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I've got an ASRock x570d4u/AMD 5600x/32gb ECC idling with mean low 40W (absolute low I've seen just under 36W) with dual SFP+ card, 5x hdd, 5x ssd, nvme drive (asm1166 6 port m.2 sata expander). This includes IPMI (more power draw) and no way to actively disable onboard ethernet as well as a few extra W for an external USB powered power meter connection (Rainforest EMU-2). HomeAssistant + a whole bunch of data logging 24x7. I don't need to transcode (only stream consumer is a Roku Ultra) but this probably still provides a useful benchmark.

Sounds overpriced and risky. Why buy something you don't need to get a CPU at a minimal savings, at best? Reselling a motherboard means two layers of used for the eventual buyer, which just doesn't seem like the right thing to do either. You willing to deal with it being DOA when they get it?

You need to force air through the spaces between the drives - it's unlikely that will be the air path otherwise. That may mean custom mounting.

I only see https/ssh allowed and https blocked. If nginx is terminating SSL I seem to recall it has to also see http. You're forwarding but not letting it through the firewall. Also verify the ports you're forwarding to are right. They seem to be - do they work direct?

Everyone always talks about transcoding but will you be? I don't, sending to an older Roku ultra from Jellyfin. At the moment that's the only use case in my house. My cpu of choice was the one I had sitting unused after upgrading the sim rig to a 5800x3d - a 5600x. Idles ~43-45w with ECC and IPMI, 11 drives, and a USB device reading the home power meter. Not as low as some Intel setups go. My backup unraid is an i3 6100. Also was just sitting around. And that's the most cost effective way to go.

No increase here at idle nor obvious change in daily power use, x570-d4u/32gb/5600x.

Mine has been working without any issues (it's also the nvme variant).

I use an nvme > 6 port sata adapter - notably more power efficient than the 8 port hba I was using initially. They do have other uses. And no need to fill every slot. Obviously in the end it's up to you.

ASM1166 IS the other controller. It converts PCIe lanes (x2 in this case) to 6 SATA III ports - those are not equiavalent to PCIe lanes.

While I don't know what drives do performance-wise when read and write are happening at the same time (does anyone benchmark that?), that's almost surely where you would find x2 a limitation (if there's heavy read AND write operations happening). What are you doing where you think there is any benefit to RAIDz1? Is it just capacity? I'm not following super closely, but from chatter I'd not be choosing ZFS myself for this use case at all even on a mirror. Additionally, and if I'm not missing information (which I may well be), in the case of a failed drive RAIDz1 puts a pretty big hit on performance; a simple mirror wouldn't hit as hard on a drive loss, though rebuild certainly takes some (or at least, my past experiences with it suggest such...)

Upgraded backup system without issue from 6.12.14 - intel i3-6100, nothing fancy here. Did have to uninstall/reinstall the intel-gpu-top plugin. Main system upgrade from 6.12.14 so far is failing to boot and looking like something hosed on the flash drive. This is an AMD 5600x on x570-d4u - initially looks like it's failing to mount /dev/sda1 and it gets stuck here. Starting investigation and will open a separate thread if I can't figure this out. update 1: There are two other USB devices attached - the UPS (Cyberpower) , and a Rainforest EMU-2. Disconnecting both devices allowed the system to boot without issue, though oddly the HomeAssistant docker did not start (and had no unusual logs). Manually started just fine. Plugged both USB devices back in - the Rainforest is working properly. NUT plugin is not starting yet, but that's probably because the UPS wasn't there at boot so chasing that now. Still very confused by why this happened, but at least it was relatively straight-forward to troubleshoot and get to a better place. update 2: Rebooted again with both USB devices attached. This time, it automatically rebooted somewhere in the startup process (I was distracted and did not see it happen, only noticed when it went back to POST) but then that second boot worked through cleanly and the system is back up fully, NUT sees the battery, HomeAssistant started up automatically, and everything seems back to working properly. Meanwhile, this has reinforced the value of IPMI for me... update 3: It turns out usb 4-2 is in fact the flash drive. I did not change ports. I did, however, unplug the flash drive and attach it to a Windows computer to check it wasn't showing errors there or anything, and I did this before the successful boot without the other two USB devices. It took an unusual amount of time to unmount. Makes me wonder if Windows quietly did something. It DID successfully start to boot, Unraid though, so really no idea at this point. Very weird.

