Help with picking parts.

[tyanu]

Hello people,

 

I am planning to build my own Unraid rig and i would like your help to make it right on the first try.

As a PC enthusiast i have some knowledges about building PCs, but as this is more server oriented i am not so sure about what parts i should use.

 

I would like to have a multi-purpose unraid server. At first, i'd like it to be able to do the following things : NAS, personal cloud, media center/web browsing.

 

I already made a test (software) on a dummy PC in order to know what to use.

 

I'll have Unraid + Syncthing dockers + a VM running a windows (10 probably) which will be my media center/browsing Pc.

 

The idea is to get my gaming pc to be plugged only to one screen, opposed to the 3 it is plugged now, and control the 2 others screens runned by the VM with Synergy for example.

 

Basically, it would look like this :

| Browsing screen (VM) | Gaming screen (gaming PC) | TV (VM) |

           ↑                                        ↑                                           ↑

       Desk                                 Desk                                      Wall mounted in the living room.

 

I will be able to reuse some parts of my actual rig such as a geforce gtx 970, and maybe the 8GO ddr3 ram.

 

Which parts do you recommend to build what i want ? NAS and cloud will probably be one 24/7, VM will be on only when i'm gaming or watching movies.

 

thanks in advance.

 

 

[tyanu]

• What is your budget?  
  • I don't have a budget yet as i am gonna buy parts one by one in the next coming months. But i would like to have  a not so power hungry unraid so i don't have my electricity bill blowing up my bank account.
     
• How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need?
  • I'll add drives later in the future. At first, i was thinking of going with a ssd for cache, and 2 1TB drives for data + 1 for partition
     
• Is expandability important to you?  If so, what's your long term goal?
  • it is as i will probably keep my server evolving over the next few months
     
• Are you interested in running any unRAID Add Ons (see here)?  If so, which ones?  Be specific.
  • I'm not sure if i'll need addons or not. I know for sure i'll be running at least one Dockers and one VM
     
• Do you want to run green/low power drives or faster 7200 rpm drives?  If you don't have a specific need for 7200 rpm drives, then choose green drives.
  • I'll go for the green drives.
     
• Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build?  This includes drives.
  • I'll recycle a few parts of my current gaming rig such as a gtx 970 and maybe the ddr3 ram.
     
• If you already have parts in mind, please oh pretty please post links to them so that we don't have to look them up.
  • Except the parts i'll recycle from my current PC, and then green 1TB drives, i don't have any precise idea.

[TBSCamCity]

Some more things you need to think about too are what kind of case you want and whether you are comfortable buying used hardware or do you want only new?

 

For example, I run all used server equiptment besides the hard drives of course. All of my servers are rack-mounted and have hot swap hard drive bays so I can replace or upgrade hard drives easily. In order to better give you some advice it would be beneficial to know what kind of footprint (how big of a machine you want) you are looking for and whether noise is a huge concern or not? For my main machine I just ordered silent Supermicro power supplies to replace my existing ones because noise is a huge concern for me so you can have quiet server equiptment.