LIGISTX

For home automation, use home assistant. Really nothing else even comes close. For NVR, look into blueiris. I have not used it personally, but I know it’s quite popular. May also be able to use home assistant (I do use home assistant to share NVR streams from a dedicated NVR to Apple HomeKit, but I don’t personally use home assistant as the NVR itself.

I wouldn’t, no. I would run a proper NAS OS, not windows. Windows can work fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Even if you did, you wouldn’t need an i5.

That is a totally different thread… But no, I don’t believe you can use standard backblaze with a NAS unless that NAS was running on windows. Backblaze will not backup network locations… Both have pluses and minuses. The big plus of ZFS and thus truenas is it will try much harder to keep data safe… but it is not as flexible in terms of storage expansion later on.

Home backblaze is only supported on Windows and Mac, and it will not back up anything that is reported as a network drive. So you can’t backup what’s on a NAS via a windows machine or a windows VM. The only way to backup truenas or unraid to backblaze would be via using backblaze B2, it you theoretically could spin up a VM and give that VM an equal size harddrive, run some script to keep data from the NAS updated on that VM’s storage, and then back that up…. But that is just a kludgy solution. Yes, you can add drives to unraid. I would do some more research into both of them before picking one, or before buying hardware. Understanding the benefits and limitations of each is important.

No not at all, I would take any amount of ECC over no ECC every day of the week. That won't work... backblaze does not allow you to backup network locations via their home tier, you would need to use B2 which is more expensive, but still worthwhile. I have been using B2 for 8+ years at this point. Maybe jsut get 32GB... I wouldn't do it this way.... get more storage up front, you can't add more drives to a vdev later down the road, you would need to create a fully new vdev which needs its own redundency. Thats the major downside of ZFS. They are working on implimenting a way to add drives to a RAID Z vdev, but that is not out of beta, and I wouldn't make purchasing decisions based on potential future software... Buy enough storage now to last you a long time, especially since harddrive don't cost all that much. I would go with 4 4 TB drives at a minimum, or just get all 6 right now and do a Z2 array of 4 TB's. I build my 10x4 TB array in 2015 and initially only used about 20% of the array, its now ~60% full and I am happy I made the choice I did way back when. i3 would be totally fine. That is still an 8 thread CPU with pretty performant threads... I ran more than that on an i3 6100 which was way, way slower. I would 100% save some money on the CPU, spend more on more RAM, and get more larger harddrives. Nothing wrong with going the i5 route, but it is certainly overkill and if the budget is tight, RAM and harddrives are a better place to spend the money. When virtualizing things, you don't need to worry toooo much about overprovising CPU resources. Think of guest OS's like programs running on your PC... you way WAY more running on your PC at once then a few cores can support, but CPU's are very good at swapping out what they are working on, and operating systems (thus your hypervisor in this case) is good at allocating time to each VM to do what it needs. You don't need as many cores as you have VM's at all. I run a 28 thread chip mostly because it was extremely cheap to buy used server gear, and it was the best bang for buck option for the generation of server mobo I decided to get, and I only really went that route to have A LOT of PCIe lanes and RAM. Bellow is my proxmox current usage, and proxmox runs pfsense as my main router/firewall (don't do this, don't virutalize your main firewall..... I do it, but I never recomend anyone else do it...) and its still seeing almost no CPU usage. For fun to prove a point, I started watching a full 1080p bluray rip, compressed down to 720p + watching WAN show on youtube, and CPU went up to 9%, and that is with plex transcoding at 1.6x speed (to get ahead of where I am so it can build up a buffer which is what plex autoamtically does). And this is full 1080p from bluray, source file is large with 34471 kbps bitrate.... The below is 4k content (only 9736 kbps source, but 4k is way more difficult to transcode) and that is how hard its hiting my system down to 720p. And remember, this is all doing it on CPU, not GPU since Xeon's do have have iGPU's and I don't have a GPU in this system. With an iGPU, it would barely hit your CPU at all... And my Xeon is from the era of DDR4 back in 2015. My CPU does nopt have nearly the per core power of a 13th gen, and my clock speed is damn near half. Yes, I have a lot of cores and threads, but the CPU is much slower and less efficient. Also, all of these CPU %'s are while running VM's of: truenas pfsense, 4x Ubuntu Server one runs plex docker host a dozen docker containers second docker host for even great seperation for less trusted containers 3 containers yet another docker host 3 cnotainers one runs a nextcloud server Ubuntu LXC container for unifi controller home assistant proxmox backup server

Good choice, scale is the right way to go. The 13400 will still be incredible overkill... I ran my homelab on a ie 6100 (thats a dual core with HT) and I was running ESXi as my hypervisor, VM's I had running under it were: Truenas 3x Ubuntu server (one of the VM's was a plex server) Windows LTSC running Veeam backup home assistant a handful of docker containers and the i3 was a non issue. I did eventually upgrade to the system in my signature, but that was more because I was starting to run out of RAM (i3 system only had 28 GB...). Nothing wrong with the 13400, but it will be massive overkill. Good rational This is entirely pointless for a truenas boot drive. Truenas never hits the boot drive, it writes literally 0 bytes unless you make config changes. Nothing wrong with optane either, they are cheap and reliable, but jsut wanted to make sure you understood what is needed for a truenas boot drive (basically nothing, also you can save config backups very, very easily, so even if boot drive dies its easy to recover). WD Red's are fine. How many drives are you planning on running is a much more important question? What redundency level? Good choice. Total wattage for a NAS is next to negligeant, but quality is extremely important. Spend money on a good PSU, its worth it especially for a NAS. Both from efficiency standpoint, but also not losing drives due to failures. 16 will be fine unless you want to start running VM's and stuff. But for ZFS alone, 16 GB will be plenty sufficient.

RAID 5 or 6 is not the right terminology for "vdevs". vdevs are part of the ZFS architecture which is a software RAID solution (its a fantastic solution, I have been running ZFS via truenas for almost a decade). I would advise you do A LOT more research before you buy or impliment anything. I would look in the truenas forums for beginner guides and explinations of whats what so you can get a better idea of pitfalls that are common, issues people run into, and gain a better understanding of what all is going on. These things are very important to understand up front because if you make config setups in the beginig, once you have the data populated, its really difficult to change things later since you will need to offload your data and start over... This forum definitely can help a lot, but to get the mots out of said help, you need to do a good bit of reserach and homework on your own so we can all be speaking the same language per say :). Things to understand first are: How much storage space do you think you need? how long will it take to fill this up, and how do you plan to increase capacity? how much money do you want to spend what hardware do you already have what is ZFS what are vdev's look into unraid so you know what your two main options are

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.