Helping Choosing Motherboard

[Kamzu]

Hello everyone!

I bought some refurbished 12tb hard drives and I'm considering building an 8 bay upgrade to my current server.

Currently I'm running:
Processor: Xeon E3-1230 v3
Motherboard: Asrock E3C226D2I
RAM: 16 gb of ram
HDD: 6 X 4TB Drives

I'm looking at the myriad of server boards available from Asrock and Supermicro and I'm overwhelmed by the choices . I would like to keep the motherboard/processor combo around $1000 USD.

My use case is really for the home and really casual.

File storage for the family
Plex - 4K transcoding

I'm looking at the MBD-X12SDV-4C-SP6F, seems to tick a lot of the boxes for me. The features I would really like to have are:

10gb networking
IPMI
m.2 on board storage drives (Currently my boot drives are m.2 attached via USB)
Preferably more than 32gb ram capable

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Thanks, and I apologize if there is another post that is similar to this.

 

[JohnDigital]

There's lots of great options out there and if you have an extra grand to get it done, then by all means do it. ServeTheHome is a great source for recommendations as well. I propose something you may have not thought about.

I was kind of in the same boat as you wanting to upgrade and cash is always a consideration in my household, but ultimately decided it was far cheaper to just offload plex to a dedicated machine (SFF) and mount storages via NFS to it. Using my similar to yours board albeit with 32gb ram.

These SFF machines are had for incredibly cheap and are quite capable with 8th gen or better QSV. Try to locate one with no Operating System as any flavor of Linux is very adept at the handling of a Plex server and decreases the price considerably. I found mine at a local computer shop with NO OS/HDD but with 32gb of RAM for $75! When I needed to add disks I added a disk shelf to the operation. Got it all done for well under $500 with the cable and and HBA with external ports. Works incredibly actually.

Of course there are power implications (fairly negligible), bit of white noise in the basement, space factors and whatnot but now my NAS just does the filing and doesn't even sweat doing it. Still running GbE to everything as well.