First time building a NAS, $2000 budget

[Shipwreck]

As the title says this will be my first time building a NAS. The server will be used mainly to store all of my data and transcode 1080p movies to about three different devices using plex. I'll be running freeNAS on the box so ECC ram is included. Don't factor in the hard drives into the $2k.

[Superfish1000]

Why does everyone feel the need to make a new thread for their NAS build...? There are hundreds now. Go read them.
rant over

IMO
Get an old Opteron 6276 CPU and mobo. IPMI is the shit. Get a metric crap-ton of ECC RAM and call it a day. I personally got a dual socket Opteron board from Supermicro, 1U case, 32GB DDR3 ECC and two 6276 CPUs off eBay for $305. I had to order a replacement drive backplane for SAS/SATA instead of SCSI and a new IO shield since its part of the case frame and wasn't compatible with my mobo. Those added another $40 to the mix.

I got 8TB WD My Books and pulled out the drives to get the WD Red NAS drives they use in them for $100 less than the actual drive.
You can find my HDD thread here.

I just ordered 24TB worth of HDDs

So I just ordered 24TB worth of HDDs... 3 x 8TB WD My Book 8TB drives that I'm going to pull apart and put in a server. Based on my research they are either WD Reds or HGST Ultrastar drives. I'm really really hoping they are Ultrastar drives because those are $500 enterprise drives and each drive only cost me $230. I'm making this topic so that other people can know what I found out and to get suggestions on how to configure them in my server. I was doing some reading and saw that RAID 5 is generally seen as a bad idea, especially for large drives, and thought I would ask the community for their thoughts. If anyone has questions let me know otherwise I'll post my findings when I get them and pull them apart.

My parts list you can find here.

Post what new thing you acquired recently?

[image] Angles Envy: Thank you @Destructor for introducing me to this. [image] Dual socket AMD Opteron 6276, 32GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC, Super Micro H8DGU-F, Super Micro CSE-815TQ or something: Because I f-ing can! [image] 4 x Mellanox 10Gbps SFP+ cards, 8 x Finisar 4.25Gbps transceivers, TP-Link MC220L Ethernet to SFP adapter. [image] Server sitting under my monitor. Also bought Cisco FET-10G transceivers and some 1Gbps simplex transceivers that I haven't gotten in yet.

I'm going to make a thread this weekend because my server cabinet is almost done and I'm going to start setting it up as my NAS/web server/game server/plex server/encoding server/caching proxy & firewall.