Hey all,
long time lurker, first time sharing what I've learned and built over the years. This all started at the tail end of 2015, I was helping a friend clean his car out and he had a mobo and processor in his trunk he was going to throw in the trash. It was a Asus P5q Pro Turbo with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 and stock cooling fan.Me, being a borderline technology hoarder, decided to keep it and find out what I could do with it, or at least overclock it til the chip blew. I started searching online for fun things to do with the motherboard and initially stumbled upon freeNAS. Thinknig about it I had some DDR2 ram laying around (remember that thing I said about about hoarding ;)) and a few spare spinning 3.5" disks. I was set on giving freeNAS a try.
Luckily some post on reddit or small net builder informed me of Unraid and the ability to add any size disk to the array at any time, which really grabbed my attention. I think back when I looked at it, there was no Free trial option or it was limited to only a few disks. I tried the trial and it was good enough demo for me to grab the basic version. I ran the basic version with 4 disks for about a month or two, playing around with dockers and moving all my media over. The dual core did a fine job of serving up Emby (i didnt want to pay for plex, but in the end, Im a lifetime plexpass subscriber) streams to all the devices in the house. As time went on, and I kept reading UCD posts, I found the E5-2670 pricing and began the hunt for an upgrade to my unraid hardware. First up on the docket was a HUGE case. I contemplated a 4U case to fit in to my 45U rack, but after the move to my new house, the rack never got put back into service and with the space available, I opted for a silly big desktop case in the form of a Thermaltake CoreX9.
Soon after I secured a new mobo, 2 E5-2670s, and 128GB ECC RAM. I went overkill and installed two Noctua U12dxi's and added pull fans on each.
Fast Forward two years and here is how the system sits today:
Thermaltake Core X9 Case + 4 Bay SATA HD Enclosure + Case FANS Gallore (1x 200MM, 4x 140MM 4x120MM)
ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 Motherboard
2x Intel E5-2670 Xeon 8c/16t CPUs
2x Noctua U12DXI CPU Coolers + Noctua F12 PWM Pull Fans
128GB Nanya 1333 ECC RAM (16x 8GB)
EVGA 980ti Kingpin GPU
EVGA SuperNova 850 PSU
2x Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD
7x HGST DeskStar NAS 4TB 7200RPM HD
2x Samsung 2TB HDs
2x WD Green (YUCK) 1.5TB HDs