I had been running the following rig for quite few years now. Some were pre-owned parts, only the RAM and HDDs were new. All are at least 5 year old now.

 

- Xeon E3-1231 on ASRock E3C224D4I

- 16GB DDR3 ECC

- Array: 6x WD3TB, 1x3TB Parity

- Cache: 1x256GB SATA SSD

 

I run few dockers including Plex (max 2 simultaneous streams), piHole and a password manager.

Alongside, I have 3 Windows VM  -2 Windows 10, 1 Windows 2019 Server (for lab purposes). 

 

Recently I find myself running out of space, so upgrading/refreshing the HDDs (to larger capacity etc) are in the plan. Other than aging hardware, just wondering if based on my usage, is there need to refresh to more current motherboard/CPU? I am fairly certain I do not need a GPU of sort; but please do prove me otherwise.

 

Thanks in advanced.

Added: I like to cap budget at around 1k if possible. So I guess minimum replacements. 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by klips

I've found that the Sata SSDs are not enough for my VM's, I'm moving to NVME SSD's.  NVME SSDs read/write in the thousands of MB/s while Sata SSDs are in the mid 500's.  Food for thought.

25 minutes ago, nerbonne said:

I've found that the Sata SSDs are not enough for my VM's, I'm moving to NVME SSD's.  NVME SSDs read/write in the thousands of MB/s while Sata SSDs are in the mid 500's.  Food for thought.

Thanks. Helpful info.