I've just read through about 40 pages of this thread. I'm very excited about the Xeon D boards to replace my i5-2405S based home server. My home server is running mostly NAS and Plex duties, but also going to be playing with Hyper-V or VMWare. I've run Openmediavault for NAS and Plex duties up until recently, but I'm now running Windows 2012R2 Datacenter.
I had bought a stack of old X8STi Supermicro boards and some cheap-as-chips Xeons for my lab, but I'm now thinking of chucking them all out and getting a couple of Xeon-D systems to give me plenty enough stuff to play with in a much smaller footprint and much lower power needs.
I'm a little concerned about Plex performance with these boards, as I have quite a few HEVC videos and transcoding one of those in Plex will max out the i5.
I don't think the budget will stretch to a 16 core board, but I'd love to know where all the 1567s are going as I could probably stretch the budget to the sort of price I think they'd go for. That said, that price would look to be around the same price as two of the 6 core boards, which is looking an intriguing prospect. I like the look of the
X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F as a good happy medium all round, with a decent number of cores, and a high clock, at a price where I'd consider buying another one later.
I change my mind on an almost hourly basis, but that's half the fun of planning a new adventure in gadgeteering.
I'm likely to settle on something like, one of the mITX SM boards, in a DS380, with a 8 port HBA to drive the 8x3.5" drives and 4 x SSDs running off the onboard SATA. That's the config I keep coming back to after wandering off into mad realms of Lian Li Q35s with 20 2.5" drives in hotswap bays. Current thinking, even though they're not NAS drives, is to go for Toshiba X300 6Tb drives. I had a bit of a 'mare with WD Reds when two of four failed when I was working away from home, so hadn't noticed.
I'd be happy to hear any observations or advice or hints about any pending hardware releases that might make me reconsider!