December 10, 201510 yr Hey everyone! Keen to be part of the unRAID community and get my first decent setup going. This thing will basically be a media server running Plex, sonarr, couchpotato, etc. I wanted to have the processing power to be able to handle all transcoding that plex needs to do as well as have a bit of headroom in case I want/learn of a new way to utilise unRAID that requires a decent CPU. I want to slowly add drives as needed/buy them from different batches and being able to expand is a key concern. I'd rather put together a decent build first go rather than need to upgrade later however if anything I have selected is overkill or unnecessary or there are better options please feel free to share your opinion on what should be changed I look forward to hearing your feedback and hopefully I can finalise a parts list and order this bad boy CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231 V3 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($369.00 @ Centre Com) Motherboard: Supermicro X10SL7-F Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($489.00 @ Scorptec) Memory: Crucial 16GB (1 x 16GB) Registered DDR3-1866 Memory ($213.88 @ RamCity) Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($475.00 @ Centre Com) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($159.00 @ PLE Computers) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($159.00 @ PLE Computers) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($159.00 @ PLE Computers) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($159.00 @ PLE Computers) Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($159.00 @ PLE Computers) Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (Titanium) ATX Mid Tower Case ($169.00 @ IJK) Power Supply: SeaSonic X Series 400W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular Fanless ATX Power Supply ($179.00 @ CPL Online) Total: $2689.88 Link here: http://au.pcpartpicker.com/p/qZcbmG
December 10, 201510 yr Things are expensive down under . Today's dual channel memory architectures are more efficient if you have two memory modules rather than one. Unless you are planning on doing some heavy VMs 16 GB is more than enough - so 2x8GB is preferred. Also, that motherboard only uses 1600MHz RAM, so if it saves you some money you can step down from 1866. I'm also not sure if it supports registered DIMMs, though I know it supports unbuffered memory modules - I'll have to take a look. I'm also not sure if it support 16GB DIMMs - again, I'll take a look. Do you really need a 1TB cache drive? A lot of people are using it strictly as an application drive these days, which allows you to size it at 250GB. If you are caching writes to the array then you need to size it such that you can cache a days worth of writes - but I find writes directly to the array to be fast enough for my purposes. The sweetspot in harddrives here in the US is probably 4TB but it may be different there. Still, you might want to consider a 4TB (or larger) cache parity drive if you plan to add drives larger than 3TB to the array in the near future. You can always upgrade the cache drive, but it would save you some work if you have near term plans. Looks like a good build to me, it is similar to what I would build if I were starting a new server. I have a slight preference for a small number of large driver (6TB+) just so I can manage fewer hard drives, but that does cost more.
December 10, 201510 yr Author Things are expensive down under . Today's dual channel memory architectures are more efficient if you have two memory modules rather than one. Unless you are planning on doing some heavy VMs 16 GB is more than enough - so 2x8GB is preferred (or 2x16GB). Also, that motherboard only uses 1600MHz RAM, so if it saves you some money you can step down from 1866. I'm also not sure if it supports registered DIMMs, though I know it supports unbuffered memory modules - I'll have to take a look. Do you really need a 1TB cache drive? A lot of people are using it strictly as an application drive these days, which allows you to size it at 250GB. If you are caching writes to the array then you need to size it such that you can cache a days worth of writes - but I find writes directly to the array to be fast enough for my purposes. The sweetspot in harddrives here in the US is probably 4TB but it may be different there. Still, you might want to consider a 4TB (or larger) cache drive if you plan to add drives larger than 3TB to the array in the near future. You can always upgrade the cache drive, but it would save you some work if you have near term plans. Looks like a good build to me, it is similar to what I would build if I were starting a new server. I have a slight preference for a small number of large driver (6TB+) just so I can manage fewer hard drives, but that does cost more. Very expensive especially with our dollar dropping. Oh thank you very much! I really had no clue what ram/how much would be best suited but your advice should save me some $$ on ram Pc part picker seems to think it supports registered, i know it supports unbuffered ECC as that was what i was originally planning to get. Again i wasn't sure how large the cache drive should be so thought 1tb SSD would be safe but I'd rather get something much smaller as it is quite expensive and 500gb ones are on sale here at the moment. Price per gb the cheapest reds are the 3TB however i was tossing up between spending more and getting a single 6TB red and adding as required or getting the a bunch of 3TB. Do you mean a larger parity drive?
December 10, 201510 yr Yeah, my bad. I splurged on a 6TB parity drive so I can have flexibility in the data drives I use.
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