www.newegg.com/seasonic-prime-ultra-platinum-ssr-850pd-850w/p/N82E16817151209?Item=N82E16817151209

Storage = 6 Western Digital Red 6Tb Drives In Raid 6 Will depend on what is the better price at time of purchase.

https://www.newegg.com/red-wd60efax-6tb/p/1Z4-0002-00MY7?Item=1Z4-0002-00MY7

Boot Drive = Will be M.2 Currently undecided but will also use for Plex data directory  might split and use one for boot and one for plex MB can take 2 if I remember correctly.

 

Now for the questions.  

1. Will this Mb work for what i want to use it for?

2. Is the ram the correct speed and type?

3. Is raid 6 the way to go? I like the redundancy of being able to loose 2 disk. I was thinking of getting a external to do backups to and keeping it off site just in case.

4. What Operating system do i use? my plan was to just use windows since i have never used anything else. But I have been watching things on unraid and it sounds good I like that I can just add drives when ever needed and can just do one        at a time of any size but does not sound secure. If I do backups will it matter much? 

5.Speaking of adding hard drives. Only 6 sata ports do i use them for a raid 6 or get some type of card to do it? (here is where i am completely lost?)   if i want to add in the future i know they have sata ports on a m.2 is that worth it? even then i need a port for a SSD to take place of the m.2 i am using? This is very complicated to many options. Ill end it here and see how it goes.

 

I THANK YOU ALL FOR PUTTING UP WITH ME AND FOR ALL THE INFO, HELP AND ADVICE YOU CAN GIVE ME. 

 

 

 

[Loki0111]

These types of questions are messy because it always depends on use case.

 

The hardware is fine for Plex, I'm bump to 64 GB of ram and use a RAMdisk for transcoding cache to preserve the life of your SSD's. It also improves performance slightly but that is really a secondary consideration.

 

For network storage box I'd get a motherboard with at least 2X PCIEx16 and at least an PCIEx8 if possible. Reason for that is to allow a single RAID/HBA card and an additional network adapter if you want 10gbe down the road. I've generally found the X1 slots useless for anything other then 1gbe ethernet adapters.

[chris7797]

Thanks for the information I will look into additional PCIE slots. I will have to look up what a RAMdisk is that is a new one for me.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id go i5 10400 here, then you don't have to worry about video card as it already built in.

 

Don't get wd reds, there smr and suck in raid arrays. Id shuck some 12tb externals, cheaper per tb, and then more room for expansion, and less power. If you want nas rated drives, get ironwolfs or red plus drives.

 

 

Id give unraid a shot for the os.

 

Id don't see a big reason to have a ssd for unraid here, plex really doesn't need much io.

 

 

[Jarsky]

I'd second considering UnRAID, It makes for a fantastic Plex box that's easy to manage. It can install to a USB and runs in memory, so just a small 8GB USB3.0 stick would suffice for installing UnRAID. 

 

You can run Plex in a docker straight in UnRAID which is extremely easy to setup with the Intel iGPU using the linuxserver.io docker container. 

 

Consider using an SSD for your "Docker & VM" path, this will put your Plex metadata (appdata) on the NVMe drive which is a good idea to keep your Plex Server responsive. 

 

As for transcoding, i'd transcode direct to RAM. UnRAID by default has /dev/shm which is a shared memory space which will allocate half your memory to be available. When you create the Plex Docker container, you can map /dev/shm to /transcode; then in Plex set the transcoding path to /transcode. You most certainly don't need 64GB of memory for just a Plex server. 32GB is plenty which will make up to 16GB available to Plex transcoding. Plex has a lot of intelligence and splits the transcodes into chunks. If transcoding gets full, it will discard the oldest chunks first. 

[NickN85]

Aren't those new red drive a stay away at all costs item? Being that the drives may be SMR? Or did WD finally come  clean and publiclly let everyone know what drives are what?