NAS Rebuild / R710 Replacement Plan¶
Planned replacement for the ageing R710-era hardware (pve2, and eventually Holly) and the nearly-full Holly array (26T, 91% used as of July 2026 — see Unraid).
Build delayed (2026-07-30) — AI-driven price inflation
The build is on hold: AI demand has inflated component prices. The board
and chassis are already in hand; the rest waits for prices to settle. When
the build lands it joins the Proxmox cluster and becomes the second
wol-pbs wake-on-LAN backup host (see Proxmox).
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 | 2× 32GB Kingston Server Premier DDR5-5600 ECC UDIMM (KSM56E46BD8KM-32HA) = 64GB | Decided — to buy; see note |
| Data drives | New Seagate Exos X18 18TB SATA (ST18000NM000J), ~£275–305 UK — chosen over ~£360 refurb SAS | Decided — to buy |
| HBA | Existing HBA carried over; upgrade to Broadcom 9500-16i when funds allow | Have / upgrade later |
| PSU | 1000W — kept at this size for future GPU headroom | To buy |
| GPU (LLM) | — | Dropped — see note |
| GPU (Plex) | Quadro P400 2GB carried over from pve2 (vfio); Intel Arc A380 later if needed | Have (carry-over) |
RAM: run two DIMMs, not four
The X870E is dual-channel DDR5; populating all four slots drops AM5 memory speed to ~DDR5-3600, so the plan is two 32GB ECC UDIMMs (64GB) at DDR5-5600.
Local-LLM GPU dropped (2026-07-30)
The 12–16GB inference card is out of the build — the Claude + Codex subscriptions cover inference, superseding both the retired laptop-side Ollama experiment and the earlier server-side GPU plan. The PSU stays at 1000W so a GPU can still be added later if that changes.
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. Interim plan: the Quadro P400 2GB comes over from pve2 (vfio passthrough) and carries Plex; the A380 is a later upgrade if AV1 encode or higher transcode density is needed.
Considerations for the migration¶
- 15 bays vs Holly's current 6-data-disk array — room to move to larger disks (the 18TB Exos X18s) and finally add headroom (several disks at 90–96%)
- 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
- Existing HBA limits: plan the array layout so the 9500-16i swap later is a recable, not a rebuild
- Backup coverage now exists (PBS on the wake-on-LAN pve3 since July 2026); this build extends it as the second wol-pbs host and cluster node rather than starting from zero
Open questions¶
- Unraid licence transfer vs fresh; array migration strategy (disk-by-disk rebuild vs rsync to new array)
- Timing — on hold until component prices come back down