I lucked into some free equipment, so here's my new build...

 

chassis: aberdeen (rebranded supermicro) 26 bay 4u case. 24x in front, 2x in rear with SAS backplane, 2x internal mounts for 2.5" drives. Capable of 4 power supplies, currently 3 present and 1 used.

mobo: supermicro X8DTHI

cpu: dual Xeon E5630

memory: 24GB ECC

controllers: 4x AOC-SAS2LP-MV8

drives: 5x 5TB WD Red, 5x 4TB WD Enterprise, 1x 3TB WD Red, 4x 2TB WD Red, 9x 2TB Seagate (dual parity, net usable is 64TB)

cache: 2x 300GB Cheetah 15k drives

unassigned 128GBSSD for docker.img

bonded GigE NIC's

 

It came fully populated with the Seagate drives, so I have a bunch that I can use as replacements for the 2TB size when failures occur. Once that resource is exhausted I'll start replacing with 5TB drives. I can also remove the SAS backplane and add two more SATA drives in the back if I want to expand the array further. It's not quiet, but it's racked in my closet with the AV and networking gear and isn't too much of an annoyance - we'll see when summer comes around again.

 

 

Relatively low-end Xeons, but a rather spectacular value 

 

Hard to complain about a free 64TB UnRAID setup !!

 

Relatively low-end Xeons, but a rather spectacular value 

 

Indeed, if I were spending my own money this wouldn't have been my first choice and in fact it wasn't. My Xeon E3-1231 v3 was what I originally purchased and used, and it now serves as my primary gaming/photography desktop.

 

Nearly all of my Plex playback is direct play with my daughter's Fire tablet being the only device that sometimes requires transcoding. I'll probably only virtualize one or two systems for general messing around and otherwise just use dockers - for these purposes the Xeon's are plenty sufficient, if not a bit power inefficient. Like you said, hard to complain and none of this seems to be very OEM, so there's certainly upgrade potential for the sake of modernization if that is ever needed.