I have 8 x 8tb disks and 3x 6tb (all seagate ironwolf), two ssds, and 2.m.2’s. As well as a 2080ti gpu. I have been using unraid but can’t deal with the poor performance and lack of proper raid anymore. The other thing I would like is to have 10gb on board networking and enough ‘lanes’ to avoid bottle necks. Spare pcie x8 slots also wouldn’t go amiss so I can add more disks with an HBA. I am running an old ryzen 5 chip and asrockrack x570 board at the moment with 64 GB Ecc ram.
So here is the question. What would be a good suggestion for a new cpu and mobo. Doesn’t have to be new (just new for me). Loads of transcoding, messing around with vm’s, docker. Basically a great combo for not crazy bleeding edge money.
You’re right, RYZEN will not get you there. I ran into similar problems. I’ve maxed out my MSi X470 Proxmox server and had to pull out the GPU I was using to speed up a Windows VM in order to fit a 10GB NIC. Also the built in network on that was crap so I added a 4 port NIC.
Actually maybe you are there and just need seek an even more expensive X570 motherboard and keep everything else the same. Maybe not…
You could go back into the past and look at Xeon systems. Ali Express sell some new PC boards with recycled Xeons and tonnes of ECC RAM. They have plenty of lanes but the Chinese don’t seem to want to fit all the PCIe and M.2 sockets a server builder would want.
Also because you’re fitting an RTX 2080ti you need a good gaming CPU so the Xeons are not really the best choice, clock speed too slow. You should use a 5800X or better.
You can save on slots by getting an HBA card that supports 16 drives.
A little trick with the 10GB SFP+ card is get a dual port, that way you can connect two PCs without a hub, just tell Proxmox or TrueNAS that they are bridged.
Thinking about this some more, this is what I went through, stick with RYZEN and find a way of making this work. EPYC is the answer you need if you can afford it.
More thinking, build two servers, one Proxmox with the RTX 2080ti and SSD drives for your VMs. The other with TrueNAS that’s simply filled to the brim with hard drives. That’s the kind of thinking that got me four RYZEN based servers, be warned.