whipdancer

Is it slots 0 & 1 or 0 & 7?

If you have a 3D printer - this is what I'm finishing up. (1) 3d print your own NAS with 24 hard drives - YouTube Here is a video from the Art of Server - a well regarded seller on Ebay for correctly flashed controller cards - where he talks about a JBOD SAS expander setup.

I forgot about the magnets. May see about getting them if any in this stack are unusable.

A single full format on Win10/11 qualifies as a secure erase. A single, full pre-clear cycle I believe would accomplish the same. There are several other methods that I've read about for securely erasing (this assumes the drive works and will spin up, obviously). According to mil/dod specs that previously required a multi-step days long process, securely erasing is no longer the onerous task it once was (as evidenced by a Win10/11 full format now qualifying). After that, I normally print out a smart test for each drive and sell them as is for cheap. If the drive will not spin up, I will drill holes through the case/platters and drop it off for recycling. I just started on my stack of old drives.

I had to do a password reset also. No issues once that was completed.

Ditto.

Don't know if you still have an issue, but I just used bitwarden to set mine up with no issues.

I don't consider mine a general issue either. It is my anecdotal experience. I have had far more issues with shucked drives than internals and now externals no longer hold a distinct price advantage. I have neither the hours nor the $$ to tie up dealing with them. Since the price of externals has risen quite a bit relative to the price of internals in the last 2 years, it no longer makes $$ sense for me to shuck externals. When I could buy 3 externals for the price of 2 internals - I was willing to take that exchange. For the sizes I'm after, it's now closer to a 5 to 4 ratio if I'm buying new drives (I haven't ever bought 4 drives at 1 time). It goes to about 2 (externals) to 3 (internals) when I consider used enterprise drives. I may only get a 1 year warranty but I get almost no questions asked during that year (and the 2 year warranty of externals only holds if I keep each shell for each drive because both sets of S/N's have to match up). Luckily, the only used drive I had to return failed during the preclear test. Also, the warranty experience with WD for internal drive vs. external drive has been night and day. A 14TB Red Pro showed a smart error for reallocated sector count. I emailed WD, and they issued an RMA, and gave me the option of handling shipping on my own or I could pay for and print a label through them - 3-day UPS was $5.43 - far cheaper than had I gone to my local UPSStore.

I don't think it's complaining the drives aren't fast enough. I'm streaming 4k UHD from lots of different drives. The drives are not the problem.

They are all white label WD Red equivalents with 3 being helium filled versions. 3x 8TB drives, at different dates and power on hour intervals, would just show as unavailable or errored and would cause the array to report the drive as unusable. I would run various checks and nothing would show up as wrong. I'd put it back in and it would rebuild the emulated (missing contents) data on the drive (since I would usually wipe it in the process of testing). But 2 months or 6 months later, it would happen again. I gave up and eventually replaced each of them.

Did you previously verify the drive works?

I frequently buy refurb enterprise drives as well. My server is a mix of shucks, new internals, used enterprise drives. The shucked WD's have had the most failures. The refurbs are all still going (but none more than 3 years old for me, yet). I've had enough issues with shucked drives, that unless the price difference is enough to purchase another drive, I won't bother with them anymore.

Can't help with determining if it is new, outside of doing a S/N look up on Seagate's website. FYI, I no longer shop with Newegg unless I'm willing to lose the amount of money involved. I'd rather buy a refurb drive from a reputable seller (and know what I'm getting) than deal with Newegg's whim on whether they are going to believe me when I say the item I received is not the item I ordered.

The 8 drive cards are relatively inexpensive. I watched ebay prices for over a year to get a 16 drive card and spent $320 on it. The only ones cheaper shipped from China and I don't have any way to verify I'm getting a quality card. So, I paid more (I think about $50 more) to get one from The Art of Server (whose reputation is stellar).

It works fine for me.

I've been running a B450 based Unraid system since the board came out. No issues. Did you do any research on using Ryzen as a platform for a Win VM on Unraid?

This is exactly what I do. I have a GPU capable of transcoding, but it's not of acceptable quality to me for 4K/UHD material.

Do you realize this isn't a 1 + 1 = 2 scenario? The guide even specifically states "very roughly speaking". Don't count on getting 2 4k transcodes from the i7-12700K, unless you've already gotten confirmation of it consistently being able to handle 2 streams from other users. Your best bet for 4K transcoding multiple streams is currently GPU based processing. Here are several discussions on 4K transcoding in Plex. Not in combination with iGPU that I know of. That completely depends on the network between your server and the client (my money is on no, because every streaming services compresses their streams as much as possible). Here are several discussions on remote streaming in Plex. In theory it won't make a difference to your CPU. Yes, it can be effective in transcoding. Yes, it can help with transcoding. The real answer is, it depends. Here's are some discussions on transcoding in Plex.

Direct streams are completely client dependent. Plex won't direct stream to a client that can't natively handle the stream. Getting 3 direct streams is more a question of bandwidth than anything else, but assuming you can handle 3 direct streams inside your network, then you should be able to outside your network (assuming there is not bottleneck once you hit the wlan). Transcoding 4k to anything requires lots of horsepower. You might want to read up on transcoding. Here's is Nvidia's support matrix. Here's one site's GPU recommendations. The one I like the most is the epalmsoft matrix.

I listed my stuff on craigslist and facebook market place. If you don't mind possibly piece-meal-ing it out (which I also considered) you can check out hardware reddit sub.

Actually, you haven't statistically proven anything. You've provided plenty of anecdotal evidence of your experience. Those are not the same thing.

No, it really shouldn't be. The premise of the OS is to protect your data. Turning off this behavior turns off the ability of the system to know to check if the data is protected. You don't have proof. You have anecdotes about how your system behaves. That is not the same thing as proof that parity checks are not necessary.

I have a Seagate Exos X14 and X16 on an Dell HBAs. No issues.

You are overlooking that fact that the only way to know if there was an error caused by the unclean shutdown, is to run the parity check. If you do not run the parity check, you are guessing. I live in a place that has power blips multiple times per week. My server lives on an UPS. I don't have unclean shutdown very often because the UPS handles the power blips for me. You're trying to fix the symptom and are ignoring the problem. Literally every person who has responded to you is saying the same thing. But you don't have to listen to anyone else - its your system, so do what you want to it.

I'm using 2 WD Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB that I bought used. Been in my server for over a year, ran 3x preclear on them. No issues. The only reason my newer purchases aren't more of those is because retail prices on those same sizes have come way down in recent months. I picked up my first 18TB for 280ish and a 14TB for 210 this past week.