December 30, 20205 yr I’ve been using the same Dell Vostro for 10+ years with some piecemeal upgrades to keep it humming. It’s a serviceable daily driver but struggles to host my PMS, is the default backup storage for the house, and works hard with some bigger spreadsheets. It currently has a SandyBridge i7, 10GB DDR3 ram, a WD Blue SSD, a GeForce 1030, and 2x 4GB WD Red as a mirrored storage space. I’m due for an upgrade when I graduate this coming June and I’m inclined to use an Unraid server as NAS, PMS, and VM workstation. This includes medical image viewing and analysis in a non-diagnostic setting (including light model building), large spreadsheet/database calculations, and light photo editing. Will consider creating second virtual machine for my wife in lieu of replacing her slightly newer laptop (from which she’d access it). Plex would mainly host music and 480-1080p content (currently ~1.5 TB of 480p DVD rips on my above mentioned PC, ~200 Blu-rays awaiting this upgrade to be ripped) without big plans for 4K disc acquisition. 1-2 local stream with potential for 1-2 remote streams over Gb fiber. NAS would additionally back up a couple PCs, phones, and cloud drives. Do not see gaming as a part of this (maybe old console emulation in separate VM). I’m imagining a rack mounted solution that would live with network equipment and distributed home AV in a single rack. If this form of consolidation is a bad idea, please let me know. Total budget $2-5k for all components. I’ve primarily been a desktop/tower PC user so I don’t have a lot of familiarity with server hardware and selection. My ideas: -Xeon W (would consider dual if strong benefit, so would like MB that could accommodate adding second) -MB: don’t even know where to start. Moar slots! -Bare metal install of W10 Pro for Workstations on an NVME and also use that install as the VM via MB spoof. -Nvidia Quadro (probably start with low-mid tier and upgrade later if needed), pass through to PMS and VM. -32 ECC GB ram, allocate 2 GB as transcoding ramdisk. -256 GB SSD for PMS metadata host -4x 8 GB WD Red Pro as data drive, with room to grow. -We are primarily music streamers, but have a fairly finite collection of digital music ~60 GB. Would it make sense to have this stored on the PMS data SSD (or other SSD) in the array to avoid perpetual HDD spinning when casually listening all day long? I’d like to have a 40 Gb network card and accompanying switch to future proof, or at least the option to easily add that to the MB. I’m sure I’ve said many ridiculous things, but would appreciate any guidance in getting started.
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