HellDiverUK

Quantenna, but you were close. I've been running Merlin firmware on my various Asus routers from Merlin started releasing firmwares. The issue is the firmware on the Quantenna gets corrupt and then can't talk to the SOC any more - game over for the 5GHz. Shame, it was a brilliant router until it curled it's toes up and died.

The Pi only has a 100Mb NIC, which sort of slows stuff down. I run OpenVPN on my router (top of the range TPLink), but it's pretty slow - the router's CPU is a bit crap. It ran much better on my old Asus RT-AC87U. Shame the Asus freaked out and corrupted it's 5GHz firmware. I used to run the VPN on a cheap TPLink pocket router, which I installed OpenWRT on to. It seemed to run the VPN far quicker - the little Broadcom in the pocket router must have had dedicated hardware for the VPN.

I run the Plex plugin for Kodi. Works great, no more nonsense with the 'real' PHT/PMP programs. Running it on an i5 NUC and my silent i3 HTPC.

There was a BIOS update for my Asus H170M-Plus that had a "CPU Microcode update" in July - I assume it was for this issue. Thankfully I have an i5 that doesn't have Hyperthreading, so I haven't bothered updating it.

I used a cheap 8MB ATI RageXL PCI on my old unRAID box that had no iGPU. Worked fine, and leaves the useful PCI-E slots available.

X99 is dead end, so unless you're on a budget you're better off avoiding it. If you're intent on making an investment, then I'd say go for one of the new X299 i7 or i9. Despite the initial bad press (mostly due to overheating VRMs during overclocking), they're really quite impressive. Expensive, but it's the HETC future on Intel. If you don't mind a bit of tinkering, then there's also Ryzen 7. unRAID may still have some issues with VMs on Ryzen, but they're being quickly solved in the 6.4rc series. All that said, I'm back to my X99/6850K rig after my Ryzen's motherboard failed, and I'm sitting wondering why I bothered getting my Ryzen 7-1700X. The 6850K is perfectly fine.

Slightly off topic, but I have three HikVision cameras, two bought straight from China though AliExpress, and one from the UK from a HikVision dealer on Amazon. One of the three died after a year, and it was one of the AliExpress ones. There's clearly a difference between export models and ones bought from China directly.

No.

The CX-M is Corsair's more basic PSU. It's unusual to get a dud Corsair, really - I have a heap of them, and even still have a CX750 that's been running at 600W draw 24/7 running a cryptominer for several years now, and I've had no issues with it. The general recommendation is SeaSonic, but I also like FSP and SuperFlower. All three make good PSUs.

WD SSDs are just a rebranded SanDisk. Which is no bad thing, really. Various reviews tally the WD drives with their SanDisk counterparts. I think the WD Blue is a SanDisk Z400. My cache drive not only does my appdata/Docker stuff, but it's main function is power saving. My downloaded TV Shows tend to be watched the same day they're downloaded, so I leave them on the cache so I don't have to spin up a HDD to view those new shows. Everything is then transferred to the array once a day, which means on a typical week the array drives only spin up for 7 hours a week.

If I have a board/CPU that supports ECC, then I'll use it - if I can't I don't sweat it. Anecdote: 6 workstations running 24/7 at work for just under 9 years, and only 1 ECC memory error has happened in all that time, and it was quite recently during a storm where the mains went out and the building switched to generator. They're Dell Precision T5400 with dual Xeon chips and the super-expensive FBDIMMs.

Using a decent NVMe drive for cache with VMs on it is fine - even a lowly 256GB Samsung like the one I use can do 3100MB/s reads and 1200MB/s writes. The bigger sizes can do 3500MB/s and 2500MB/s. In my gaming rig, the NVMe 950 Pro totally slaughters the RAID0 of Crucial MX300 525GB. The MX300 array can only (!) do 1GB/s reads compared to 3.5GB/s on the Samsung.

Agreed on both tdallen's points - the Pentium is fine, and a cache drive is pretty much essential. Even a cheap 500GB WD Blue would be fine - a SSD is even better.

On almost all i5 and i7 you lose ECC support. There's typically a Xeon E3 part to match every i5 and i7 as far as clock speed and core counts are concerned. There are a few i5 and i7 chips that support ECC, but I've never seen them 'in the wild' as they either never really existed, or were used in specific OEM machines.

The dual core AMD version is a bit anaemic, the quad core version is much better (also has a faster clock speed). The Gen10's Marvell SATA controller remains questionable in unRAID also.

I have an 8TB Seagate NAS ST8000VN0002 disk in a CCTV server (it's the drive just before they became IronWolf), and it's definitely not shingled, and is definitely 7200rpm. I'd wager the DM004 is the same mechanism but with marginally different firmware.

1220v3 is 4 cores. Best CPU to swap in is the 1281v3 which is 4.1GHz, 4 core with Hyperthreading (so sort of 8 core). It'll be WAY faster than what you have. Though, the 1271v3 is probably easier to find, it's 4GHz but stlll 4 core with HT.

The FreeNAS neckbeards will be having a stroke if they read that.

The chipset on those boards uses as much power as some more recent CPUs when you count up the northbridge and the southbridge. At work the old Poweredge 2950 machines used about 500W idling with 8 disks and two dual core CPUs. The newest machines we have are Poweredge R515 with dual 6-core Opterons and 10 disks and they idle just over 150W. Old servers are a false economy - they're hot, noisy and drink power.

Retire it? You still have 96%. Assuming an approximate wear of 4% per 3000 hours, you still have 72000 hours, which is 8.2 years. Worst case scenario. I think perhaps you're a little premature in retiring it.

So, some of us have zero interest in VMs. Is Ryzen stable if you're not using VMs? I could do with a bit more CPU welly for Plex/Emby duties, and am thinking of another Ryzen rather than going to an i7 in my current unRAID box.

Well I meant the chipset specifically, but said socket generically.

To be fair, the tape mod hasn't been needed for a long time, it's only an issue on some old and crusty chipsets in the S775 and early S1155 era.

I though btrfs was required for cache due to Docker? Or has that changed? Can't say I've seen this issue, and I've been running btrfs cache since the first betas that allowed it.

The cooler chosen is severe overkill. Your cooler should not cost nearly as much as your CPU. An i3-7100 could be cooled by a Hyper 212 Evo without the fan... Or just use the cooler in the box. Also worth looking for a MLC SSD - my experience of TLC drives like the 960 EVO is the big writes and rewrites soon burn though the flash. As you don't need any more than 120MB/s writes across the network, even the slowest SSD will be fine. I use a SanDisk Z400s 128GB in one of my unRAID boxes, it's super low power, it's MLC, and it was free (taken out of my laptop when I upgraded it). It's only good for 150MB/s write, but fine for unRAID cache.