Hey guys, I’ve been creeping around for a bit and I’m getting close to being ready to pull the trigger on everything. However, I’m not convinced I’m making the best decisions with everything, so I wanted to get some opinions here.
The main goal of this build is to offset usage from the main gaming PC. The main rig runs a 295x2 GPU, so even when not under load it’s pulling decent amount of power from the wall. I’d like to save my sanity and wallet the pain of another Texas summer running the AC and that beast 24/7.
The second goal is to take all of my media and make it available in one area. Music may be a bit tricky since I still use iTunes to manage my larger iPod, and a quick google search tells me that may be a bit problematic, but being able to take all of my movies onto a plex server would be amazing. It would be for a lot of in home streaming with a bit of remote, and I can’t really imagine more than 5 users pulling from it quite honestly.
I’d also like to use crashplan to back up everything and keep me protected. There’s no real need for this, but it never hurts to be careful. This would ideally back up the main pc, one (possibly several) laptops, a phone and an iPad (this one being the lowest priority)
Like I said earlier, power consumption is one of my main concerns, but I’d also like to keep the noise to a minimum. The mini ITX build I’m considering would probably go in a shelf underneath my TV to make cable management easier, but I could always find a way to run a cable around my apartment if I need to hide it in the closet if you guys think I’d be better served with an rackmount server or something of that nature.
I may also try to run small servers for gaming with my friends, but not sure what the best way to do that would be. One thing we’ve talked about is setting up a pit boss machine for Civilization 5, but not sure that could be done this way.
I’m not 100% sure what type of RAID I should be looking at honestly, but I’m leaning RAIDZ1, but I've had people try to talk to me about RaidZ2. I'm aware that gives better security, but since a lot of this is media I'm not 100% convinced I need to give up the extra space. I'd love to hear some expert opinions.
I’ll be running FreeNAS with a slickbeard and Plex, again unless anyone has better suggestions.
This part list represents the final build, but originally I’ll be doing just 16 gb of memory and 4 total WD Reds. I have no idea what to do for a PSU since I’m not really sure what kind of draw I should be expecting here. I’m also considering an external blu ray drive to rip blu rays with handbrake, but again no idea what I’m doing.
The SSD is there to act as a cache, since I’m convinced I read somewhere that it can be a decent boost.
Please feel free to be brutally honest with this critique, I’m way out of my element and could really use some honest help from the experts. This is going to be my first server/NAS and while I’ve done a ton of gaming/casual builds, this is unexplored territory.
Here's the PCPartPicker list if that's easier, but I'll link the parts as well.
Motherboard/CPU
C2750D41
Case
Silverstone DS380B
Memory
Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ECC (Just one kit since I'll be starting with 4X4 TB
Storage
4 TB WD Red 4 TB seems to be the sweet spot right now. I'll be starting with 4 drives and later throwing in an additional 4 to save on costs.
SSD Cache
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAELTAI/?tag=pcpapi-20
Kingston 120GB
Power Supply
Silverstone 450W Gold (Is this too much? Not enough? I only have a vague idea of how much power I'll be pulling).
Other things I've been considering are the actual networking. I didn't know if it would be worth it to throw a better NIC in there or to throw a switch with my main PC and the NAS on it before it hits the router.
Thanks in advance for any insight. I've been browsing Reddit and here for a bit, but I've reached information overload and am starting to really overthink things.
The main goal of this build is to offset usage from the main gaming PC. The main rig runs a 295x2 GPU, so even when not under load it’s pulling decent amount of power from the wall. I’d like to save my sanity and wallet the pain of another Texas summer running the AC and that beast 24/7.
The second goal is to take all of my media and make it available in one area. Music may be a bit tricky since I still use iTunes to manage my larger iPod, and a quick google search tells me that may be a bit problematic, but being able to take all of my movies onto a plex server would be amazing. It would be for a lot of in home streaming with a bit of remote, and I can’t really imagine more than 5 users pulling from it quite honestly.
I’d also like to use crashplan to back up everything and keep me protected. There’s no real need for this, but it never hurts to be careful. This would ideally back up the main pc, one (possibly several) laptops, a phone and an iPad (this one being the lowest priority)
Like I said earlier, power consumption is one of my main concerns, but I’d also like to keep the noise to a minimum. The mini ITX build I’m considering would probably go in a shelf underneath my TV to make cable management easier, but I could always find a way to run a cable around my apartment if I need to hide it in the closet if you guys think I’d be better served with an rackmount server or something of that nature.
I may also try to run small servers for gaming with my friends, but not sure what the best way to do that would be. One thing we’ve talked about is setting up a pit boss machine for Civilization 5, but not sure that could be done this way.
I’m not 100% sure what type of RAID I should be looking at honestly, but I’m leaning RAIDZ1, but I've had people try to talk to me about RaidZ2. I'm aware that gives better security, but since a lot of this is media I'm not 100% convinced I need to give up the extra space. I'd love to hear some expert opinions.
I’ll be running FreeNAS with a slickbeard and Plex, again unless anyone has better suggestions.
This part list represents the final build, but originally I’ll be doing just 16 gb of memory and 4 total WD Reds. I have no idea what to do for a PSU since I’m not really sure what kind of draw I should be expecting here. I’m also considering an external blu ray drive to rip blu rays with handbrake, but again no idea what I’m doing.
The SSD is there to act as a cache, since I’m convinced I read somewhere that it can be a decent boost.
Please feel free to be brutally honest with this critique, I’m way out of my element and could really use some honest help from the experts. This is going to be my first server/NAS and while I’ve done a ton of gaming/casual builds, this is unexplored territory.
Here's the PCPartPicker list if that's easier, but I'll link the parts as well.
Motherboard/CPU
C2750D41
Case
Silverstone DS380B
Memory
Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ECC (Just one kit since I'll be starting with 4X4 TB
Storage
4 TB WD Red 4 TB seems to be the sweet spot right now. I'll be starting with 4 drives and later throwing in an additional 4 to save on costs.
SSD Cache
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAELTAI/?tag=pcpapi-20
Kingston 120GB
Power Supply
Silverstone 450W Gold (Is this too much? Not enough? I only have a vague idea of how much power I'll be pulling).
Other things I've been considering are the actual networking. I didn't know if it would be worth it to throw a better NIC in there or to throw a switch with my main PC and the NAS on it before it hits the router.
Thanks in advance for any insight. I've been browsing Reddit and here for a bit, but I've reached information overload and am starting to really overthink things.