This is a strong suit for me as I have built about 4 machines in the decade you speak of. Not counting the countless builds for Enterprise and IRL Friends/Family.
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I was also on Z-97 with a i5-4690K | 24GB RAM | GTX970 but the downside to those old intel machines is the I/O. Intel has terrible I/O. So as my needs grew, I could no longer use the 5 HDD MoBo RAID I had in the system reliably if I used a couple USB devices. It’s an issue with Intel and how they route I/O through DMI.
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I strongly recommend a All AMD system Ryzen CPU, Radeon GPU, but more importantly a X-5xx motherboard for the I/O
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I have a NVMe RAID0 on my AMD X-570 and it’s on the MoBo because of Linux
dm-cryptMy configuartion is simple, RAID 2x1TB NVMe LVM + XFS luks encrypted ( On Fedora this is easy through blivet-gui in Anaconda during install ) -
LSI RAID cards are in the Linux kernel, and the setup is incredibly easy. For a long time, I ran the old system I listed above, as a NAS with just the LSI RAID controller to boot from. The LSI controller allowed me more storage capabilities and the HUGE benefit of running my I/O through PCIe instead of the TERRIBLE
Intel DMI bus. This brought a ton of stability for a long time, until i had to move house, and damaged one of the drives in the RAID, but recovered nicely from. -
Why did I recommend a X-5xx motherboard
, You asked for RAID and I/O is important. The A-3xx B-xx Class boards do not provide the same amount of I/O as the X-5xx class motherboards, and you seem to upgrade in long cycles which means growth of your RAID because of data etc. -
I consume less energy on my current build because I have the 2 NVMe drives which are far less energy hungry than 5 HDD at 3.5v 24/7. To mitigate that I do not run the RAID 24/7 and have moved out HDD’s into USB drives saving a TON of energy. i can talk ad nauseam about Luks, Storage and RAID builds.