December 18, 201312 yr Finally outgrew my Dell mini-tower that I had re-purposed as an entry level Unraid box 3 years ago. It worked OK, and even ran Sab, SB, and CP, but I couldn't pass up the Cyber Week deals this year! It's not the greatest build, but I feel I did OK for the money (tight budget over here at the moment). I think it's a huge upgrade over the Dell Vostro 220 I was using. Plus, I get to put my apps on a cache drive now. I already owned the drives, so the $262 I paid was for everything else. The below prices include all discounts and mail in rebates. I also got $20 off a Tigerdirect order for checking out with "V.me" when I bought the Motherboard and CPU. All my links are to newegg for consistency, even though I may have gotten a couple things from Amazon, Tigerdirect, etc. OS at time of building: Unraid 5.0-rc8a Plus CPU: $50 AMD A6-5400K Trinity 3.6GHz Motherboard: $85 GIGABYTE GA-F2A85XM-D3H Socket FM2 (8 SATA III ports on-board) RAM: $50 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600 (PC3 12800) Case: $20 Rosewill LINE GLOW ATX Mid Tower Drive Cage(s): 8 stock internal 3.5", plus a $24 Cooler Master 4-in-3 Device Module Cage Power Supply: $25 CORSAIR CX500 SATA Expansion Card: $13 SYBA 4 port SI-PEX40064 PCI-Express x1 Low Profile Ready SATA III Cables: $2 each 2 X Rosewill 8" Sata Power Splitter Cable Model RCW-302 $1 each 4 X Rosewill Model RCAB-11036 36" SATA III Black Flat Cable $7 2 Port USB 3.0 A Female to 20 Pin Header Motherboard Cable Internal Connection (for install of USB flash drive inside the case) Fans: All stock included with case & 4 in 3 cage 3 x Front Blue LED 120mm; 1 x Top Blue LED 120mm; 1 x Rear 120mm Parity Drive: 2TB - Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 5900 RPM 32MB Cache 3.0Gb/s Data Drives: 2 X Western Digital WD Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2 X Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 2TB 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2 X Western Digital WD Green WD10EADS 1TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s (1 in the array, 1 not pre-cleared yet; pending upgrade to Unraid Pro) Cache Drive: Fujitsu MHW2120BJ 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" Total Drive Capacity: 12 drives Primary Use: Media download & streaming to HTPCs throughout the house, and other data storage. Likes: Cost, cool temps, low power, room to expand, parts could easily be used in other desktop systems down the road. Dislikes: Will be a pain to swap out drives in the 8 stock 3.5" drive bays. Oh well, I shouldn't be doing this much in theory (hopefully)! Cable management wasn't the cleanest. A more expensive modular PSU would help with this. Add Ons Used: preclear, unMenu, SABnzbd, CouchPotato, SickBeard Future Plans: set up cache_dirs and crashplan. Eventually fill the 4 slots in the Cooler Master 4 in 3 drive cage with some WD Red drives (3 or 4TB?) Boot (peak): 175 W Idle (avg): 57.3 W Active (avg): 97.3 W Light use (avg): 61.2 W I decided to purchase and install the 4 port pci express sata card & also the 4 in 3 drive cage, even though I won't need them for a while. The card was only $13 after the Newegg discount & rebate! Hopefully I don't have any problems with it down the road. As you can see on the attached Unraid GUI screenshot, my warmest drives during a parity check are at 31C, so I guess the 5 x 120mm stock fans are doing their job? Please feel free to comment, criticize, offer insight for my next build, whatever. I always enjoy reading and learning from all the experienced Unraid gurus on this forum. I took some advice from a couple while putting together these parts. Thanks to garycase especially. I know "budget builds" aren't his thing, but he was nice enough to come down to my playing field and offer assistance. Thanks for looking! Matt
January 6, 201412 yr Nice budget build. You mentioned media streaming, do you find that CPU sufficient for transcoding? I run Plex Media Server, and was wondering how the throughput would be on that CPU. Thanks.
January 19, 201412 yr I built my first server using this exact same configuration. I am getting a lot of stuttering playing a 720p movie. I'm not an expert or anything but I think I need more processing power. Attached image shows the CPU load wh ile I am playing this movie to 1 Roku box. My network is all wired with Gig connections. CPU is at 100%
January 22, 201412 yr I was able to stream remotely to Samsung Smart TV with surprising success. Guess I need to do some more troubleshooting
January 22, 201412 yr The CPU in this build is marginal for Plex ... it likely can't handle the more complex transcodes needed for many devices. Simply streaming to a device that supports the native format you've stored your media is would not be a problem (virtually any CPU would do for that) ... but a CPU with a Passmark in the 2100 range is simply not enough "horsepower" for reliable Plex transcoding. Assuming that's what you're using, I suspect the Roku stream required transcoding, whereas the SmartTV either did not or required a less CPU-intensive transcode.
February 19, 201412 yr Upgraded the processor to the A10 6800K 4.4Ghz Quad- Core. Works like charm now. Thanks to the original poster for providing a great set up for my first build.
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