Lolight

Keep in mind when comparing prices that many Exos drives are being sold without a direct Seagate warranty attached - only warranted by third party sellers. Retailer often omit this important detail. Sometimes they also sell the new-old stock with unknown storage/handling history.

Steve goes to NewEgg:

Also great to see an avalanche of comments, posted within hours of the GamersNexus' video coming out. Lots of commenters mentioning of something similar happening to them or just in general sharing their consistently worsening over the last few years shopping experiences with NewEgg. The common theme: we will NEVER buy anything from them again...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fnXsmXzphI

The issue affects shucked Western Digital drives only. Shucked Seagate drives are not affected.

Depends on the location since the UPS market is very regional. Where are you located?

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/nvme-vs-m2

The linked in your post ASMedia 1064 based card should work:

The 6TB is your biggest drive therefore must be allocated to a parity. Then you have left with a bunch of 2TB drives for data. IMHO, you'd be creating a huge reliability uncertainty since every single drive is a potential failure point. You'll end up with a smallish storage space exposed to a high probability of failure. I think it would be wiser to repurpose the old drives to something else and build up the Unraid server with a couple of new higher capacity disks. Overall, it would be more reliable and cost efficient in the long run.

mid March then?

Getting close to the Stable? Or not quite there yet?

I'm not sure on why you're looking for custom servers or specific NAS hardware. It seems you're interested in just a very basic set of Unraid capabilities. No specialized hardware required.

Since you're already familiar with LibreElec... Get one of the compatible media boxes (cheap), attach to your TV(s) and network with NAS, install Coreelec which is closely related to LibreElec. Then you'll be able to direct play your 4K movies, with a minimum hardware investment and electricity usage. Those media boxes easily play everything, including 4K. Unless you're already geared up to spend tons of money on new hardware that would be capable of accomplishing the exact same thing.

Must be different in the 80 Plus ratings. A 550W Bronze rated PSU will be significantly more inefficient as compared to the 850W Titanium or Platinum rated one.

Get a better quality PSU, from a well-known brand, the very least.

Don't need to look for a specific model. Any of the 80 Plus Titanium rated PSU's (from well-known brands) would be very efficient at low loads.

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-ironwolf-pro-st20000ne000-20tb/p/N82E16822185007 https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-IronWolf-20TB-Internal-Drive/dp/B09MKK1YCK/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=seagate+ironwolf+pro+20tb&qid=1639466144&sr=8-3

You've mentioned that you only have about 25TB of data. Any specific reason for other multiple towers? Getting a cabinet and going vertical sounds quite radical considering your "tame" needs. Sorry, you don't provide much info on that. My only point behind questioning you server chassis choice over a regular tower was based on the apparent mismatch between the stated needs and the proposed solution.

Check if the drive shows up in BIOS. If it doesn't then reconnect it with a different SATA cable and check in BIOS again. If the drive is still not recognized then change a SATA port on the motherboard.

Are you absolutely set on going with a server chassis?

A drive failure every 3-6 months? What's your current setup?

Your current system should work just fine as a file storage/non-transcoding media server. If you plan to do other, more CPU intensive tasks, then you'll need to upgrade to the modern CPU/Motherboard combo.

i doubt you'll see much of real world speed differences in the NAS environment. I think what would be more of interest is a difference in their load/unload cycle ratings: