JacekR

Calculate the total Wattage of your system, and look for PSU's that are 2x that rating. So if your system will draw 350w at full load, get a 700w+ PSU. That will keep you in the peak power efficiency band for the PSU. Pick a reliable brand, I recommend Seasonic personally. Such as the Seasonic FOCUS GX-750 ATX 3.0. Has 10 sata connectors, so should power all those HDD's as well. It's about $90 on amazon. As a side benefit, the FOCUS series is fanless up to 30% load, then silent running (low fan speed) up to 50%.

That is a good point, i didn't realize the voltage wasn't 120v.

The watt meter that Jonathan linked say's it's unavailable when I clicked it, so here is an alternative that costs $12. The size of the PSU you have is irrelevant to the UPS you need. Actual wattage draw is what is important, as most PCs and servers are designed with larger PSU's to get into the efficiency band under load. Which on most PSU's is between 40% - 60% load. As an example I have a APC UPS 1500VA / 900W for my unraid server. At idle (45w) it gives me a 75 minute runtime at full load (425w) it gives me 11 minutes 49 seconds of runtime. btw: I noticed you can not trust the 'estimated runtime' as listed on unraid if your idle draw is lower then the UPS minimum draw. The UPS I use has a minimum draw of 90w when on battery, so anything under 90w of draw has the same runtime of 75 minutes. If you scroll down on the specs page for the UPS I have you'll see field you can enter your Wattage draw to see what the runtime will be, and the min-max is 90w - 900w. Most UPS's devices you look at, the manufacturer will have specs you can check for how long the runtime will be based on wattage use.

Eerily similar to the build I'm making, lol. But it's choice of ram and reasoning is faulty. That cpu supports ddr5 which you can get 1.1V such as crucial CT2K16G48C40U5 (32gb ddr5 4800) Rest seems fine. For an unraid but way overkill for pure nas only.

Very interesting read and good info, thankx. As to going with EXO drives instead of the NAS ones. I don't know, the current discount that best buy is giving on the IronWolf NAS is very tempting. And this server will not see overly heavy use, basically just me using it as a photosync for my family's phones (me, wife, 2 kids) and a plex server only I will probably use LOL. They all just watch stuff on netflix and hulu, while I like to rewatch older shows sometimes that aren't on netflix or hulu. Right now, besides that I don't know what else I might use the server for in the future. Oh yea, I also have seen a lot of people complaining about getting EXO's on amazon. Either getting refurbished drives sold as new, drives with like 10k hours on them already. Or Drives that are new but 6-7 years old (mfg date), surplus stock that resellers are buying from data centers which never installed them. And those data centers don't trust the drives due to their age already, so the resellers seem to be getting them on the cheap and reselling at new market rates. So cheapest place (that I'd trust) that has those 16TB ones in stock seems to be B&H at $329.99.

Thank _cjd_ for the input. I agree that Seasonics are dependable (I have a 1kw PSU in my main rig for nearly 8 years now). Also this 750w I picked has 8 SATA connections so I won't run out if I add more drives late. And bonus, fully modular. I can't find any 'definitive' answer on the seagate website if there Ironwolf NAS drives are CMR. But some websites selling them do mention they are CMT. Their datasheet on the drives doesn't even say (linked). But they are on sale right now from $260 to $200 on bestbuy, and $200 for a 12 TB NAS oriented drive seems like a really good deal. Oh the link I added is for their ST12000VN0008 drives not the ST12000VNA008. According to Seagate the only difference between them is a few grams of weight, everything else internally is the same. And they come with 3 year warranty and free data recovery attempt if you lose data.

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/snyLRK CPU: Intel Core i5-13500 2.5 GHz 14-Core Processor ($199.99 @ Best Buy) CPU Cooler: Thermalright Assassin X 120 Refined SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler ($17.89 @ Amazon) Motherboard: Asus PRIME B760-PLUS ATX LGA1700 Motherboard ($129.99 @ Amazon) Memory: Crucial CT2K16G48C40U5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-4800 CL40 Memory ($87.79 @ Amazon) Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (Purchased For $0.00) Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (Purchased For $0.00) Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 12 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($199.99) Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 12 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($199.99) Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 12 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($199.99) Case: Cooler Master N400 ATX Mid Tower Case ($74.99 @ B&H) Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS Plus Platinum 750 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($118.44 @ Amazon) Total: $1229.06 Ok upgraded the PSU and the HDDs

You do have a good point about the drives. Hence I was opting for duel parity with those drives. But maybe going with 3x 12 TB seagate ironwolf nas drives would be best. And looking around bestbuy has them on sale atm for $199 each. So for $172 ($600 vs $428) more I would actually be doubling my space available and getting better drives. Bestbuy link And yea the PSU sucks....trying to pinch $$$ where it's probably better to spend a bit more for reliability and expandability. The 550w only has 5 sata connectors, and no way to add more. Also watching more youtube videos, I heard someone say unraid loads off a max 32gb usb stick then runs 100% in memory. So does that mean I don't need the 980 pro ssd for the os? If so I'd probably just nix it.

So as I said I'm new to Unraid. And wanted to build a more flexible server to replace my plex server which is 6 years old at this point. Purpose of this server will be to run as a NAS, Photo Sync (via Photoprism) and Plex server (able to transcode 1 stream at 4k). And possibly some other services as well I might add in the future. My budget all in I'd like to stay under $1500. PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/D6wmTY CPU: Intel Core i5-13500 2.5 GHz 14-Core Processor ($199.99 @ Best Buy) CPU Cooler: Thermalright Assassin X 120 Refined SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler ($17.89 @ Amazon) Motherboard: Asus PRIME B760-PLUS ATX LGA1700 Motherboard ($129.99 @ Amazon) Memory: Crucial CT2K16G48C40U5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-4800 CL40 Memory ($87.91 @ Amazon) Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($111.23 @ Amazon) Storage: Seagate BarraCuda Pro 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($106.99 @ Amazon) Storage: Seagate BarraCuda Pro 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($106.99 @ Amazon) Storage: Seagate BarraCuda Pro 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($106.99 @ Amazon) Storage: Seagate BarraCuda Pro 6 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($106.99 @ Amazon) Case: Cooler Master N400 ATX Mid Tower Case ($74.99 @ B&H) Power Supply: MSI MAG A550BN 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($49.99 @ Amazon) Total: $1099.25 The 4x Seagate drives will be in raid 6, giving about 11 TB of useable storage for the NAS. Sigh....I'm not so sure about these drives though....I've never had issues with Seagate drives, but a lot of people seem to nowadays. Haven't bought a new HDD in nearly a decade, been using SSDs for a long time. But 10TB of SSDs in raid 5 would be cost prohibitive. the 980 Pro will run the OS the 2x 970 Evo Plus will be set to read/write cache. (in raid 1, I assume not sure how unraid handles that yet) I already own the 2x 970 evo NVMEs, so not including them in the total pricing. They were the main boot drives on my main PC before I replaced them. The motherboard has 2x pcie 4.0x4 and 1x pcie 4.0x2 m.2 slots, the 980 I will put in the 4.0x2. So the 970 drives will have the same speed. Also the 980 will run cooler at the reduced speed as well. I haven't ordered anything yet, and don't plan to for a week or 2 yet. (currently waiting on new router and switches to reconfigure my network from 1g to 2.5g, doing that first) If you guys could let me know if my setup is deficient in any way, or could be done better. Please let me know, I'd really appreciate any input. Oh and if you guys know if those Seagate BarraCuda drives are worth it, or garbage that be great input too 😄 I've linked the pcpartbuilder for this setup. And created links for all the individual items directly to the OEM page for them. Regards, Jacek