Tydell

I'm not familiar with the boxes you're talking about. Are we talking something like a pi running one of those distros? or is this a different device? I wasn't aware that the cpu on the pi could handle something like that.

I mean, I'd call myself an unraid novice, sure, but I'm certainly not a novice to this sort of hardware - just not used to applying it for personal use. I've been in this space professionally for something like 15 years now. I did end up up going away from a smaller case and skipped ahead a couple levels and picked up a supermicro 846 4u chassis (24 hot swap bays) with a full sized atx motherboard (w480 creator) with the w-1290p. RAM is ECC - I figured this may be a "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" sort of situation. I was originally looking for a Rosewill 4u chassis, but those are hard to come by, so I did the next logical thing and just got a supermicro chassis with the sas/sata backplane already in there. It would have cost more to outfit the rosewill chassis with a few hot swap cages than it cost for the supermicro chassis. And plex 4k transcoding unfortunately requires quite the beefy CPU, so here we are. Would it have been more prudent to start with a simpler, less beefy setup? Probably, but I wouldn't have been able to test my primary use case.

Good to know, thank you!

Did you ever get an answer to this or figure it out? I'm looking at this case and given the impossibleness of finding a Rosewill case in the US, I'm considering paying $100 to have it shipped to me. It looks to me like you should be able to fit two hot swap cages in place of the two fans on the left and a third cage rotated 90 degrees in place of the three 5.25" bays. Does that not seem to be accurate?

I'm now leaning more towards ECC. ECC isn't crazy expensive, so I should probably just do it. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure I suppose. So that said, I guess I'm now leaning towards the Supermicro X12SCZ-TLN4F for the 10 gig ethernet & ECC support.. Although it has fewer SATA ports, I'd ultimately have more room to expand with an additional SATA/SAS controller and still have a port left over for more expansion (additional storage or a GPU). ASRock Rack does make mention of a 10Gbe variant of the W480D4U in the manual called W480D4U-2L2T, but a search of the internet shows that model doesn't exist (yet) since it only exists in that manual.

Huh, I'm seeing that the W-1290p is pretty much identical to the 10900k, but with ECC support. If ECC isn't super important for Unraid/ZFS, maybe a 10900k would make more sense. After doing some reading though, there seem to be a lot of folks on both sides of the fence. Ultimately, the data I have isn't super critical and anything that is critical is backed up elsewhere.

After spending the last couple of days exhaustively reading posts and documentation on all things Unraid, I think I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on my first Unraid build. My use case here would be Plex (with GPU transcoding), media storage, Homebridge, Pihole, and who knows what else I'll discover and tinker with - maybe chia storage. It also needs to be quiet. I don't have a dedicated server closet - this all just sits on a rack in my office closet. This thread specifically took up quite a bit of my time yesterday and I was fully on board with an E-2278G(or E-2288G), but they seem to be all but impossible to find at the moment. Now, after a few more hours of research, I think I've landed on the Xeon W series of processors - specifically the W-1290p. I would like to start collecting 4K HDR 10 bit files and be able to transcode them. According to Plex, you need a 17000 passmark score to transcode 4K HDR content. The E2288G barely eeks that out at 17923. The W-1290p has a bit more breathing room there with a score of 23550. With the 2288G, if I'm transcoding 4K, the server doesn't have a ton of cycles left over for much else. Additionally, the W-1290p seems to be infinitely easier to find at the moment as well. So, with all that said, here's my build thus far: Intel Xeon W-1290p Processor ASRock Rack W480D4U - I chose this over the Supermicro counterpart X12SCZ-TLN4F due to cost & having more SATA ports - though the Supermicro board does have 10 gig ethernet built in. Both have IPMI capabilities. 32GB ECC (I hear ECC isn't super needed with Unraid, so I'm not super sure here) Silverstone CS381 case (I hear this case runs hot, but according to Backblaze, as long as the drives are operating within their designed temp ranges, they have found no correlation between drive failures and temps). I'd certainly monitor temps and make airflow adjustments as necessary. For storage, I'll start with the on board SATA ports and will add an additional SAS/SATA controller as I expand if needed. 10Gbe via a Mellanox Connectx-3 card (not sure if i'll go copper or sfp+ yet - I hear copper has 1-2ms more latency compared to sfp+) Is there anything glaring that I'm missing here or not thinking about? I appreciate any input! This could easily be in the Hardware section as well, but my primary concerns are around my CPU and motherboard choice.