I've never tried deactivating. I've done the drive swap, and also done fresh installs and connected to an old key. The old drive would only be to establish that hardware signature - after that, upgrade or fresh install to the m.2 as you wish. Twice I've had to jump through hoops on the phone, only once was it a pain. As long as you have the old OS on the drive and old hardware, you could also jump right to new OS/drive and have easy fallback options if it doesn't let the key transfer.

This is of course for Windows, not Unraid. There isn't a relicense option. If you've never updated hardware, it'll have better odds of working. I would start by just lifting the existing OS drive to the new system and booting. The video card is also staying, right? Go through the license steps, it should activate. And as much as I hate suggesting it, it's far simpler if you have all the latest cloud addicted sign-in stuff. If you really want the fresh install, start that after. When it gets to activating, you should be able to pick the existing key if you let it phone home. If you don't need the fresh install, you could clone the old OS over to the new drive and then upgrade. If it doesn't phone home and you only use local accounts, you'll have to try the OS key - if you have it. There are ways to try to extract it.

I have an older Roku ultra. Does 4k just fine and seems to work with Jellyfin well - haven't used it much that way though, and most my collection needs subtitles work so slow going. Plus plenty of streamed content for now. It's not impressive hardware (remote eats batteries for lunch) but it works. I have an ancient grudge with Nvidia and a slightly more recent one with Apple, so I didn't leave myself a lot of choices. P400 or better is something I'd ebay for less than that t400 on your list. And honestly, start with the memory you have and only add if you need it. Save the funds now, or maybe be a little pickier on power supply. Your existing OS license for the PC build should carry over if you do the upgrade right. Have fun with the project.

You should be able to get away from transcoding with a Shield, making things even simpler. I don't run a GPU with a Roku... Or just use the CPU, not GPU. If you did add a GPU to an AMD build, a cheap Quadro might be a better fit but the 2070 will handle it. Though you might want more with HA anyway if you get into ollama for local voice control... Just pay attention to pcie lane availability if you go with the b450. For the money, it's hard to beat the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120. The Phantom Spirit looks to be the same but one more heat pipe. Hard to justify more for a server likely tucked away.

Sounds like a good plan then. I do think you might find Intel an advantage, but totally get not wanting to go that way too. I'm struggling with that right now, but if ollama on igpu becomes a thing I might have to for power consumption reasons. Probably would still be lower with my current use cases than the ~45w idle I see now on the 5600x. But 30yr payoff so not cost effective for that reason alone.

That board will limit something on pcie lanes still - x16 or x8+x8, and an x2, not the x4 you list. Or so says the Asus site. SAS board will have higher power consumption than some of the good SATA expander boards. And, as a workstation boards I'm not sure how power efficient this can go.Have you reviewed the powertop thread? Gobs of useful info buried in there tuning for lower consumption. Intel may be the better path, especially as you can use onboard you for transcode.

I am not really sure on GPU needs, but it's common to run a sas expander board in an x8 next to a GPU at x8 so I imagine it's adequate for a lot of things. I'll also note I only used the board I run as an example, because I know it well. There are other options, many less expensive. I do think you want the x470 or x570 chipset, not b450/550 as those are even more lanes limited. Newegg search is good at filtering products on specific criteria like form factor, cpu socket, and SATA port count, if they carry what you want.

I know the ASRock Rack x570-d4u I run has 8 sata ports and 2 m.2, but I'm unaware of any setups which will do x16+x8 unless you look at epyc or something - the cpus simply don't have the necessary pcie lanes. Adding a 2 port x1 SATA card would get this to 10 though that might not fit between GPUs now that I think on it. If I'm misunderstanding and you are fine with running at x8+x8 speeds, some options with 8 sata; none I can find with 10 SATA onboard though (I only count 8 in your list?)

