Home TrueNAS SCALE Build - Looking for advice on CPUs/MBs

[omeganot]

Hello all,

I've been perusing the forums (and other forums, and other resources) for a few months now in anticipation of building a new machine to replace a 10yr build (using consumer parts, and Windows Storage Spaces...yep) with something a little more robust and ready for the next decade in my home. I'm spinning a bit right now on parts selection because I'm unfamiliar with server-grade hardware.

This machine will be used for storing and serving up data for my personal use and the use of my family. There is a combination of "I care about it" (photos, home video, docs, etc.) and "replaceable" (movies, install files, pre-configured VMs) data that I'll be storing. Most of the time I anticipate it will sit fairly idle, backing itself up to the cloud. The heaviest load is likely Plex, with a combination of locally served media and transcoded files to family or wherever we're traveling to, and any other processing necessary to prepare the media. It'll run a few VMs/Docker containers as well, like a family Minecraft server, a VM for any Windows-based services I need, but probably not much else. It's the VM/Docker support that has me looking at SCALE over CORE, and from the reading of better experiences for those transcoding using SCALE, or at worst throwing up an Ubuntu VM to handle it for me.

So far I have:

• Case: Meshify 2 XL (I don't have/want a rack at this time)
• HBA: LSI 9207-8i
• Drives - 4x 12TB HGST HC520 (Plus older 8TB and 4TB drives from an old system I can use until they die - thinking separate pools for separate purposes).
• PSU (I have an old KingWin 1000W 80+ Platinum I could use, or I'll get something appropriate)

What I'm stuck on is the CPU/MB. For Plex, I'd like to get an Intel chip with an iGPU that is preferably Gen 11 or newer. Why go with Gen 11 and have something so new when earlier CPUs can transcode plenty of concurrent streams? Specifically, Gen 11 seems to be when they introduced two parallel HEVC encoding pipelines. My hope is that the Plex of now or the Plex of the future can take advantage of these to provide more efficient transcodes to me when I'm traveling, or something other than Plex can. If I'm completely off-base here on these capabilities, I'd love to hear more, but perhaps that's the subject of a different thread or a DM, or the reasoning that I should go with something a little older, or a separate machine just for transcoding. I'm open to these options and was merely hoping to simplify with one machine.

This seems to present me with a few CPU/chipset combinations:

• Xeon E-2300G chips (like the E-2324G) on C252/256 chipset boards, LGA1200, DDR4
• Xeon W-1300 chips (like the W-1350) on W480/W580 boards, LGA1200, DDR4
  • Seems the W480 boards may need a BIOS update to support W-1300 CPUs, so I'd check for compatibility if this was an option
• Alder Lake Core chips, (like the i5-12500) on W680 boards, LGA1700, DDR5 likely

Given the above, I'm curious about any experiences or recommendations you have regarding these CPU/chipset combinations.

• What should I know about the E and W series chips, and the differences between them and their chipsets?
• If the E-2324G and the W-1350 were the same price, which would you get for a build like this? The W-1350 has 6 cores instead of 4, yet we're relying on workstation MBs over server MBs at that point.
• DDR5 ECC sucks for price and availability. I'm not opposed to it, but I recognize the issue and that's more of what got me looking at E and W Xeons and DDR4 boards.
• How are the W-series chipsets? Seems like they're server-branded, ECC-supporting versions of Z-series consumer chips. Likewise, what does one really get with the C-series chipsets?

Any recommendations or advice you have to offer is greatly appreciated. I'm spinning here trying to make choices on things I don't have the experience with or that I can find through searches, so I'm hoping to turn to the good people here who may know a bit more about this than me.

Thanks much!