I am new to NAS/PLEX but willing to learn and excited about the possibilities of it. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable as far as hardware is concerned but new to Unraid and Plex.
Here are the parts I have come up with which are not set in stone but just a little guideline. Please help and give me other ideas as you wish.
Here is the list:
CPU: Intel Core i5-12400 2.5 GHz 6-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: ARCTIC Freezer 34 eSports DUO CPU Cooler
Motherboard: The main idea here is it has 6 sata ports for the hard drives and a 2.5 GB Lan. ASRock B660M Steel Legend Micro ATX LGA1700
Memory: I’m looking at 16 or 32 heard you can go lower. The prices do not seem that bad though. Team T-FORCE VULCAN Z 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory
Storage: Have read conflicting things on having an NVME SSD for cache so not really sure if needed. Also I’m not 100% positive on 4tb or 6tb hard drives but thinking of having at least 4 as to have raid 6? WD Black SN770 either 500gb or 1tb. For the actual media storage drives Seagate IronWolf 6 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
Case: Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: Could I go with less? Corsair RM (2021) 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
OS: Most Likely going with Unraid and using Plex with it.
Looking forward to your input. Glad to be here as well.
The 12th gen cpu is not necessarily what I would go with, but it’s fine if you aren’t super concerned with power usage and heat. If you can, I would definitely enable software ECC. ASUS used to have this feature on their prosumer boards, but I’m not sure if they still do, or even if your ASRock board has something similar. If your mobo supports it, I would turn it on.
In terms of UnRAID, I definitely recommend it. If you have all the same drives, I would use ZFS, which you can find in the community applications. Do note, however, that if you do use this, you will need at least a couple of throwaway drives for an array. I’m not quite sure how exactly to use an ssd cache, but you can probably find other guides online. You don’t necessarily need to use NVMe, but you can if you want to. I, personally, use SATA drives as a cache.
It’s quite efficient, don’t worry about that. It’s just the high-end 12th-Gen Chips that take a lot of power.
This Builds looks like a good and balanced one overall.
But consider going with a lower Wattage PSU, unless if you’re planning to upgrade it with a very power hungry GPU or the like in the future. Maybe a high quality 400W Unit?
Having a PSU that fits your build will save much more power than going with a different CPU, since most of the time your system will likely use 50-100 Watts from what your parts look like.
Give this a try for a general idea of power usage:
just as an alternative, you could do an ASRock AM4 board with a ryzen PRO APU, and then it would support ECC RAM and you could run native ZFS through a distro like TrueNAS. TrueNAS also supports containers and plex (and EMBY) is available for it also.
I agree with @Zedicus, in that Freenas is a good choice for free software. The only reason that I use UnRAID is because I have different size disks, and I prefer the way that the UnRAID webgui handles docker. The community applications help, too.
Downsizing your power supply is not necessarily needed, and I’m not so sure it would help with power consumption. You don’t need to have a power supply that matches your power draw, it can (and should be) be above. Don’t undersize it. Especially with some recent hardware, it helps to oversize your psu in case of power spikes. Downsizing it isn’t going to lower your power consumption in any meaningful way, it’s just going to reduce your headroom. If anything, it might reduce your psu’s efficiency, raising your power consumption slightly. Again, not really in any meaningful way, though.
