For about the last 7-8 years I have been running the following setup for my Plex server and it has suited me very well. I'm thinking about finally upgrading the Motherboard/CPU/Controllers and would appreciate recommendations.
Current Setup
- Supermicro CSE-846 24 Bay
- H8DM2-2 Supermicro Motherboard
- BPN-SAS-846TQ Backplane
- Dual AMD Opteron 2431's
- 16GB Memory
- 3 x Sonnet Tempo SATA Gen 2 PCI-X Controller Cards
- PC Power and Cooling 750 watt PSU
- Windows Server 2016 + SnapRAID + DrivePool
- 24 various 3.5 SATA drives for 89TB usable
This server is housed in an basement media closet and noise was a concern. I ended up with the desktop PSU + speedfan software to get the noise level tolerable while maintaining safe temps. The only other complaint is that with this setup that a majority of the drives are not properly visible to the OS. They function fine and no issues within SnapRAID, but if I pull SMART data only about 5-6 unique drives show up and the rest are duplicates.
I'm fortunate enough to be within driving distance of a Microcenter and figured one of the Motherboard/CPU/Memory bundles they offer would be fine. If you have a budget of around $500 what would you suggest upgrading to?