There's a reason I listed the x550. It's a good option, if the more expensive one. I'm on the fence about 2.5/5gbe value. I don't recall the x550 I have in a windows box (where I only had x4 available so went that route) supporting but I never tried either. I mostly have SFP+ here. Only my backup unraid has to use rj45 and it's an x540 in a 2u... If it gets hot it's not an issue for me. And it was cheap, which is why I went that route. The machine spends most of its time powered off though.

Intel x540 or x550 will be stable and work well. Intel X710 or mellanox if you can do SFP+.

Install was easy (no surprises there) and everything seems working with only a few minutes setup. There are probably things I didn't remember setting up one way or another, but obviously not anything required for the usual use case. I did have to manually rescan, but was able to get playlists going immediately. No issues with softsqueeze. Even HomeAssistant just worked. I will also note, I did not uninstall the old LMS - I just stopped it. No issues noted with that. I was trying out the interface/skin options (material design has some massive design problems IMO and I'm not a fan - it remains the best option from what I can tell) and discovered the "Logic Teal" is so broken it's not funny; I was at least able to search for "settings" and hit enter blindly to get to them to fix it - otherwise I'm not sure how I'd have fixed (there are plenty of options). I assume that's part of Lyrion, but in its current state it should not be included. And I'd recommend everyone stay away from that skin.

I think "the hardware" remains the biggest reason. I haven't found anything as good, though some of the devices are just OK. Some of the original hardware was amazing and still does better than stuff you can buy today (specifically, the Transporter) Unfortunately, Logitech destroyed an amazing product base - and so of course it's all "old". Slim Devices was fundamentally targeting audiophiles, and they're a dying breed. There were some amazing details the original designer put into stuff, like tuning the lowest display setting on the Boom to be insanely dim (but appropriate for a very dark room / use as an alarm clock). The ability to build a player on a pi stack pr or similar is fun - so much flexibility. I've been tinkering with pi-based stuff lately also (have a neat little zero 2w with POE hat and DAC hat, even powers a 7" touchscreen... but the interface needs work). Lots of plugins too. Sync across players (all wired at this point) is as close to perfect as it needs to be (maybe is, I haven't actually tried measuring). I'm very picky about sound quality/accuracy (classically immersed/trained from day 0) so my rigs aren't small. I'll also stream to desktop / headphone rigs (e.g. my work setup). I also really appreciate that it's a hands-off approach to library management. No proprietary stuff - I copied my library to a microSD for my phone and everything, playlists and all, just works (except... the library is too big so my preferred player doesn't find everything in one folder - built-in on Android is terrible, as so many things are, with classical albums). I haven't looked hard at alternatives, but I've looked since aging hardware (wifi going flaky - it's just too old - wired is better anyway) is a concern. Nothing comes close for me. Also, with 2 Transporters, a classic v2, a boom, a radio, and 4 Duet (which I've been phasing out - I don't like the lack of direct controls)... it's hard to justify any change. I've actually thought of buying replacement parts to build more Transporters - just haven't found an appropriate chassis. To @dlandon thanks for this - I'll have to give it a whirl in some down time this week. We usually have music going all day on weekends so that's not a great time to fiddle. So happy LMS lives on, 'cause I'm stubborn and don't want to give up my Transporters (ok, they'd still be an amazing DAC)

No stability issues on my AMD 5600x on x570-d4u. So as a blanket statement, no. Among the choices you've provided, unsure. Plenty of folks run consumer Intel or AMD. It all looks like older hardware, any reason?

Wifi performance is lots of details - channel width, signal level, interference, plus meshing can halve speeds each hop. To be "wired" fast you need clear space, wide channels, and clear line of sight to the AP. Wifi7 brings some channel width magic to help, but you can get decent throughput on wifi 5 or 6. If you need to do lots of large file transfers, wired is the way. Also I very much doubt lots of 100gb+ setups - 10gb is affordable if still not cheap and requires wired connections. If you want to verify your server isn't the bottleneck you'll need a wired connection. I cap out at about 3.3gb/s to a raid10 SSD write cache on 10gbe (verified 9.8+gb/s via iperf3).