Spunner

I like the setup, but have questions myself on the video choice, for VM and Plex use. - I know Intel makes drivers for virtualization, but I'm uncertain how far the ARC series is supported. I see giganode has a "Intel i915-SR-IOV" App on the main screen, being uploaded recently, and it clearly does NOT support Arc boards. - I'd verify on the Plex forums on Arc support as well, to get an idea on compatibility and capability. I know the integrated graphics support on newer Intel chips lags a bit, but I'm not sure on the Arc series itself suffers from the same. As for the SSD's, I don't know that you need two sets, but I am no expert. Having a 2TB mirrored set, I feel, is more than enough. The real storage-hog are your plex videos, which will reside on your disks, so everything else you noted should leave you more than enough on the WD Black's you mentioned. Would suggest doing more research here... The processor, for me, was the biggest catch when picking a setup. Intel desktop proc's are very, very limited to PCIe lanes used for expansion. If you ever expect to install other boards, besides the video card, like SAS, 10Gbe, etc., you'd need to have a workstation or server motherboard that supports a Xeon (Intel) or Epyc (AMD). Several benefits open up here, like IPMI, that allows you to KVM into the system, all the way down to the BIOS/UEFI settings from a remote location, even if its only in the other room. Not having a keyboard, mouse, monitor is nice too.

Lot's of used servers out there with v3/v4 Xeon's for very reasonable prices. If 'quiet' is a thing, get a tower over a rack mount... but just a thought. I was in the same boat as you a month ago. My X9 was getting... flakey... and had replaced it once already, keeping my little Xeon E3-1230v2 alive. But came to the conclusion that it wasn't keeping up with what I was asking of it, so I stepped into a R730xd, 2x E5-2660v4, 256gb RAM, 8TB SAS drives, SAS cache, yada, yada... I overkilled this one, but I don't want to replace this for several years. And the nice thing was that it was all under your budget (and mine). Food for thought...

Realistically, I personally would purchase a used, or cost-effective PCIe SAS HBA and place all of your disks on it, bailing on the internal SATA ports all together. Purchasing an "-8i" controller will provide you 8 ports for SATA or SAS drives. Only other item you'd need is the proper cable w/power connections on them. If you do decide to use the PCIe for something else (video HBA for transcoding?; 10Gbe?...), then the PCIe-to-SATA adapter is about your only other path out of this one... short of buying a new motherboard with more slots/expansion.

Same! I have an almost identical configuration and I'm looking for "the next 5-7 year replacement" configuration. Supermicro X9SCL Xeon E3-1230 v2 32 GB ECC DDR3 LSI SAS 92xx-8i running 6 drives (3 & 4 TB w/Dual Parity) 2x 500GB SATA Samsung SSD's for Cache (off motherboard SATA)

For your consideration: Myth of Empires There are dedicated server guides, but I would love it in a Docker so my UnRAID server would handle. Thank you.

...as requested! unserver-diagnostics-20190822-1819.zip

Siwat, I'm trying out your newish AdGuard Home container but have run into an error during install: root@localhost:# /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/dynamix.docker.manager/scripts/docker run -d --name='AdGuardHome' --net='bridge' -e TZ="America/Los_Angeles" -e HOST_OS="Unraid" -p '3000:3000/tcp' -p '53:53/tcp' -v '/mnt/user':'/unraid':'rw' -v '/mnt/user/appdata/adguard_home/workingdir':'/opt/adguardhome/work':'rw' -v '/mnt/user/appdata/adguard_home/config':'/opt/adguardhome/conf':'rw' 'siwatinc/adguard_home' 132f753f0b6f9ca10d4b59b6238abed73d4f072809e3a6b16713ea13bf481b34 /usr/bin/docker: Error response from daemon: error while creating mount source path '/mnt/user/appdata/adguard_home/workingdir': mkdir /mnt/user/appdata: no medium found. The command failed. Any direction is appreciated.

Seagate 3TB - ST3000DM001 (P/N# 1CH166-301) ~ 4 years old and Out of Warranty Smart errors increased to 384 by the time I removed the drive.