Me neither, but Gamers Nexus shows a non trivial difference in their latest benchmarks. Putting a non-K CPU in a B- or H-series board actually limits its performance as you are forced running on slower memory speed.
It’s like that for 10th gen. As B365 is for 9th gen you would need to search Google and not trust me 
Can’t see it being an issue for me I doubt I will do any overclocking for the NAS.
So the PSU you recommend @Adubs the Seasonic Focus Gold is out of stock everywhere here in UK. I’ve had a look around and have been using the PSU tier list on Linus Tech Tips forum not sure whether that’s a good thing to be doing? anyway the next supposedly good PSU I can find in the similar price range is this 450W Be Quiet! https://www.scan.co.uk/products/450w-be-quiet!-straight-power-11-full-modular-80plus-gold-sli-crossfire-quad-rail-375a-135mm-fan-atx
What are your thoughts, is it ok or is there something else you would recommend? Given it is is going in a NAS running not far from where I sleep I’d like it to be relatively low volume in operation.
Speaking of noise, what sort of noise can I expect compared with a Synology or QNAP?
I think that one works fine for this build. The tier list isnt bad though I take issue with some of their nit picks but otherwise its pretty accurate.
My synology unit is basically silent other than drive noise. what volumes you end up with on this nas build will be down to fans and tuning really.
I would recommend unraid if you are new to building servers the gui is quite intuitive and there is a lot of tutorials out there that can help you along the way. Also unraid allows you to upgrade storage as you go so you can add more drives as you need which is helpful if your on a budget or if you want to have an upgrade path that is available if you decide that down the line you need more storage. Furthermore, using plex in a docker is easy to set up using the community applications plugin and you can stream it from basically any device on the network or even outside of it if you are wiling to do some network configuration. Basically a self hosted version of Netflix or hulu. unraid also makes it easy to make shares for steam library or whatever else you may need to store. I’ve not used Free NAS personally but from what I understand while it is a robust and rich experience out of the box, the community support is severely lacking compared to unraid.
1 Like
Is it advisable to run a check on the drives before I shuck them and put them into a NAS? Would WD Lifeguard Diagnostic utility be good enough? I know that with Unraid you use Preclear but I don’t have the NAS built yet so just wanted a solution I can run with the drive connected to my Windows PC then when my NAS is built I can shuck the drives and throw them straight in. I don’t really want to activate my Unraid trial until I’m fully using it on my NAS but the other thing is I also would still like to use my Windows PC while testing the external drive for errors.
Its not a bad idea but I’ve personally never done it. Make of that info what you will.
Do you even preclear your drives or just put them in? I know the drive needs to be zero written for parity but I think the WD utility will do that but I’ve also read that Unraid will want to preclear a drive when it is added?
In my experience the only time you get into trouble is when the drive has existing RAID signatures written on it from previous use. Then you need to clear the drive.
It’s especially bad if the drive was cloned from something you’re already using because then it can cause array corruption.
But if you’re just shucking preused external drives I’ve never seen that cause any issues.
1 Like
So I ran WD Lifeguard and it passed the extended test taking around 15 hours. How many more times is it recommended that I test the drive?
I’d call it good and send it
Just In the process of writing zeros now (think that is required for Unraid anyway?)
nah, you just add the drive to the array and it will format
theres no need to write anything out
So even after zeroing it unraid will want to format it? I thought it had to be zero for parity?
I’m not sure where you got that information
All checks done and have come back good. Just ran CrystalDisk and it says they are WD120EMFZ do we know what these are?
firmware verson will give you a better idea of what it is.
This can be found in device manager right? Says Elements_25A3__1029
nope, you cant see the firmware until you use crystaldiskinfo on it
81.00A81