re: Mini Tower Work Computer Build

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controlling a RAID

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What type and how many drives? or is this going to be connected to an external RAID box... The build I posted for the OP was small form factor, probably wouldn't fit too many 3.5" drives safely and comfortably. I also don't think an i5 is totally necessary for your use. It depends, I guess, on what sort of clients you'll be using for Plex and how many streams you'd have going at once that would actually need the PC to do the transcoding. Even still, it just so happens that I've been working on "Plex"-ifying my media recently (Getting this Chromecast and Nexus 6 has put me in the tinkering mood), and I came across an old post on the Plex blog showing a 2-year-old Mac Mini handling transcoding to 12 clients at once with a mobile i5 on older architecture -- 720p and 1080p of course. Any of the haswell refresh i3s would easily beat the performance of a Sandy or Ivy Bridge mobile i5.

Nevertheless, here's a $436 micro-ATX build with an i5, 120GB SSD, and 1TB HDD: LINK

You could scale down the CPU a little, go Mid-tower/ATX and have some room for more hard drives to make it a true media server/torrent box for essentially everything digital you own.