Before I start, here is my current build:
- i5-4670K w/ ZALMAN CNPS9700
- EVGA GeForce GTX 470
- ASRock Z87M Extreme4
- G.SKILL Sniper Series 1866 8GB (2 x 4GB)
- Raidmax 850W 80 Plus Gold
- Samsung MZ-7TD250BW 840 250GB
- HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB
- Western Digital Caviar Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive WD20EARS
- SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3EG HD203WI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
- LG WH10LS30 10X Blu-ray Burner
- Rosewill RANGER-M Dual Fans MicroATX Case
Before you ask about the GPU, I used to own an XFX 7970 Black Edition, but I didn't game for months, so I sold it, bought an HE-400, and installed my old 470. The Samsung 2TB was cannibalized from an external drive and the WD Greed Drive is ancient.
Anyways, my free time as of late has primarily been focused on media and not games. I have around 250 Blu-rays backed up as MKVs, around 500GBs of Music, an equal amounts worth of TV shows, and 1.2TBs of Anime. I need a NAS. I already use Plex Media Server to access my media on the go, but it does seem like a waste of energy to leave my desktop on constantly for the convenience. I also don't feel as comfortable leaving the WD / Samsung Drive (this one may be on the way out) on. What I was thinking of may be a bit out there though. I have been wanting to build a mini-itx build for a while.
I want to keep components from my micro-atx build for my NAS and then use what I can for a mini-itx HTPC / gaming build. Right now it looks like this. Any items in bold are components that I would move from the old system.
HTPC Build:
- i5-4670K
- ASRock B85M-ITX
- G.SKILL Sniper Series 1866 8GB (2 x 4GB)
- Samsung MZ-7TD250BW 840 250GB
For that build, the case is something I haven't decided on yet, which is why I don't have a PSU or GPU chosen either. My main concern is the Motherboard. Can I save money by buying a B85? I don't know much about overclocking K parts on B85 chipsets, but I do know that unofficially it's been done in the past. It would save me $50 as compared to the Z87 part.
Here is my potential NAS build:
- Intel Pentium G3220
- ASRock Z87M Extreme4
- G.SKILL Value 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
- Raidmax 850W 80 Plus Gold
- HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB (not sure how many)
- Rosewill RANGER-M Dual Fans MicroATX Case
- I may also buy a 10gbit NIC on Ebay for cheap.
I have a few questions regarding NAS builds. It would support up to one home user and up to two users over the internet on Plex (I have 100Mbps upload). What RAID array or other option should I go for? RAID 5? Is it worth running a small SSD for the OS or is a mechanical good enough? I've heard that there are ways to integrate an SSD into the array to boost performance. How is this done? How much memory should I go for if I may want to use this build for a game server potentially as well? Could I get away with just buying one more 4TB and using those two 2TBs in the Raid array, or do they all have to be the same size? Is a Platinum PSU necessary?
The biggest issue is that CPU. It's pathetic. If I went this route, I may have to convert all of my MKVs to H.264s so that it wouldn't have to transcode everything (Plex can't use direct play for MKVs unless the video is H.264 and the audio is AAC). My 4670K @ 4.0GHz seems to use a lot of horsepower to trancscode rips. There is no concrete evidence from my own testing or online to know how much CPU horsepower is needed for Plex transcoding. I tested one 20mbps 1080p transcode and two 3mbps 720p transcodes playing simultaneously and it ran smoothly on all devices. However as a test, I tried using my i3-2370m in my laptop to transcode one Blu-ray rip and it stuttered at any bitrate. Obviously that CPU is terrible for any heavy lifting, but it's not that much worse than the lower end dual cores on the desktop front.
The other, perhaps more cost effective option is to just build a brand new AMD NAS.
This post is long, so I apologize, but I've never built a NAS before. Thanks for any help. I posted a similar thread elsewhere, but no one on that website answered.