Hi all

I originally posted most of this in the wrong place, and was told that this was a better section to ask this.

I'm seriously thinking about buying a HP DL380 Gen 9 which has 2 x Xeon E5 2697 V3, 8 x 16GB DDR4 for a total of 128GB RAM, an Nvidia grid K2 GPU, LSI SAS HBA connected to 12 x 8TB HDDs for a total of 96TB, and is currently setup with Truenas Scale already installed on a pair of 120GB enterprise SATA SSDs.

This is my first adventure into this sort of server, all my previous limited experience is with using gaming motherboard etc for unRAID.

I'm hoping someone here can confirm whether or not they can see me having any issues using this as an unRAID server before I buy it. Right now I'm just assuming that because it currently has truenas running on it, that it should be pretty straightforward to turn it into an unRAID server.

I'm also interested in some feedback on how best to setup the server. I plan to stop paying Google to store my pics and will do this on this server. The server will also be used as a media server, as well as run 2 Home Assistant VMs. The server has 5 PCI slots so I plan on throwing a 1080ti GPU in it for video transcoding. The unRAID server this will be replacing has all array disks formatted in xfs with cache as btrfs. I was thinking of formatting the cache drive as ZFS but I know very little about it.

The reason for looking into getting this server is because I'm currently running two unRAID servers and was hoping this new one would replace them both. My current main server is a 12th gen Intel i5 12600k with 64 GB RAM, with 8 disks and one Parity giving a total of 58TB which is close to being full. I also have a Windows 11 VM and I also run Klipper for 4 3D printers. I also have a Scrypted docker container that feeds cameras to Home Assistant but no video storage is going on because I just don't have the storage. The second unRAID server is a HP Proliant Microserver Gen 7 which I recently got for free to extend my storage but it is extremely underpowered and all CPU cores are usually always maxed out.

I do have some capacity for more storage in the Intel 12 Gen server, but all the CPU cores are already often maxed out, particularly when the Windows VM is running.

I could upgrade with normal consumer stuff, new motherboard, CPU, DDR5 RAM etc, but the cost of that will probably come close to this new server.

So, do you think I should get it? If your answer is yes, please share what file system I should choose. If you think not, can you please share what you think I should do? I'll appreciate any and all responses! Cheers!

Sounds like a solid plan, but instead of the 1080ti for transcoding, look into one of the single slot intel cards like the a310 or a380 - waaaay less power draw and will run circles around the 1080 for transcoding.

If this is your first server, keep in mind that it can be very noisy, the high pitch annoying kind of noise. And they can consume a fair bit more power, too.

Thanks for your reply! I'm in the process of setting it up now. Short term it's in my bedroom. It is a little louder than what I already had running, but it isn't too bad.

I'll definitely look into your GPU suggestions!