I’ll consider 7900 not sure if i’ll have that many things running at the same time. At first i’ll just use it to test linux distros, play with them and learn their ways. Nothing mission critical, but I dont want to loose anything, hence those raid1s. I got the 58gb optanes for less than 60 bucks both.
At first I was sceptical about the a620, but seeing the comparison and all, same power phase, ddr5 support, pcie4, wifi, lan and all. All I will miss is m.2 gen5x4 and gen4x4 for gen4x4 and gen3x4 and 2 usb2s. Optanes are gen3, but i’ll keep it in mind if I find a good deal.
Asus ProArt X670E-Creator WiFi have about the same features and supports ECC which you’d probably want and is in the same price range. In worst case you can pop in a separate AHCI controller or Broadcom.
Not sure where you live but you also have the MG07 or MG09 series, Exos would likely be my second choice over WD or IronWolf. Have you looked at Toshiba’s N-series?
SSDs: I’d highly recommend that you go for Crucial’s P5 Plus series (NVME), they’re relatively cheap and proven to be reliable (incl firmware). Might not be the best performing drives out there but will do just fine for your applications. I’ve seen too many midrage SSDs from WD just die and there are reports of odd behaviours with WD ones overall. The newer ones from Seagate looks interesting but I don’t think they’re wildly adopted. Solidigm P44 Pro are also solid choices depending on availability.
As for SATA SSDs I’d go for Marvell (controller) based ones, they just work and perform about as good as you’d expect for a SATA SSD. WD are by far easiest to find however there are multiple revisions out of the for example Blue 3D SATA variants and not all uses Marvell controllers or the same kind of flash memory. It’s the same story about the Sandisk branded ones which isn’t surprising given its the same parent company.
The X99 system is probably decent, the watercooler can be on its last legs though. Unless you need better peformance go for that one initially.
Given you’re tageting relatively new hardware (AM5) you’re likely better off running a FreeBSD 14 or a Linux distro running a relatively recent kernel.
Hey brother, thanks for jumping in. The nas server I’m already closed in on the parts. Definately exos drives, easier to get for me. Got some Solidigm p44 and optane p1600x for nvmes. Not looking for sata ssds yet, but I’ll try to find some Intel 4520 when the time comes. Oh, and ill go LGA 1700, it’s just 2 of us streaming, and we usually watch tv together, so the igpu should be more than enough.
Latest conv is about a VM server I’m tryng to build. Almost fully decided on that one, check my latest ppp post. For this one I’m fully set on itx.
