Hello everyone. I thought I'd take the opportunity to introduce myself to the community.  I am pretty happy with what I've ended up with but I thought maybe  the veterans around here could teach me something to improve my future decisions/builds.

 

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to go from a WD My Cloud to something that could store all my recorded TV and recorded clips I use for work and decided I should probably try to build something from scratch. I wanted something that could be a NAS and Plex Server, but I wasn’t sure what else I wanted it to do. My LGA1366 (the only desktop I have at the moment) chews away at encodes, and for $150 or so I could buy a X5670 or better with a new CPU cooler to probably double my encode speeds, so I could maybe just build something lower power that could do Plex, but not strong enough to chew away at h.264/h.265 encodes long term.

 

I started putting together potential configurations with PC pat picker.

A) If I just wanted something low power low budget, I could throw together something with a cheap haswell i3 or an Atom SoC for a great little NAS/Plex Server/HTPC that’s $500ish before HDDs

B) I also looked at a Xeon LGA 2011/2011v3 buildsThe upside of this build is in a few years when the flood of 12-18 core Ivy Bridge/Haswell/Broadwell Xeons start to hit eBay for a few hundred dollars, it’s an amazing upgrade for workhorse server for encoding.

 

I also checked out prebuilt options from Dell and Lenovo as well and I ended up finding lots of what looked like good deals on Dell/Lenovo towers. So I bought a Lenovo TS440 with a Xeon E3-1225v3, 4GB RAM, no HDD, no RAID card was $236 including shipping. I bought an 8GB stick DDR3L ram for $60, 2 more 4TB WD Reds for $135 each, and finished my build for an al in cost $620 plus unRAID license For that I got what I feel like is an excellent server with good expandability.

 

So I’m happy with the deal and hardware I’ve ended up with, but I’m not sure what my long term plan should look like.  My LGA1366 computer is only going to run so much longer and I am really interested in building a server using either LGA2011 or LGA2011v3 so when the big sell off happens on multi thousand dollar xeons happens I can get a sweet rig to do all my encoding.

 

Anyone running LGA2011/2011v3 servers, especially any older Dell/Lenovo/other prebuilt's? How do you like them?  I’m thinking about investing in a dual CPU server/motherboard and just sitting on it for a few years until parts prices come down.  There seem to be lots of options to buy Dell/Lenovo torn down cases/motherboards/PSUs; but the down sides seem to be the parts compatibility with non brand parts, and the motherboards are less feature rich with fewer ports/expansion slots. Or I could wait for a good deal on a nice Supermicro dual CPU board and wait for the CPU costs to come down. What are other power users doing?

 

My first reaction to reading what you stated is your drive capacity. you only have two 4TBs. This means that if you configure a parity, you have only a 4TB server. Not a problem unless you want more storage. But if you want more storage, the case for your computer has to have the open bays for those additional drives. I don't think stock Dell desktops and their enclosures allow for too many hard drives.

 

I also don't know if their motherboard are "standard" ATX, where you can buy a third party case that can fit more drives and have a Dell MB fit it. Perhaps someone can chime in. Also motherboard has to have many more SATA ports depending how you want to "grow" your storage.

 

Most 3rd party ATX sized MBs have 6 SATA ports on them.

So I bought 2 extra WD red 4tb to safely start an array and move all the data to it. I've added the WD Red 4tb from my MyCloud to make 8tb of storage, with 1 free hot swap spot.

 

The Lenovo ts440 is actually really nice for bays. It comes with 4 hot swap bays in a cage with the space to add a second cage and 2 additional 5.5" external bays. The downside of the motherboard is only 5 SATA3 ports. So once I add a second cage I will have to add a HBA card, probably just an LSI flashed to IT mode from eBay.

 

The dream would be to buy a used TS440 in the next year or so on the cheap and steal take its HDD cage and PSU plus have a backup motherboard/ cpu/ case.