Rebuild of Home NAS/plex Server

[Admiral Breaker]

So I have been thinking about rebuilding my Home server/NAS system. Currently it is an AMD A10-5800K with 20GB of RAM, and 10TB of Storage in windows Storage Space. I was thinking about going FreeNAS and upgrading to a new Ryzen 3 or 5 with Vega. I am looking for recommendations for a build. This is my idea of the rebuild but any ideas would be great. I plan on getting a RAID card or HBA card of some sort so please recommend something that would work with Windows, FreeBSD, and CentOS. 

[Windows7ge]

If you're building a server/NAS I'd recommend server rated components. This includes a server processor, ECC memory, and appropriate motherboard so I don't understand why this sounds like you want a gaming computer with Vega & an M.2 SSD. If you go with FreeNAS and you choose not to use the onboard SATA ports use an HBA like the LSI SAS/SATA 9207-8i. You should never use a RAID controller if you're using FreeNAS. ZFS likes direct access to the drives. Hiding the drives behind a hardware RAID controller can cause issues if something starts going wrong with a disk or just the array itself. You might not know anything is wrong until you reach catastrophic failure.

 

If this is to be a NAS why are you asking for compatibility between three different OS's? You should pick an OS and pick hardware that works with that OS. Cross platform compatibility is always nice but it's never a guarantee.

[Admiral Breaker]

20 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

If you're building a server/NAS I'd recommend server rated components. This includes a server processor, ECC memory, and appropriate motherboard so I don't understand why this sounds like you want a gaming computer with Vega & an M.2 SSD. If you go with FreeNAS and you choose not to use the onboard SATA ports use an HBA like the LSI SAS/SATA 9207-8i. You should never use a RAID controller if you're using FreeNAS. ZFS likes direct access to the drives. Hiding the drives behind a hardware RAID controller can cause issues if something starts going wrong with a disk or just the array itself. You might not know anything is wrong until you reach catastrophic failure.

 

If this is to be a NAS why are you asking for compatibility between three different OS's? You should pick an OS and pick hardware that works with that OS. Cross platform compatibility is always nice but it's never a guarantee.

I had specc'd the build out due to price. Also for energy consumption. I am also not sold on any single Operating system. So I am trying to keep my mind open. I did have a RAID card but it dided. I also have server components, such as a Intel Xeon but I dont have a board that supports ECC and the board that works with the Xeon only has 5 SATA ports. So it limits the number of drives. Again I am still debating and thinking of what I want to do. Thank you for your input.

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, Admiral Breaker said:

I had specc'd the build out due to price. Also for energy consumption. I am also not sold on any single Operating system. So I am trying to keep my mind open. I did have a RAID card but it dided. I also have server components, such as a Intel Xeon but I dont have a board that supports ECC and the board that works with the Xeon only has 5 SATA ports. So it limits the number of drives. Again I am still debating and thinking of what I want to do. Thank you for your input.

If you're open to limited CPU + PCI_e expandability but lots of RAM and SATA expandability in a small form factor you could consider the ASRock C2550D4I or C2750D4I. The C2750D4I loaded with 32GB of RAM, a 10Gbit NIC, & three 3TB WD Red drives drew <60W. The UPS I had could run it for almost an hour before needing to shut it down.

[Admiral Breaker]

On 5/16/2018 at 1:02 PM, Windows7ge said:

If you're open to limited CPU + PCI_e expandability but lots of RAM and SATA expandability in a small form factor you could consider the ASRock C2550D4I or C2750D4I. The C2750D4I loaded with 32GB of RAM, a 10Gbit NIC, & three 3TB WD Red drives drew <60W. The UPS I had could run it for almost an hour before needing to shut it down.

I was thinking about something like that but how is it with Plex encoding? I actually got a message when streaming plex that It could not handle the encoding process due to hardware limitations with my A10. 

[Windows7ge]

25 minutes ago, Admiral Breaker said:

I was thinking about something like that but how is it with Plex encoding? I actually got a message when streaming plex that It could not handle the encoding process due to hardware limitations with my A10. 

I have very little knowledge about encoding and Plex in general. The C2750 is a BGA 8 core CPU with a base frequency of 2.4GHz and a boost of 2.6GHz. As much as I can say is if Plex encoding is a single thread application then you'll need a CPU with a high core clock to encode the video for how much data has to be processed at any given moment. If the encoding can be distributed across 4 or more cores then it might work just fine. I can't say. I still have my old C2750D4I but I don't use plex at all so I don't know how well it'd perform.