Stickman posted:

I know you said that you're not interested in cutting costs, but you could save nearly enough for another drive:

CPU Cooler: Stock is fine for your workload. There's also no reason to use an expensive low-profile cooler in a Node 304 since you have clearance for any air cooler. If you want an aftermarket cooler, a Gammaxx400 is much cheaper and would likely perform better.

Memory: 16GB is a massive overkill for NAS/plex (as is 3000MHz). 4GB would be fine, but dropping to 2x4 would save you $33.

SSD: 128/256GB would likely be sufficient for the SSD depending on what you're planning on using it for. The 240GB Corsair MP510 is $44 and the 512GB HP ex920 is $64.

That's up to $130. You could save a bit more switching to a Ryzen 1600 + ASRock B450, though you'll only have four sata ports instead of six. If you have a Microcenter nearby you can save an additional $30 with the motherboard/cpu combo (and maybe more if they agree to price-match the B450's newegg price).

I'm not a NAS/plex expert, but I suspect you could drop down to a cheaper Pentium/Athlon processor if you're using a gpu for transcoding. I've seen Xeon+ECC RAm configurations recommended before, but I'm not familiar enough with the options to make recommendations - hopefully someone can chime in.

Finally, be aware that many of the white-label drives support TLER (time-limited error recovery), but it needs to be re-enabled each boot.