Hello all, this is my first (and hopefully not too long-winded) post. I have a reasonable amount of computer experience, as my first computer was a used Apple III with the 5 1/4” floppy that I can remember playing Number Munchers on the green CRT’s, and toying around on on various DOS, Win 3.1 / 95/98 operating systems until my father purchased me a brand new HP Pavillion when Windows XP first came out with a CD burner drive, 40gb Fujitsu HDD, and 128mb AGP Video card. Since that time, I have spent the last 20 years building and repairing PC’s, up to my current day 5900x Ryzen / RX9070XT as I still play computer games to this day. I have made the switch from windows to Kubuntu Linux as my daily driver for the last year and a half.
Anyways, I have been running a homelab supermicro server for the last 4 years on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and after performing an update and having it fail and take my hardware RAID5 array of 36TB nearly full of data offline for several days (scaring me senseless), I feel it is time to move to something I can understand and manage a little easier; thus my interest in truNAS. Thankfully all data is readable, as my last 1:1 backup was 11 months ago and some important data had been added since then. This server was predominantly for Plex and data storage, and was much too overkill for my needs (enterprise 2011 era Supermicro X8DT6-A, Dual Xeon e5649, and 128GB of EEC RAM).
SInce I will be re-building my HDD array on ZFS Z-1 from the NTFS is currently is, I wish to upgrade my hardware to something more modern, but would like others opinions on how to go about it. My goals are long term stability, as I usually wait around 8-10 years before upgrading hardware. I expect up to 4 plex users streaming at once. I may also host a minecraft server that doesn’t see more than 4 simultaneous users. I am not super cheap with the hardware, however I would like to have it fairly power efficient and have the CPU cooling fan based, and fit under the hood of my 2u Supermicro CSE-825 Case. For architecture I was thinking a desktop Intel 1700 or 1200 socket based system and CPU which uses Intel Quick Sync for Plex hardware transcoding support. My main concerns are should I run ECC Memory? And what PCI-E HBA should I use that supports 8 x 8TB 3.5” Hard Drives that connects using my existing SFF-8087 cables without bottlenecking? Let me know what you guys would do in my position.
Thank you, and look forward to learning much more.
Ryan