Motherboard / CPU selection


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Hi all, I'm planning to build my first Unraid server to replace an ancient QNAP NAS that has been acting as my Plex and backup server. I've done a ton of research into enclosures, components etc and I feel that I have a good handle on a lot of the components I'll need, but I am struggling to land on a fit for purpose motherboard and CPU selection. In particular, I am not sure whether my selection will cause bottlenecks around PCIe lanes.

 

My use cases are:

  • Plex server: I have plex pass and I use it to serve a few users in the house. I'll want to be able to support multiple (3+) concurrent transcoding streams - I figure I'll need an intel CPU to get the benefit of quicksync
  • Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr/Mylar/NZBGet: I plan to run them in docker containers or plugins, whatever is easier
  • Photo and document backup: Storing all critical documents and photos/home videos locally with a parallel backup to BackBlaze B2. I'll leave my media library without backup as I have keys/phyiscals for everything and can restore over time
  • Emulation for older school video games (i.e. early playstation, nintendo 64, SNES etc), using something like Retroarch or Plex Arcade
  • Home automation: Running Home Assistant sitting on top of a Fibaro Home Hub
  • Random assortment of linux VMs - slowly teaching myself software development so I'd want to be able to spin up and blow up VMs for different projects
  • Gaming: If I can make it work, I have a spare 1060 6gb card so I'd like to be able to use it to do some casual-ish gaming on the side through a W10 VM. I will be building a dedicated gaming machine for high end stuff so this is more just for when I am fooling around.

 

Right now I am planning on buying the following hardware:

 

As I said, the main concern I had was PCIe capacity. The motherboard only has 6 SATA ports (only 5 usable with the second m.2) so I do think I need the HBA to allow the array to expand to 6 drives + 2 parity. I am trying to stick to consumer grade hardware rather than getting into the x299's or server grade hardware for cost reasons. 

 

 

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