Recommendations for rebuilding my FreeNAS server

rakeshdas · March 19, 2016

I have a FreeNAS server that has served me rather well for about 2 years now considering it's weak specs. I put a FreeNAS server in a Dell Inspiron 570 that has a lousy AMD Athlon X2 240, 8GB of non-ecc RAM, and a mismatch of random hard drives that are not in a RAID array. On this server, I store a ton of photos, backups, home videos, movies, TV shows, and music. Also on this server, I have a ton of stuff that is running like transmission, Sonarr, MiniDLNA, Syncthing, and the most used addon, Plex Media Server. I know that this is probably the most cringeworthy or wrong NAS in all of time, but it runs and runs quite stabile and that is what I am the most surprised with.

The most important function of this server is the Plex server, so it would make sense to rebuild the server and buy parts that are geared towards the best performance of the Plex server. I mostly stream 1080p content with a bit of 720p mixed in and I also stream a ton of photos to my TV for slideshows. The only reason that I think the current server hasn't blown up is because don't stream content via Plex to more than one client at a time and 95% of the time, that client is my TV. I was thinking that in terms of the CPU, which is the most important component for Plex from what I know, I need a Intel Xeon E5, maybe a E5-2670. My budget for a CPU is around $100-150, and I don't mind if the CPU is used from EBay or something. What I am most confused about is the motherboard, which one to buy. I would prefer to keep the budget for the motherboard the same as the CPU at about $100-150.

Do you guys have any recommendations as to what I buy to make a decent Plex server?

Aekim · March 19, 2016

In you want to go with freenas and ecc you will not find sth that cheap (perhaps old Server stuff)

Consider sth like unraid 60$ or rockstor / Ubuntu Server (free) so you don't need ecc. With unraid you could use your old hdds, too. Just get a big parity drive (or 2) and sth like a i3 with 8gbs RAM and a cheap mobo (with Intel nic would be best but costs more)