Been ages since i built a PC, last unraid was in a HP micro server, so took me a good amount of reading/reasearch to pull some components together i hoped would work OK. Hopefully this may help someone else going down the same path...

 

Use case was:

 

As a Nas

Multiple VMS

6 or 7 dockers, (Sab, Sonar, Radar, emby, Unifi etc)

 

I eventually settled on the below

 

• Fractal Design Node 804 Case
• Enclave 600w 80 Plus Gold Modular PSU
• AMD Ryzen 2700 CPU (8 core 16 thread) 
• 32gb Crucial Ballistix Sport 2666mhz DDR4 Ram
• Asrock B450M Pro4 M/Board (1 onboard fast NVME slot, plus a second on board M.2 slot)
• Nvidia 710 Graphics card (i did buy a £5 cheep old PCIe card from eBay - it didn't work, and needed to get the system running, so bought the cheapest new card i could find!) 
• Western Digital BLACK 500GB SN750 M.2 2280 NVME PCI-E GEN3 SOLID STATE DRIVE (used for Cache)
• Western Digital BLUE 3D NAND 500GB M.2 2280 SOLID STATE DRIVE (used as an unassigned drive in the m.2 slot) - i did buy a crucial M.2 drive here, but it ran SOOOO hot, 50degres idle - so sent that back and got this WD, and its a good 20 degrees cooler
• Dell H310 Perc HBA Card, flashed to IT Mode
• Amazon SAS to 4 SATA Forward breakout cable

 

From the old system, i put in my 4 WD Red 3tbs, these 4 disks connected to the Dell H310

I put in my old 250gb Crucial SSD as a 'download' drive for sab to use, connected to the motherboard SATA

 

All working really well - all the SSD's trim OK (was worried about this, as some reports of some drives not trimming in Linux) 

 

i have my WD reds in the Array - the 500gb NVME as cache, with VMs and Docker/Appdata

the other 500gb m.w SSD is there for all my audio MP3s that were on my Mac - my whole house sonos system accesses them and i always wanted them off the mac - i tried before on the array, and as i have it spun down, its a pain when using it for sonos to have to wait and timeout when it cant access the media, so i decided to put the audio files on an unassigned SSD, and then back this up to the array. iTunes on the mac also connects to this, so again, it needed to be instant.

 

I also dabble in music production, and have 200gb worth of sample CDs, so these are on the ssd too - keeps them off the main PC, and gives me instant access to them - again - backed up to the array

 

The Dell HBA card will run 8 SATA disks, so room for expansion. The motherboard can run 4 sata drives, but need to reduce that by 1 if using the second M.2 slot (as i am) 

 

Case will house 10 disks, and its quite compact.

 

 

 

 

 

Nicked this one from the web, as didn't take a pic of it when complete!

 

Edited October 26, 20196 yr by rorton
typo

I would add: Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX, Premium Quiet Fan, 3-Pin (40x10mm, Brown) to the Dell H310 Perc HBA Card they are meant for high air flow server cases and need added cooling in a non server case to stay cool.

 

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B009NQLT0M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks for the tip. Will the fan secure straight onto the card?

4 hours ago, rorton said:

Thanks for the tip. Will the fan secure straight onto the card?

Mine did with 2 screws which are not included with the fan. I just went through my screw collection to find 2 that would work.