Critique my Plex/NAS build

[TacticalTuna]

I would love some feedback on my build, as I am a novice builder but I was able to piece this together.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/tacticalPC/saved/QmY2Vn

Goals

 

• Small footprint with the most number of HDDs
• Hardware accelerated encoding & decoding with Plex on an nVidia video cards (two 4K streams or two+ 1080p streams).
• Ability to run multiple Docker containers and Virtual machines simultaneously.

 

Questions

 

• I have 5x mechanical drives and one SSD for the OS installation. Should I just change that to another drive the same as the others and install the OS on the disk array?

[trurl]

The OS installs itself into RAM from the archive on Flash each boot and runs in RAM. Think of it as firmware but easier to work with. 

 

You should use the SSD as cache.

[mathomas3]

personally... I would go with 8tb HDD from the get go... your goals/ideas for the build will dictate what you use... but I have 8 8tb HDD... and I just bought a new computer chassis to add more hdd... 

 

not sure unraid can use hardware encoding to speed up streams via plex... maybe running from a VM it would work?

 

your ssd (if used for cache) should be 256gigs max... that's what i use on a setup much larger then this...

 

also I would suggest an AMD processor... for the price point/performance its a no brainier...

Edited April 14, 2020 by mathomas3

[trurl]

3 minutes ago, mathomas3 said:

I would go with 8tb HDD from the get go

Yes, you might consider fewer, larger disks to give similar capacity as those 4TB disks. That will make it easier to expand. 8TB seems lowest price per TB at the moment.