LIGISTX

RAID is definitely not garbage... Its uptime availability AND it can save you headaches. I have had an annoying amount od drives fail in my truenas array, and have been extremely thankful I have ZFS Z2 (basically software RAID 6) running. The headache from downtime for my system would be huge as my homelab is a large part of the networking infrastructure of my house, as well as home automation and lots more. More uptime by definition = less headaches and stress. Its not a backup... but uptime is uptime, and that is not "garbage".

Without reading all the previous posts…. The only way your drives will not cool themselves or have issues with potential CTE mismatches and thus suboptimal expansion and contraction in the sub freezing, is if they are SSD’s. I’d be pretty surprised if harddrives were able to deal with those sorts of temps for very long. I’d have much more faith in SSD’s.

Set up WireGuard so you can tunnel into your network from external subnets. Then you can use your SMB shares as if you were at home. Wireguard is free and pretty easy to set up.

That should be fine... streaming content is not intense for the plex server to do, its just streaming data at a marginally low bandwidth (for internal networking and harddrives its very low bandwidth.......). Transcoding takes a lot of power, but that would not be "streaming 4k hihg-bitrate movies", that would be transcoding them down to not 4k.

I did do a bit of digging this morning after posting my previous post, and I did end up setting one of the logs to write to RAM instead of disc. I have a threat on proxmox forum and level1techs asking a few questions, but I may end up doing more of what’s suggested in that reddit thread as well as potentially log2RAM. Thanks for the link!

SMB is a network share protocol, WireGuard is a VPN application. SMB lets you share your data via the network, so when you go to add a network location in windows, that’s using SMB. WireGuard will let you remotely VPN into your network while physically away from home, so your SMB shares still work. They are both needed as they are totally different things. If you don’t want to access files while away, you don’t need WireGuard.

I am, and seemingly haven’t yet. I have been running a pair of 980’s (non pro) for over a year). They are wearing a bit fast, last I looked maybe a month ago they were reporting 20% life lost which I do admit seems a bit crazy… but if I can get 4-5 year out of them which that suggests I would, that seems acceptable to me.

ConnectX3's work fine in TrueNAS. I have one and its working fine. But it will not work on Win 11... which is waht drove me down the rabbit hole. It will work on Win 10 though, and youd imagine drivers on Win 10 would work - they won't, trust me, there is a lot of googling you can do, but just don't waste the time. What you want to do, which is the most affordable option, is get 2 Intel X520-DA2 cards. The ConnectX's will work fine with truenas, but IMO since you are buying 2 from the start, just get two that match. I got 1 for my windows PC once I upgraded to Win 11 and the old connectX didn't work anymore, it came with the needed fiber transceiver, and I run a 10 gb link with fiber between them. Buy 2x of these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/166675754998?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=tG85ngMXR2e&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=B1xTkXm_Qfe&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY Should come with 1 fiber transciever in each according to the image (the one I bought over a year ago came with one). Then you just need some fiber which is shockingly cheap. https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=7622 And that should be that... The one thing to make sure of is you will need to set up that subnet in both truenas and on the NIC in windows, share your SMB shares over that subnet in truenas, and then in windows remove all old network shares to that NAS and reset them up on the new point to point subnet. That way all traffic will actually flow over that link and not go out over your normal ethernet. Works like a charm!

Lawrence systems is great.

I’d set up a VM within truenas to do what you want. Either Plex in a docker container, or make a full on windows (or Ubuntu…) VM, and do in there. TrueNAS isn’t the issue. I run Proxmox as my hypervisor with TrueNAS virtualized along with many other things, one of which is an Ubuntu server VM with Plex running in it. I SMB mount my Plex data to the Ubuntu VM, point Plex at it, and away it goes. Been working like this since ~2016.

ECC isn't needed, but I run it... my mentality is if I am going to spend the money and energy (perosnal and elecrtical) to have a NAS and store all my data presumably for my entire life, might as well do everything I can to keep it secured against bit rot, corruption, etc. Thus why I use truenas and ZFS; no other file system will work as hard as ZFS does to keep your data safe.

You can run that workload on an i3…. If you want server gear which is a fine idea, I’d go that generation of Xeon but you can get a lower power chip. I run a 2660-v4 myself, and it’s been great. You only need 1 of them. I run Proxmox as my hypervisor, and VM’s consist of TrueNAS, windows 11, 3x Ubuntu server, pfsense, a few LTXC containers, home assistant, and within the Ubuntu VM’s I have about a dozen docker containers running, a Plex server, and some other random stuff. CPU usage is usually low single digit %’s….

A 32GB boot drive is plenty for truenas…. I suppose if you want to run containers or VM’s off the boot drive (can you do that in truenas? I still run CORE so I’m not sure) then maybe that would be useful.

I’m not sure about those actually.

Id just instal windows real quick... it will only take ~10 minuts tops. Might as well just confirm. Also, make sure to enable XMP/EXPO. Looks like its currently dissabled.

I don’t know supermicro stuff super well, but when I need to I know enough to do the research to get my answers. But suffice it to say, most supermicro chassis with 24 bays will have this functionality. My buddies 24 bay I helped him deploy has 2 dual port SAS cards, so only 4 SAS cables are running to the backplane and he has all 24 drives working.

Your backplane probably is a SAS expander… you can run a single HBA and just use two SAS cables between the HBA and the backplane (or as many cables as your HBA has) and it’ll work fine. Id recommend doing some more specific research into what parts you actually have. But typically, as I said, backplanes ARE SAS expanders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_1 click the levels, and look at the pictures. The only RAID levels that “matter” are 0, 1, 3, and 10.

I can’t tell if you are joking or not…. The Wikipedia page for RAID has had extremely easy to understand pictures for decades. It’s super simple to understand with a few pictures.

RAID 0…. Me thinks you should just google RAID, and read for a few minutes

What’s your electricity cost? It’s likely not THAT high.

Thats too bad

Photos app.

As others said, don’t use SMR in a NAS. The time it takes to rebuild a failed array is SO egregiously long, the likelihood of a second drive failing during the rebuild process becomes an actual issue, and at that point you lose all your data if you only have single drive redundancy. For reference, I run a 10x4tb array with 2 drive redundancy, and I personally have had a second drive fail during a rebuild…. And I am using CMR WD Reds. So this is not just “possible…. Theoretically”. It had happened to me, and I am very thankful I had dual drive redundancy to save me. And my rebuilds take ~8-10 hours, being at risk for multiple days, no thanks, SMR is a no go.

Nothing will work like iCloud does. No app you can instal on your iPhone will function like iCloud backup and iCloud sync do. I believe you can use iCloud sync and not use iCloud Drive, tho. If that is still the case, you’d be able to have the pictures transfer from iPhone to Mac computer seamlessly, but won’t be backed up to the cloud automatically. If this is even still possible. But id look at that as potentially possible. No third party solution will do what you want that I am aware of.