BUILD all SSD/silent plex build: please advice

[france1967]

Hello everyone
I'm here to ask for advice to you experts.
A friend of mine has a qnap, and after that I have spoken for a year of wonders of freenas and ZFS, he is convinced and asked me to make for him a plex server with the following characteristics:
- 4k transcoding capabilities
- small form factor, so ITX
- opportunity to expand disk capacity in the future
- but above all, and this must be the main feature, really silent

For now I thought about:
cpu: xeon e3 1230/1
ram: ecc crucial
case: fractal node 304
psu: seasonic fanless p-520
all noctua fans and heatsink
and so far it was easy :)
for the rest I had initially thought of a solution all ssd based.
Starting with 6x1tb ssd, consumer gear, sandisk ultra II or samsung 850 evo, to contain costs, and in the future have the possibility of double them using six 3.5" -> 2x 2.5" adapter, so I could fit in the node 304 up to 12 2.5" units.
but reading some old posts on the forum seem to have understood that ssd's in zfs have problems of reliability and/or duration.
Is it always a problem, or things have changed? (just wondering: raid6 vs raidz2 makes any difference for ssd's?)
Or do you think I can use some (min 6 max 12 units) 2.5" spinning disks? 1 tb wd red or 2 tb wd green? or else?
Any of you have experience with this type of discs? Are they silent?
As for the motherboard can you recommend a card that has at least 12 sata3 ports?
Thanks in advance!

 

[Yatti420]

Sure why not .. 4k may need some power/cooling.. Sure for up to 12 but need mobo ports or add-on card.. Alot of cables etc.. Small cases..

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Or do you think I can use some (min 6 max 12 units) 2.5" spinning disks? 1 tb wd red or 2 tb wd green? or else?

ST2000LM009?

 

[Yatti420]

Go for red over greens for NAS use..

 

[SweetAndLow]

I think zfs needs some tuning when it comes to ssd pools. The default configuration probably isn't best.

 

[france1967]

ok guys, first of all thanks a lot for your replys :)

@Yatti420: you're right! probably it will not be easy, but with some good cable management perhaps I can do it
regarding power/heat issues, I already use on one of my server a 1230v3 with noctua nh-d9l. Heat/noise is ok and it's more then enough for one 4k transcoding.
One stream use about 70% cpu. With 2 streams come (obviously) heavy stutters. I think xeon e3 Vx series is not capable of two 4k streams for now.

@SweetAndLow: can you please explain what tuning I have to do? Is it a problem with all kind of raid arrays (ex raid6), or only with zfs?

Now my questions are:
1- best option for noise is ssd. can I use them (samsung 850 evo? any advice?) with an expected life of at least 5-6 years? (remeber, main use will be plex server for video and music)
2- if ssd It isn't a feasible way, 2.5" spinning disks (ex WD red) are in real life use silent enough to be defined noiseless? (I need to put the nas in the same room where I listen to music and watch movies)
3- asrock E3C226D2I + ibm m1015. Is it the best option? alternative option/advice?
4- ibm m1015. if I connect 8 sata ssd to it, they will run at full speed sata3 or slow down to sata2?

thanks again to all who want to participate in the discussion

 

[Mirfster]

ibm m1015. if I connect 8 sata ssd to it, they will run at full speed sata3 or slow down to sata2?

The IBM M1015 handles 6Gbps

 

[sremick]

You don't need SSD to be virtually silent. No one can hear my box (sits right next to the couch) and it has 6 spinny drives and 4 fans. But feel free to use it as inspiration even if you're going SSD.