knobbytires Posted May 19, 2020 Posted May 19, 2020 (edited) I had a bunch of HDD's, SSD'ss and RAM sitting around from server project I never built. My immediate use case is a higher end Plex server as my Synology is close to capacity. I did some research and settled on the following: SilverStone Technology CS380 NAS Tower Coraisr RM850x Super Micro X8DTL-iF 2 x Xeon E5620 LSI 9211-8i 2 x Arctic Freezer 12 CO Icy Dock ExpressCage 6 x 2.5 6 x Sata III Cables 2 x Mini SAS to 4 SATA StarTech 50x10mm AYA 7" 8-Pin to Dual 8-Pin EPS Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive Alex Tech 1/2 inch Wire Loom Existing: 6 x Samsung 8GB 2RX4 PC3L-10600R 8 x Seagate 4TB 6 x Samsung 850 EVO 1TB Total cost for new parts was ~$650. Equivalent Synology to support drives/ssd + ram upgrade would have been $2k+ and would still have less cores and memory. Overall I'm pleased with build. Plex streams 4k w/ no issue and only slightly louder than my Synology. I’m also starting to use Unraid as spill over for larger dev VM’s that don’t fit on my laptop. Notes: Many posts state the Arctic Freezer 12's work on X8DTL boards with supplied adapters which was untrue in my case. The screws are about 1/8" too long so I used a few washers as spacers. Worth noting, I tried four different coolers and theses were by far the best. Originally I had both cpu cooler/fans facing toward rear but the front CPU ran a few degrees hotter as the fan blew directly into back of rear cpu cooler/fan. I rotated 90 degrees and they now run at same temp. I originally purchased the Mediasonic 6 x 2.5 but it had intermittent issues with ssd's so swapped it for the Icy Dock. I glued the StarTech fan directly to the chipset heatsink with thermal glue. It's more permanent than I'd like but cleanest solution I could find. Planned additions: I have an old 980 Ti which I hoped to use for transcoding but it is about 20mm too long. I may add a 1060 at some point for GPU pass through to VM’s + transcoding. I have a 3TB FusionIO card I may try to get running for VM's if I don’t add a GPU. Edited May 19, 2020 by knobbytires Quote
reboot47 Posted May 20, 2020 Posted May 20, 2020 very nice set up, the silverstone cs380 seems to be one of the more popular solutions for nas, its available and well priced at least. I think your 980 ti may not do hw transcoding of hevc content maybe check here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/906qud/980_ti_vs_gtx_960_for_transcoding/ I remember having to ditch my geforce 970 since even newer $40-50 gpus were performing better with 4K playback. Quote
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