I have been thinking about a server at home mainly to run Plex (lifetime subscriber) in the short term and then other items in the future I.e. backup (Time Machine and Windows) and home automation, security camera as I learn about them.
I was going down the FreeNAS route and was looking for some used equipment locally that had ECC memory and at least 16GB. After about two weeks of watching different local selling sites I came across a used ThinkServer TD340 with a single E5-2420, 32GB of ECC ram and some hot swappable enterprise 15K drives installed for a decent price. When I spoke with the seller he suggested unRAID, which I am liking the more I research (like being able to use drives of varying sizes). I purchased the TD340 and will start playing with it over the next few weeks. I don’t plan to use the 15K drives except maybe to play around a bit during the trial period. I have other SATA drives at home I plan to put into this machine long term (1TB, 2TB and 3TB sizes).
I kinda jumped a bit quicker on the machine without knowing much about it and learning specifically about it’s compatibility with unRAID. I can get all the drives to show up when I have started the trial version of unRAID so I might not have to reflash the RAID controller. Other than boot it I haven’t had time to play around yet.
I will also install a cache SSD drive (120 GB in size).
If anyone else using similar machine and can offer any quick suggestions of things to watch out for or tweak that would be appreciated.