• I live in East Asia, so I don't have access to the typical goods/products on Newegg (but Taobao and Aliexpress ship quickly). I also don't have the insider info to purchase used enterprise equipment. So I cannot get any Rosewill products and I also cannot get the Navepoint case, but there are a lot of other interesting cabinets (or unbranded OEM stuff).
  
• I also live in a multi-room apartment on a high floor. The "situation" has impacted travel and work, so I'm starting to think about indulging myself by building up my home computing equipment to pursue more computer-related hobbies. My travel budget is getting dumped into this hardware budget. Of course, the significant-other-approval factor is really important, therefore I need to keep the equipment quiet. Plus, having one mini-rack seems much easier to move around, should I ever need to move apartments. The idea of having something the size of a nightstand right next to my desk seems much better than some desktop case and mess of wires. In fact, a nice glass door on it would be really slick looking. Shoot, it might be able to fit a wine cabinet right next to it and even install some rack-mounted audio equipment. I really wonder why this hasn't become more popular... although it probably gives off a late 1960s/early 70s minicomputer feel.
  
• Also, I'm considering other locations where I could place the rack; such as in a living room or if I swap rooms for my home office. I would need to run some more Ethernet cable through the existing conduits to make HDMI&USB over Ethernet possible. Linus Tech Tips' videos on Unraid really opened my eyes.
  
• For a long time I've wanted to do more virtualization from devices that are on 24x7 and build my own personal cloud. I've also wanted to escape the Apple/Google/Microsoft ecosystems as much as I can. The Windows Linux Subsystem caused a lot of issues on my laptop. Once I started calculating the cost of a new Apple MacMini and a Synology/QNAP NAS, I found I only need to invest a little bit more to gain a lot more freedom and options. Some of the services I'm interested in running are: Ansible, PiHole, Joplin, Git, and Plex, HomeAssistant, and whatever else that will be easy to spin up. I also like the idea of snap-shotting system images for backup. I have had small board computer PCs crash on me dozens of times in the past.
  
• I would also like to add a UPS battery backup to the system. Rack mounts for this are convenient and clean. I've experienced power cuts in many countries I've lived in and I expect more in the coming years. I have a 500/250 Internet connection over Fiber/GPON. I need to run some fiber UPC extenders through these conduits to relocate the router if I'm going to put it on battery backup. Of course, I could be wrong that the telco continues to power their devices during a power cut. Mobile LTE service stayed on in the past and it's the same operator. I'm not too confident about running PFsense in a VM, I did run m0n0wall years ago, but I need to keep the Internet up... in fact I've had some outages with the consumer-grade 802.11 access points I have. Who knows, maybe I can get an SFP GPON adapter from my telco provider and a separate 1u server for that purpose.
  
• My current PC is a 2-year-old laptop with an i7-1065G7. I also purchased a Razer Core ThunderBolt 3 eGPU and put an older graphics card inside it for gaming. I do have a steam account, but I mostly play strategy games and older games. I do have a 4k monitor (43"), but I usually run games in 1080p or in windowed mode. Hopefully, I'd be able to sell some of this equipment too to fund this.
  
• My work PC is a 3-year-old ThinkPad which is getting a little slow and old. However, my company allows employees to run their work Windows 10 image off of virtual machines. This PC doesn't need a 3D GPU; a simple video output will do, but I'd like to have a dedicated video output (HDMI/Display port) for it, rather than a virtual desktop. Perhaps I can forgo a PC refresh and get better performance.
  
• I have a decent Aten 4 port USB KVM and my monitor can take up to 6 inputs. (Limited to 4k 60 Hz).
  
• I would also like to look into transcoding if it makes sense(by trying to find a used Quadro P2000).
  
• Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but by running all these machines off of the same Unraid host, I should be able to transfer files much faster than Gigabit Ethernet, right? That would eliminate the need for expensive networking gear.
  
• Rather than have multiple machines, (a dedicated NAS, a dedicated gaming machine, and an army of Raspberry Pis), I thought "why not spend a little bit more and get a lot more functionality?" Plus, I'd like to have direct video output from the machine and not try to pump 60 FPS through a network connection to a desktop software client. Steam Link-type tools seem more like a toy rather than something I would want to use at all times.
  
• This will be an Intel build (I've got nothing against AMD). The thing that really opened my eyes about virtualization is that extra cores don't seem to be impacting the performance of many applications. I can benefit by combining multiple machines into one box and running unRaid. For example, take this video comparing different gaming performance of extreme editions. The top-end, double the price 10980EX (18 core/36 thread) has very similar performance to the 'entry-level' 10900XE (10 core/20 threads). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3JRKhEu0SI
  Although, I expect that some will say that this is just a symptom of games having not yet been coded to take advantage of multiple cores or that I've been in the Windows world too long.
  Using these parts means using the x299 chipset.
  
• I have not really given a lot of thought into how many hard drives to populate this with yet or how to configure them in UnRaid. I really don't know how much storage I'll need. Most motherboards I'm looking at have between 6-8 SATA ports. This won't be a video editing rig. I need more of a long-term data pool. I read that as of today, SSDs are still 4.5-5x the cost of HDDs. However, it seems like we might reach cost parity in a couple of years, which may make a difference if I upgrade the amount of storage later. While SSDs are silent, BlackBlaze's initial data shows that SSDs have about the same failure rate as HDDs. UnRaid's documentation suggests adding the largest-sized parity drive you can.
  
• I also have not thought about cooling. When I got into PC gaming here on SA 20 years ago, water cooling was not reliable... so I'm a bit biased against it. If I have a 3U server case, I should be able to run a decent amount of airflow from front to back, right?
  
• Ultimately, being able to shut down VMs to fine-tune available memory, GPUs, and CPU core count is very attractive.
  
  

• i9-10980XE
  
• A motherboard with an x299 chipset (I guess I need to dig through the UnRaid forums to make sure the one I buy doesn't have any issues)
  
• Case: either a Silver Stone GD08 or Silver Stone CS350. These both seem to be 3U cases.
  
• Storage cache pool drives: I have two new unopened 512 GB 2.5" SSDs
  
• Ram: Should I buy the biggest DIMM I can, (like a single 64 GB one) and then buy more later to expand, and which would increase the memory channels?

politicorific fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Oct 4, 2021

• 4U - The server
  
• 2U - The UPS
  
• 1U - A PDU (fancy power strip)
  
• 1-2Us - some shelves for my router and RPi3 running PiHole.
  
• 2U - 120mm Fans?