Hi all, I am looking for feedback on a first time build from those much wiser in these matters!
Background: I have a lot of older 3.5" HDDs that get retired from various sources and go on to gather dust in a drawer. I would like to bring them back into active service.
The goals of the build are:
Get the old HDDs back online as a NAS, storing films and photos
Run a Windows 10 VM daily driver
Adobe Lightroom photo processing would take place here
Potentially some lightweight gaming down the line too, so IOMMU is a consideration. I currently make do with onboard graphics, so when I say lightweight I mean it!
Would probably look to run the games over Parsec for sake of convenience.
Raspberry Pihole (just to play with docker really)
That's about it! There is no intention to have a plex service running externally and my household is very small, so any streaming/transcoding of the movies would be limited to 1 stream of 720p. Similarly the Windows VM is likely to be inactive when streaming, but still running on standby for general (non gaming) use. I'd envisage 4 of the below 6 cores going to the Windows machine.
Based on my forum/armchair research, I think I've put together something that should suffice for the use cases above and provide headroom for expansion if/when needed.
What do you think, am I setting myself up for any obvious headaches? :
Case: Silverstone ATX GD08B
Fan: 120mm (intake) Arctic P12
Fan: 80mm (exhaust) Arctic F8
Mobo: ASRock Z390 Pro4
CPU: Intel i5 9400
Heatsink: Stock
GPU: TBC (Onboard until Ebay'd)
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2*8GB DDR4 2400 MHz
PSU: Antec EA550G Pro 550 Single rail 12V@45 amp
Flash drive (OS): SanDisk Cruzer Fit 16GB USB 2.0
HDD 1 (Cache & VM SSD): Samsung 860 QVO 1TB
HDD 2: Old Hitachi Deskstar 500GB @ 7200
HDD 3: Old Hitachi Deskstar 500GB @ 7200
HDD 4: Old Western Digital 500GB @ 7200
HDD 5: Old Western Digital 1TB @ 7200
HDD 6 (parity): Old Western Digital 2TB @ 7200
I would expect these old drives to die off so as to make room for denser, more energy efficient ones before I filled them. I figure the PSU should be enough for even the worst case of consumption on the old drives(?).
The board also has a number of M.2 slots and I am wondering if they might be a better cache and/or VM option so as to leave another SATA free(?)
Graphics card suggestions are welcomed, but I will be looking to snipe one off ebay, so that will take some time. Everything else is to be bought new and I will live with onboard GFX until then.
The above spec is coming out at ~£660, which is already a bit over the budget I had initially set for myself. This is partly the reason the graphics card will have to wait until I have everything else up and running. Will the Windows VM still be on the table without one?