Hi everyone,

I currently host Unraid on my old Dell Precision tower. I've recently got a cheap used Fractal Design Define 7 case.

Before getting the new Define 7, my idea was to just upgrade my old Intel Xeon E3-1225 V2 CPU to Intel Core i7-3770k and double my DDR3 RAM.

 

The main reason I got the new case was to get additional HDD (since my Precision tower can hold only four HDDs). Since I have the new case now, my idea would be just to move the PSU, MB and HDDs into the new case (I will need to get extension cables since the PSU is designed specifically for the Dell case).

 

Now I have a chance to get a cheap used Dell Optiplex 5060 wIth i5 8500 which would be a just a bit higher in price than upgrading the CPU and RAM (we are talking about ~$30-40 difference). Since I have spare laptop DDR4 RAM, I guess I can just buy DDR4 Desktop RAM adapters in this case.

 

So the questions I have:

Is it worth the hassle getting the newer Optiplex tower to get the PSU and MB (with i5 8500) and move to the new FD Define 7 case (the case should fit mini-ITX)? Will I really benefit from switching from Xeon E3-1225 V2 -> Core i7-3770k to Core i5 8500 and DDR4 given my use case.

Upgrading CPU and RAM should not be a problem for Unraid, but how Unraid will behave if I upgrade MB (in case of Optiplex MB)?

Is Unraid smart enough to identify the sequence of HDDs if just move them into the new case (sda/sdb/sdc/sdd) or should I mark them somehow to make sure they match a very specific order?

 

To make it clear, I am not a super heavy Unraid user: I have Plex and a few other dockers + two VMs. Current CPU and amount of RAM is at its limit (basically I can't really run two VMs simultaneously), but I believe changing the CPU to a more powerful and doubling the amount of RAM will resolve this problem.

Unraid keeps track of disk assignments by serial number. Assuming no RAID controllers involved to interfere with that should just work.