Unraid Home NAS Build

Tesioniro · May 9

Budget (including currency): ~£2500 (Excluding Hard drives & GPU )

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Unraid Home NAS to store data, run virtual machines for .Net development, docker images(plex sonarr radarr etc.), host game servers.

Other details

I currently have a 2-bay Synology NAS which has worked fine but storage is getting full and doesn't really support VM's and can't have many people trans-coding on Plex at the same time.

I am looking around to build my own NAS and build something which I can upgrade in the future. I found a case which supports many drives (Phanteks Enthoo Pro II Server Edition) which looks to be perfect for this.
I am however unsure of what kind of specs are for a NAS that runs 24/7, things like do I need ECC ram which I don't think is on DDR5 or should I instead go for DDR4 ECC RAM. Will a CPU air cooler suffice?

I would like to go the pcspecialist and get it build for me I currently selected the following (I already have many hard drives and a GPU which I can upgrade later down the line so those are not included in the budget):

Case Model:
Phanteks Enthoo Pro II Server Edition Closed Panel Full Tower Case - Black
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i9 24-Core Processor i9-14900K (Up to 6.0GHz) 36MB Cache
Motherboard
GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER (LGA1700, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, Wi-Fi 6E)
Memory (RAM)
64GB Corsair VENGEANCE RGB DDR5 6000MHz (2 x 32GB)
1st M.2 SSD Drive
2TB SAMSUNG 990 PRO M.2, PCIe 4.0 NVMe (up to 7450MB/R, 6900MB/W)
2nd M.2 SSD Drive
2TB SAMSUNG 990 PRO M.2, PCIe 4.0 NVMe (up to 7450MB/R, 6900MB/W)
Power Supply
CORSAIR 1200W RMx SHIFT SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling
PCS FrostFlow 200 Series High Performance CPU Cooler

Any help is much appreciated.

RONOTHAN## · May 9

16 minutes ago, Tesioniro said:

do I need ECC ram

It can be a decent idea, though it's not a requirement.

16 minutes ago, Tesioniro said:

which I don't think is on DDR5

It is, unbuffered DDR5 kits aren't super common but do exist. This is the first kit I found on Newegg, though more definitely exist:

https://www.newegg.com/kingston-16gb/p/N82E16820242847

19 minutes ago, Tesioniro said:

run virtual machines for .Net development

If this is your desire, I wouldn't go for a 14900K. The 7950X having a homogeneous architecture means it can play a little nicer with VM workloads, plus it draws 100W less under full load and doesn't have the random crashing issues that the 14900K is currently having. Plus if you do want ECC, getting it to work on AM5 is a lot easier than getting it to work on LGA 1700 (you need one of a handful of W680 boards on LGA 1700, while about half of AM5 boards support it).

26 minutes ago, Tesioniro said:

GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS MASTER (LGA1700, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, Wi-Fi 6E)

This motherboard choice seems a bit odd to me. Is there some feature on this board that you particularly want? It doesn't have many SATA ports on it, so you would need an HBA if you want to do something like 8 drives (given your case choice, I'd hazard a guess you want more than 4 drives), so the only real advantage of it is that it has 10GbE built in, and if you only care about that, getting a cheaper board with an add in card for that would make more sense IMO.

Tesioniro · May 9

24 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If this is your desire, I wouldn't go for a 14900K. The 7950X having a homogeneous architecture means it can play a little nicer with VM workloads, plus it draws 100W less under full load and doesn't have the random crashing issues that the 14900K is currently having. Plus if you do want ECC, getting it to work on AM5 is a lot easier than getting it to work on LGA 1700 (you need one of a handful of W680 boards on LGA 1700, while about half of AM5 boards support it).

I was looking at intel for the Intel® Quick Sync which seems to work better with Plex transcoding than AMD. Plex will be used constantly where as the dev VM's will be used occasionally.

25 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

This motherboard choice seems a bit odd to me. Is there some feature on this board that you particularly want? It doesn't have many SATA ports on it, so you would need an HBA if you want to do something like 8 drives (given your case choice, I'd hazard a guess you want more than 4 drives), so the only real advantage of it is that it has 10GbE built in, and if you only care about that, getting a cheaper board with an add in card for that would make more sense IMO.

As I would like the PC to be build for me as I do not have much knowledge on hardware and building it I am confined to what PCSpecialists (UK PC builder) can offer me and this was one that had 10GB port I guess for the Sata I would just use a sata expansion card
If there are any other builders with better options that would be fine too.

RONOTHAN## · May 9

4 minutes ago, Tesioniro said:

I was looking at intel for the Intel® Quick Sync which seems to work better with Plex transcoding than AMD. Plex will be used constantly where as the dev VM's will be used occasionally.

True, Quick Sync does help with that, though IMO it doesn't make up for the other issues I mentioned with the 14900K (especially the recent crashes that have been showing up). If you need encoding, getting an Arc A310 or even a used Quadro P400 and using it on the AMD system would make more sense.

9 minutes ago, Tesioniro said:

As I would like the PC to be build for me as I do not have much knowledge on hardware and building it I am confined to what PCSpecialists (UK PC builder) can offer me and this was one that had 10GB port I guess for the Sata I would just use a sata expansion card
If there are any other builders with better options that would be fine too.

I would still argue that learning how to build this isn't really that hard, but if you're really not comfortable with that that's fine. I'm not really aware of any other UK PC building shops (granted, I don't live in the UK and wouldn't use them anyway, so it's more out of ignorance than them not existing), so I'll stick with recommendations from them.

Since I really would recommend going AMD for this system, the only board that they have in stock that would work for your workflow is the X670E Creator ProArt as that has their cheaper boards don't have enough PCIe slots for a 10GbE card, an HBA, and two GPUs (one for encoding, one for something else in the future).