gaulderson

Ya I really wasn't sure at all what to do with memory besides how much I wanted, checking the manual is a good idea, thanks!

Second time building a PC, but first time building a server. Any recommendations or thoughts are greatly appreciated. CPU - 2 x Xeon E5-2660 ($100) Motherboard - Supermicro X9DRL-iF ($320) Memory - Crucial - 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3-1600 ($148) Storage - 4 x 8TB WD Red ($640) Cache Drive - Samsung 850 EVO SSD 500GB ($180) Case - Fractal Design R4 (already owned) Power Supply - EVGA G3 650W 80+ Gold ($82) Total ~$1470 Use case is basically just to act as a big Plex server that can store a bunch of stuff and handle multiple 1080p transcodes. Hoping for it to be relatively future proof for at least the next few years while I add more HDDs as needed for expansion. Also any recommendations for a narrow CPU Fan would be greatly appreciated. edit: I also apologize if this is in the wrong forum.. I just realized I may have messed that up.

Now I feel dumb, didn't realize there were onboard graphics. Thanks!

I'm currently look at the Supermicro X9DRL-iF, but it looks like there is no x16 slot for a graphics card. How would I go about installing unRaid in this case? Do I have to buy a x8 or x4 card?

Is it a pain to add RAM later down the line? I assume it's just as simple as finding the same model although I'm not sure how hard that might be.

New here so please forgive me if this isn't the right place to post this. Anyways, I plan on running Plex + a few dockers and a Windows 10 VM for gaming. I see a lot of unRaid builds with 32gb of RAM and I was wondering if it was worth almost double the price of 16gb. How much RAM are people here running and do you wish you had more? edit: as a side note it looks like 2x8gb ECC RAM isn't too popular and 16gb sticks seem to be more common.

Nice build! Thinking of making something very similar... any reason you opted for 32gb of RAM? I'm trying to decide between 16gb and 32gb

Thanks for the replies everyone! It looks like I'll be fine sticking with one SSD then and saving some money too

Well I suppose I'd also be storing backups of any settings and configurations on my main array as well. Some personal data will be transferred around but I don't expect much. I'm really not far off from a typical media server use case. I'm not entirely sure what else I should expect to be moving through the cache.

I plan on having at least one SSD (500gb) for my cache to also store VMs, containers, etc. (please let me know if this is a bad idea) I was wondering if it is generally recommended to have another SSD in unRaid's RAID 1. Most of the data I'm going to be storing in my main array is media content so it's not the end of the world if I lose a day's worth of data.