Planning new server w/ storage

Psittac · November 3

I'm going to be building a new gaming machine here next year, hoping AMD comes out with a high VRAM RDNA4 card. Anyways this 5950x w/32g ram will be put into a rack mount and my goal is lower power consumption. I have TB and TB of drives but it makes me wince thinking about them running 24/7

I've made a post asking about a lower power server and that's how I came up with this plan.

I need to know where the sweet spot is for HDD's while keeping the total number of drives low. I currently have 10x1TB 6x3TB and 8x4TB none of which are being deployed. I'm pretty sure they're all running raid5 but they've been sitting unused for a few years.

This seagate ironwolf 16TB is on sale but I'm guessing there will be better sales coming up this month? 32TB will be plenty if I do 3x of them in raid5.

Also would an HBA or Raid card be best? What card would you recommend? I'll be able to run this on windows server since it'll be in a closet. Absolute uptime and redundancy are not a huge concern, I can fire up one of my other machines and do a cold storage backup of anything important. This is mostly going to be for media and plex server. The machine will do other thing's but the bulk of the space will be plex.

Electronics Wizardy · November 3

WIth only 3 drives I'd just plug them onto the onboard sata. Should use the least power of the options, and storage spaces in windows is generally fine for parity if setup right, but I'd personally rather go with something like Proxmox as the Hypervisor

Psittac · November 4

I actually spoke with a good friend of mine a while after posting this and he is going to let me use his plex server so I don't need to run my own, just going to run compute and such and turn on my poweredge for when I need to back stuff up.