My tower, and all of the enclosed hardware, has been up and running since January of 2015. It's used almost exclusively as a Plex media server, I've attached a list of the primary components.

Other than replacing a few failed HDDs (and most recently my boot flash drive), nothing has changed. I started with five 3TB HDDs, including one for parity, an SSD for the cache, and the flash drive. A few years ago I expanded to a 10 HDD array with two parity drives, totalling 69(gigity)TB of storage. I added a single PCIe card with six SATA ports as part of the expansion, everything else in the tower is original.

The server itself runs fine, but I'm concerned that the expansion has maxed out the cooling capabilities of the tower. The disks tend to run warm normally, and get borderline hot during parity checks.

At what point should I consider upgrading some of the hardware, or building a new tower altogether? I do plan on adding more storage in the future, but that will likely come in the form of external enclosures.

I realize this is very subjective, I'm just looking for suggestions, recommendations, or ideas that I haven't considered. Thanks.

UnRaid Server Hardware List.docx

1 hour ago, bcr621 said:

but that will likely come in the form of external enclosures.

USB not recommended for assigned disks. There are external enclosures with SAS connections though.

Sounds like a new case with better cooling and more bays could be a good place to start upgrades.