Thinking of starting out on trying out a homelab/home server build with left over parts

[LelouchviZero]

Budget (including currency): $800-1k USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex, NAS, Minecraft server, self hosted discord bot

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc.): I'm going to be building this with older parts I have laying around what I have so far is mostly my old system that I can work with so it doesn't collect anymore dust, here's the list of parts I have leftover: 

CPU: i5-6600k

Cooler: Hyper 212 Evo

Motherboard: Z-170XP-sli

RAM: Corsair LPX Vengeance DDR4 16GB 3000mhz (4GB x 4)

GPU: GTX 970 or 950 (I have both)
I plan to have two 18TB WD Reds in this system to start off

I am hoping for some advice on what OS I could use for these use cases, and what case I should go for as well. This will be my first time putting together something like this. I will also appreciate any advice for going into this as well!

[filpo]

14 minutes ago, LelouchviZero said:

Budget (including currency): $800-1k USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex, NAS, Minecraft server, self hosted discord bot

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc.): I'm going to be building this with older parts I have laying around what I have so far is mostly my old system that I can work with so it doesn't collect anymore dust, here's the list of parts I have leftover: 

CPU: i5-6600k

Cooler: Hyper 212 Evo

Motherboard: Z-170XP-sli

RAM: Corsair LPX Vengeance DDR4 16GB 3000mhz (4GB x 4)

GPU: GTX 970 or 950 (I have both)
I plan to have two 18TB WD Reds in this system to start off

I am hoping for some advice on what OS I could use for these use cases, and what case I should go for as well. This will be my first time putting together something like this. I will also appreciate any advice for going into this as well!

if your looking for to build a nas try TrueNAS as an os (for gpu it doesn't need to be powerful at all

[will0hlep]

1 hour ago, LelouchviZero said:

Budget (including currency): $800-1k USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex, NAS, Minecraft server, self hosted discord bot

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc.): I'm going to be building this with older parts I have laying around what I have so far is mostly my old system that I can work with so it doesn't collect anymore dust, here's the list of parts I have leftover: 

CPU: i5-6600k

Cooler: Hyper 212 Evo

Motherboard: Z-170XP-sli

RAM: Corsair LPX Vengeance DDR4 16GB 3000mhz (4GB x 4)

GPU: GTX 970 or 950 (I have both)
I plan to have two 18TB WD Reds in this system to start off

I am hoping for some advice on what OS I could use for these use cases, and what case I should go for as well. This will be my first time putting together something like this. I will also appreciate any advice for going into this as well!

The main thing that matters with cases here is lots of HDD mounts.

 

I'd recommend getting several smaller drives instead of 2 large ones if your data is important to you cause that allows you to run more practical raid strategies. I mean if your running them in raid 1, imagine having to move 18TB of information to a new drive when 1 of them breaks. There is a good chance the second drive breaks during the transfer and you lose everything.

Another thing: once you have more than 2 drives your networking will be a bottleneck. I recommend setting up 2.5Gb between you NAS and the devices you want to access it from if your going to be moving data frequently.

[LelouchviZero]

9 hours ago, will0hlep said:

imagine having to move 18TB of information to a new drive when 1 of them breaks. There is a good chance the second drive breaks during the transfer and you lose everything.

I haven't considered that, thank you for the advice! The case I've been looking at is the Fractal Design Define R5 or R6 as it has a lot of hard drive mounts.

 

10 hours ago, filpo said:

if your looking for to build a nas try TrueNAS as an os (for gpu it doesn't need to be powerful at all

I see! When doing my own research on NAS solutions in particular TrueNAS did look like a worthy candidate So I might be going with it.

[SorryBella]

1 hour ago, LelouchviZero said:

I haven't considered that, thank you for the advice! The case I've been looking at is the Fractal Design Define R5 or R6 as it has a lot of hard drive mounts.

That would be my recommendation if you cant find Enthoo Pro 2, because that one would have a better airflow. But yeah, your hardware requires pretty much no upgrade, just choke more HDD and maybe an SSD to host the NAS and to setup Arc caching.