NAS Rebuild / R710 Replacement Plan¶
Planned replacement for the ageing R710-era hardware and the nearly-full Holly array (26T, 91% used as of July 2026 — see Unraid).
Build list¶
| Component | Part | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Chassis | Logic Case LC-4480-WH 4U rackmount — 15× internal 3.5" bays, 480mm depth | Purchased |
| Motherboard | ASUS ProArt X870E | Purchased |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 9950X | To buy |
| RAM | TBD (X870E = dual-channel DDR5; 96–192GB depending on budget/ECC-UDIMM support) | To buy |
| HBA | Existing HBA carried over; upgrade to Broadcom 9500-16i when funds allow | Have / upgrade later |
| PSU | 1000W | To buy |
| GPU (LLM) | 12–16GB VRAM card for local LLM inference | To buy |
| GPU (Plex) | Intel Arc A380 for transcode | To buy — see note |
Does the 9950X make the A380 unnecessary?
No, for encode. The 9950X's RDNA2 iGPU decodes AV1 but has no AV1 encode, and its H.264/HEVC encode quality/density is far below Intel QuickSync. The A380 brings AV1 encode plus excellent HEVC/H.264 low-power transcode — the right Plex card if AV1 output or many simultaneous transcodes matter. If Plex only ever direct-plays or does the odd single H.264 transcode, the iGPU could carry it and the A380 can wait.
Considerations for the migration¶
- 15 bays vs Holly's current 6-data-disk array — room to move to larger disks and finally add headroom (several disks at 94–96%)
- Holly is a VM on pve2 (VM 110, USB boot + PCI passthrough); the new build should be planned as bare-metal Unraid or a hypervisor decision made explicitly
- The LLM GPU supersedes the retired laptop-side Ollama experiment — inference moves server-side
- Existing HBA limits: plan the array layout so the 9500-16i swap later is a recable, not a rebuild
- Revisit the (currently absent) backup jobs as part of the same project — new capacity should include a backup target, not just more primary storage
Open questions¶
- RAM: capacity + whether to chase ECC UDIMM support on X870E
- Which 12–16GB GPU for LLM (used 4070 Ti Super / 4080 class vs waiting)
- Unraid licence transfer vs fresh; array migration strategy (disk-by-disk rebuild vs rsync to new array)