Looking for some input here... I plan to replace my very old "Windows Home Server" (go ahead and laugh, but it has served me very well over the past 10+ years) with a new unraid setup, and I have a couple of options.
The first is to build completely from scratch, probably using the ServerBuilds.net NAS Killer 4.1 or 5.0 guides.
The second option is that I have a recently retired Dell PowerEdge R210 II system from work at my disposal. It has a Intel Xeon E3-1240v2 3.40 GHz, 8M Cache, Turbo, Quad Core/8T processor, 32GB of RAM, a single 500GB 7200RPM 3.5" seagate drive, internal USB and a single PCIe gen 2 slot. I think that this would be a great base platform if I add a LSI 9201-16e card and build a separate JBOD for DAS.
Thoughts? If I go the later route, I'll probably replace the 500GB drive with a pair of larger SSDs in the PowerEdge chassis for cache drives, and start the JBOD off with a largish (8tb is my thought) parity drive and a couple of data drives, and as I move date from the old server to the new, "eject" the drives from the old server and slowly rehome them in the JBOD. Frankly, this drive setup is likely what I would do if I choose option 1 and build from scratch as well.
TIA,
Bushman