Building my Plex server

I use plex for pictures and music and videos. It is a nice server package, and there are client apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone.

I've used an old computer (at least 10 years old now) and it's time for an upgrade, the original computer is an i5, cannot be upgraded to win11, and I has a fast 8 sata ssd raid array with an lsi raid card with 10 year old drivers, and it pauses every so often. Also, the array is only about 1.4 Terabyte (since Samsung SSDs were expensive at the time).

So I decided to make a new server, and have state of the art raid. So, clearly I need SSD drives, and the fastest is the m.2 units that are effectively on the PCI bus itself (sata, pata, sas, scsi all need a controller between the PCI bus and the SSD drive).

I went looking for raid cards for m.2 and found confusing results. Some of them were wildly expensive, and some were really cheap, what the hey?

OK, so the expensive ones have a dedicated controller, fancy software, etc... yuck, cards from $600 to $1,200 dollars. So how did the cheap ones work? Ahh... well they are NOT really a RAID card, i.e. they do not do the RAID function themselves, they just present the m.2 ssd drives INDEPENDENTLY to the operating system... how does that work? I found the most common is from ASUS, and it needs "bifurcation" of the PCI bus.

Say what? OK literally bifurcation means split in two... but in the motherboard world, it has been transmogrified (look it up) into meaning being able to split the PCI express lanes into independent groups.

OK, so the ASUS Hyper card has 4 M.2 sockets, and what you want is to split the 16 lanes into 4 sets of 4 lanes, each set of 4 connected to one of the 4 m.2 ssd modules... so inexpensive and fast.

The issue was doing the research finding a motherboard that allowed this bifurcation setup... known as 4x4x4x4 .... very few motherboards and processors support this... normally this is in servers and xeon processors... now the savings in the simple raid card and standard m.2 is wiped out with a $1,700 motherboard and $1,000 xeon processor.

I kept looking and found an inexpensive (relatively) solution that keeps my performance.

The motherboard is an ASUS ROG Hero Crossfire motherboard ($700), and an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9900X (About $350)

Lower level AMD cannot do this, and few motherboards do this. Also, I don't need gaming support, so while there is only one 16x PCI express slot that can do this, the onboard AMD video card is fine (especially with a 12 core procesor!!).

It's the least expensive solution I can figure out that will let me use the inexpenxive and fast ASUS Hyper memory card. I'm running PCI 5 also, motherboards, the RAID card, and the Samsung 990 PRO ssd... so no compromise on speed.

I did buy 4 TB ssds, and figured I would get about 12 TB on raid 5.

talk about the bios setup, turn on raid for nvme, turn off fast boot, otherwise you cannot get to the raid configurator in the bios...

then you can set the array up in the bios..

But now you need 3 drivers, installed in a specific order to "bring" the raid to windows 11...

Also you can run a windows version of the BIOS raid setup...