Hi, im going to move to a home office soon, we already have a 10gb lan working but you guys can laugh at me for the cheapest data server ever. We rock a Amd fx 6300 with 2 burned cores, 8 gb ram and some old spinning 500gb Hdd, we use Asus xg C100C pci 10gb lan cards on all of our Pcs. WE work on 3dsmax Corona render making architectural renderings. That data server has a raid 5 with 6tb of space, we run an internal backup every day that goes to a separate hdd inside the same pc, and from time to time we make an external backup of all the data.
We use a netgear Xs724Em 24 10gb switch
So its time for an upgrade!
What im looking for to upgrade (if its a bad decision please let me know!) Is the system itself using the same lan card, I was looking for a Ryzen 5 3400G (integrated video) 32 gb ram a 256gb ssd for the system 6tb Hdd of free space using UNRAID with 2 drives of life saving ass, and some m.2 1 tb drive as a cache drive. What im hoping for is to have from 400 to 600mbs of sequential transfers, is it realistic with this hardware? What im missing here, what other good and cheap options are there? Thanks to wendel for this awesome forum btw. and thank you guys!
Welcome to the forum. Just a point on title versus categories, you aren’t asking about software or networking hardware… so you may not get the NAS nerds reading this… Oh wait.
I replied to a similar thread this morning that covers similar points. My response there was to question what the author wanted the server for.
In your case the same question applies. Do you want a NAS, or do you want a rendering rig. The use cases are different.
For a NAS you basically want just easy access storage. The hardware should be low power, cool, quiet and expandable. The 3400G is fine but low end boards may limit pcie lanes so make sure you get one with enough lanes for your lan card and a HBA if you want many drives, or at least plenty of onboard sata. The cache is irrelevant. Just spend your money on disks.
Also it is 2020, 6TiB storage can be had on a Single $100 HDD. You may want to push the boat out a bit and build a bigger pool.
For a render server, the 3400G is a wimp. There are better ryzen 7 CPUs for similar price and you may want to consider GPU acceleration. Consider a motherboard with a couple of m.2 slots so you can raid1 the nvme and have resilience but still fast renders, then archive your completed runs to your NAS. Unraid won’t give you rendering capability so you may need Linux or windows.
If you want to do both, then consider a high core count Ryzen gen 3 or even threadripper, use virtualization to create a NAS and a separate render rig.
The great thing about modern hardware is it is all fast and powerful but it is easy to waste money on something you don’t need. Perhaps if you could describe your workflow you may get some better guidance.
THX for the response! I guess that i cant move the topic to the right forum now 
I forget to mention one important thing! Im looking to have a Win 10 Vm on this machine too, just to install on it a couple of license servers that some of the plugins i use need.
I need this machine just as a NAS, my rendering rigs connected to this are a 2700x and 2 2x xeon 2696v2 servers, i was saying 6tb of storage just because im using 2.92 tb right now, as for hdds im looking for this https://www.newegg.com/seagate-ironwolf-st6000vn0033-6tb/p/N82E16822172057?reviews=all&Description=hdd&cm_re=hdd--22-172-057--Product 6tb segate for $160 each drive.
What kind of performance can i expect from this? Or what else you would change?
THX again!
Also what would be the use of the HBA card? im looking for 8sata connector boards for a start, if i need more i would need to use a raid card?
One more thing! the only way to have good read and write performance is to use and entire array of ssd? or there is a way to mix those?
Thanks for the additional information
In that case you don’t want the 3400G, it isn’t designed for multiple virtual machines. It is an APU designed for low end rigs. Go with a Ryzen 7 and get more cores and more features.
Seagate ironwolf drives would write at between 150Mbps and 200Mbps per drive. If you want more performance than that go all SSD.
That was an option depending on your mobo selection. Some only come with 4 SATA ports. A HBA gives you more and can give you enterprise features, like hotswap or ‘RAID’. Note L1 members usually say two things when someone mentions raid:
- Raid is not a backup
- traditional raid Is bad for disks over 4TiB.
Whatever your views on the above statements, these days RAID arrays are less relevant for performance (just use a single large NVME drive as your scratch disk) and you should considering tiering your drives for interim and long term storage. Usually people put the VMs on flash as well for IOPs.