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You can check out the data hoarder subreddit, which often has good suggestions. My current setup is Ryzen on an AsRock motherboard (let's me use Unbuffered ECC

You can check out the data hoarder subreddit, which often has good suggestions. My current setup is Ryzen on an AsRock motherboard (let's me use Unbuffered ECC RAM), and you use LSI HBA cards (see art of server on EBAY) which gives you more SATA ports. Still in the range of $500-$1000 (no HDD) depending on how you spec it out, but far more powerful and expandable for anything even close to that price range. If you are going for something in the $200-300 range, you can likely take the same path, but will make compromises in e.g. motherboard choice that won't scale well over time (but can still do a basic 32TB file server with ease).

aborsy 4y ago
Would you mind posting your AsRock hardware? I was considering AsRock x300 mini desktop, but it supports only 2.5” HDDs. I am looking for two 3.5” HDDs, one NVMe and ECC RAM, low power CPU, around $600 or so.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  I am using the B550 Steel Legend (6 full speed SATA ports, which is perfect for raidz2 in ZFS), a Ryzen 5800x (you can't use the g variants with Unbuffered ECC), and my RAM is Kingston ECC Unbuffered DDR4 3200 Model KSM32ES8/16ME. You will need a dedicated graphics card, thankfully they are going down in price, if you are going to run Plex/any kind of transcoding, I recommend looking up "NVENC Encoder Matrix" and finding a card that support h265 and B-Frames (Turing or later). Biggest cost is easily the CPU, a 5600x will run you $190. You could try a 3600 for $150 but I have not tested that with the ECC RAM, which is completely undocumented what kind of support is there it seems. You probably want the 5600x anyways, I was able to overclock the ECC RAM up to 3866MHz and set my infinity fabric FCLK to 1933MHz (the 3600 can't reach that really at all). It's only like 5% more performance though. Might need to look at used parts (Mobo, CPU, GPU) to get it for $600, but I haven't looked up prices and tallied it up.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    Also as a side note, you can't run anything headless (on consumer motherboards), it needs a GPU to post.

aborsy 4y ago

Would you mind posting your AsRock hardware? I was considering AsRock x300 mini desktop, but it supports only 2.5” HDDs. I am looking for two 3.5” HDDs, one NVMe and ECC RAM, low power CPU, around $600 or so.

bick_nyers 4y ago
I am using the B550 Steel Legend (6 full speed SATA ports, which is perfect for raidz2 in ZFS), a Ryzen 5800x (you can't use the g variants with Unbuffered ECC), and my RAM is Kingston ECC Unbuffered DDR4 3200 Model KSM32ES8/16ME. You will need a dedicated graphics card, thankfully they are going down in price, if you are going to run Plex/any kind of transcoding, I recommend looking up "NVENC Encoder Matrix" and finding a card that support h265 and B-Frames (Turing or later). Biggest cost is easily the CPU, a 5600x will run you $190. You could try a 3600 for $150 but I have not tested that with the ECC RAM, which is completely undocumented what kind of support is there it seems. You probably want the 5600x anyways, I was able to overclock the ECC RAM up to 3866MHz and set my infinity fabric FCLK to 1933MHz (the 3600 can't reach that really at all). It's only like 5% more performance though. Might need to look at used parts (Mobo, CPU, GPU) to get it for $600, but I haven't looked up prices and tallied it up.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  Also as a side note, you can't run anything headless (on consumer motherboards), it needs a GPU to post.