Hey all, I'm currently running an E3 1231 V3 and an x10 motherboard with onboard SAS2. I have approximately 30 drives attached via onboard ports and an intel SAS2 expander attached to the typical IBM add-on SAS2 controller.
My use-case is currently mainly plex on the most recent build of freenas. This system has evolved for over a decade or maybe even 15 years from a meager dual Tualatin rig maxed out with only a puny 2GB of ECC Ram back in the day and several promise controllers to now spanning two 24-bay cases. I love it!
I've been involved in hardware in the past, but my career makes that impossible now (and has for 7 years). I'm not so much hardware savvy now, writing code 10-20 hours a day every day of the week and most weekends to keep up with change requests and new product development
I'm looking for a rig that has enough horsepower to transcode 7 1080p video streams at once as our house has screens in basically every room and my kids watch on tablets and phones. Basically, lots of plex clients all over our house. Collecting movies and music is our entire family's hobby, so we have thousands of films and albums and a storage unit that is (sadly) completely full of Blu-Ray and DVD discs, vinyl, and CD's. We basically use plex for everything, DVR, movies, etc. We also constantly listen to music from the plex library in our cars, at work, etc. and all of our phones sync photo and video content to it.
What I'm asking you all is:
Help me find some updated hardware that will meet my needs for the next 5 or more years. It doesn't have to be new, but it needs to support lots of RAM and probably 8 physical cores at least as fast as my 1231, which are my current bottlenecks.
I have no objection to AMD, and we have cloud backup in the case of a massive issue such as a multi-drive failure or corruption. If I said "money is no object", I'd be lying. However, I can afford to spend a few thousand dollars and could probably push that budget even more if a few extra dollars netted a significant upgrade. I already have enough reds to fill 48 bays, so I won't be replacing drives anytime soon.
I have no objection to replacing the cases, but I'd rather keep them since it's an unnecessary expense. Basically, just looking for a board with as many SAS2 ports as possible, probably dual CPU's since the 8 thread one I have now is being obliterated by demand, and at least 256GB of either unbuffered ECC or registered ECC.
I'm hoping @Chris Moore will pull some extraordinary ebay deal he's stumbled across out of his hat and make my day, but I have no problem buying cpus, board, ram, necessary adapter cables for supermicro headers assuming I don't have them laying around already somewhere, and upgrading the x10 setup.
Thanks in advance guys, I'm really interested to see what the favorites are. This isn't going in a datacenter. It's going to be in my home, so wattage is a consideration, ultimately. However, I know more cores generally means more wattage and more heat.
My use-case is currently mainly plex on the most recent build of freenas. This system has evolved for over a decade or maybe even 15 years from a meager dual Tualatin rig maxed out with only a puny 2GB of ECC Ram back in the day and several promise controllers to now spanning two 24-bay cases. I love it!
I've been involved in hardware in the past, but my career makes that impossible now (and has for 7 years). I'm not so much hardware savvy now, writing code 10-20 hours a day every day of the week and most weekends to keep up with change requests and new product development
I'm looking for a rig that has enough horsepower to transcode 7 1080p video streams at once as our house has screens in basically every room and my kids watch on tablets and phones. Basically, lots of plex clients all over our house. Collecting movies and music is our entire family's hobby, so we have thousands of films and albums and a storage unit that is (sadly) completely full of Blu-Ray and DVD discs, vinyl, and CD's. We basically use plex for everything, DVR, movies, etc. We also constantly listen to music from the plex library in our cars, at work, etc. and all of our phones sync photo and video content to it.
What I'm asking you all is:
Help me find some updated hardware that will meet my needs for the next 5 or more years. It doesn't have to be new, but it needs to support lots of RAM and probably 8 physical cores at least as fast as my 1231, which are my current bottlenecks.
I have no objection to AMD, and we have cloud backup in the case of a massive issue such as a multi-drive failure or corruption. If I said "money is no object", I'd be lying. However, I can afford to spend a few thousand dollars and could probably push that budget even more if a few extra dollars netted a significant upgrade. I already have enough reds to fill 48 bays, so I won't be replacing drives anytime soon.
I have no objection to replacing the cases, but I'd rather keep them since it's an unnecessary expense. Basically, just looking for a board with as many SAS2 ports as possible, probably dual CPU's since the 8 thread one I have now is being obliterated by demand, and at least 256GB of either unbuffered ECC or registered ECC.
I'm hoping @Chris Moore will pull some extraordinary ebay deal he's stumbled across out of his hat and make my day, but I have no problem buying cpus, board, ram, necessary adapter cables for supermicro headers assuming I don't have them laying around already somewhere, and upgrading the x10 setup.
Thanks in advance guys, I'm really interested to see what the favorites are. This isn't going in a datacenter. It's going to be in my home, so wattage is a consideration, ultimately. However, I know more cores generally means more wattage and more heat.
