Hello all and thanks in advance for any advice.  I'll start my story and try and keep it short.

 

I've been using Unraid for a long time, but only with basic functionality of a NAS.  I'm on my 2nd system, but have always put old hardware to use except for hard drives.  I currently have a retired gaming motherboard and processor that's a 2nd gen i5-2500k and asus motherboard.  I don't have any onboard video and have been running headless for years.

 

Last night it crashed while streaming a video file from the server, and I couldn't get a response or ping it, power cycled it and it came up.  I thought it was weird as it's been pretty solid, but then this am before I left for work it was down again.  fast forward to this evening I've been down there working on it when I believe I have figured out that there's hardware failure and why.  I just moved and put a server rack in the basement and there's a dryer vent above it.  I suppose with the heat and humidity I have condensation inside the dryer vent, leaked out of the seam and into my unraid machine.  It's the back of the PC, not where the drives reside.

 

I need to get some hardware ordered up pretty fast.  I use it for NAS only but maybe would like to do some very small things in the future.  I assume an up to date i3 would do the trick.  I have 8 drives and 6 of them are in the array, 1 cache, 1 hot spare.  all 8 sata ports are on the motherboard.  I need a motherboard, cpu, memory, extra card for sata ports if the motherboard doesn't have 8 (more is always better), and I'm thinking I might get a new power supply for good measure.  Any form factor mobo is ok as I have it in a mid tower fractal define case (with the vented top of course to allow for water intrusion).

 

I'm going to devise a way to defect any condensation away from my bench.

 

Also if I put all of my current drives in with the existing USB drive, is there anything I should do beforehand?

 

Would it be beneficial to replace my old mechanical cache drive with an NVME drive?

 

I'm not really worried about cost, but I don't want to just waste money.  Looking to keep the power draw low.  I was happy with a 2nd gen i5 so I'm sure I'll be really happy with whatever level of performance.

 

Thanks for any advice or help!

 

Luke

Have a look around for an AMD Epyc cpu/mobo combo.  Sweet spot for me are cpu 7xx2 number indicating gen 2.

Pcie lanes for days and low power consumption if keeping to 24 cores or less.

well the good news is that I found another board/cpu laying around and have my server back in order now, but I definitely do want to upgrade from in if nothing else just for power consumption purposes.  It's not an emergency any longer though so I will read up on some things and pull the trigger on something soon.  

 

Not sure I'm wanting to make the plunge for server hardware just because my use case is pretty low.  

 

I'll read up on options.

 

and I insulated the dryer vent pipe that caused the chaos.