SergeyB

Very cool!

So I made a slight modification today to one of my home lab servers. I detached the front panel and glued magnets to it that push it outwards by about half an inch, allowing more air to get in through the front fans to the HDDs. The result is the HDD temps dropped by 4-5 degrees. Score!

!! FINAL SETUP !! So after an adventure, longer than intended, I finally have my final setup for this location. The new case is Fractal Design Node 304 (Thanks Linus for a video from 10 years ago. That was informative). It supports up to 6 HDDs and I'm using that space for my 4 HDDs + 1 SSD for Proxmox and VM disks. Also added a beefy Noctua horizontal profile cooler. That helped take about 10 degrees off the CPU, compared to the stock cooler. I did still had to move the case to its own shelf, as it was overheating in that close space. And that also allowed the UPS to have more air to breathe. Not ideal in terms of space, but call it an investment for a better future. And finally in the new setup, I'm left with HDDs having a stable 35 degrees during medium workload and CPU at 35-40 degrees stable! So now it's time to let the hardware go and focus on the software! Cheers!

Right, I'm on it! Will post when I have upgrades haha Thanks

Ah! But that router isn't providing the Wifi. It has wifi technically, but it's turned off and instead I have a Ubiquity access point in the hallway where it's central to all the rooms for maximum coverage. It has PoE and is plugged into the main switch. lol Ah, good to know. In that case I might run the SMART check manually. TrueNAS has periodic SMART check tasks of all the types (short, long, etc.) but I'm not sure it reports time at the end. Will have to look into it. That 4th drive doesn't have heat dissipation at all. The longer it's working, the worse it's gonna be. Gonna take care of that before officially deploying that machine.

Yeah, you can tell I've never done that part before These come from facebook marketplace actually. I found someone who is selling a bunch of hardware, including lots of these drives for about C$25 each and he says they were barely used. Well, for that price, I'm gonna go for it! Had another NAS built for another location with 6 of them. Works like a charm (for now). Interesting. I'm gonna look into those for the future. Thanks! Speaking of those temps, just as I wrote this post, I started seeing an issue I foolishly was hoping I wouldn't run into. This case is actually made for 3 HDDs, but I put 4 of them in there using the extra space in the 5.25" bay, which does not have a fan. Once the drives started ramping up the work load, 3 of them went up to 40 degrees, and 1 up to 60(!!) Also this particular CPU has a known overheating issue. So what I'm gonna do is get a better case - Fractal Design Node 304 - that supports 6 drives with cooling, and a beefier CPU cooler from Noctua. Too bad, I was hoping to avoid spending more money, but I guess if you care about your data to survive longer, you'd have to invest. Other than that, thanks for for the input guys! Appreciate y'all.

Hey all! I finished my new NAS recently. This project has some space limitations (See images) Wanted to share and ask your opinion about this limited space setup and whether or not I should be... concerned about some of its aspects. Shelf contents: 1. Main network switch (smart switch from TP-Link). 2. Router (TP-Link) - routes traffic through ethernet to a fiber converter, then off to my ISP. 3. Grandstream gateway for VoIP telephony services. 4. UPS (below black shelf), in charge (pun intended) of power outages for the PC only. 5. PC (top of black shelf) - Runs TrueNAS and Ubuntu on Proxmox. NAS Specs: Case: Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced Board: Biostar Hi-Fi B85N 3D (Mini-ITX) CPU: Core i7-4790K (LGA1150) RAM: 16GB (8GB x 2) 1600Mhz HBA Card: Dell Perc H310 Storage: 1 x Crucial 500GB SSD (Proxmox VMs and ISOs) 4 x 3TB SAS HDDs (TrueNAS ZFS storage with 1 parity drive) Air intake: 2 fans at the case front - air flows through the HDDs onto the motherboard Air exhaust: 1 fan at the side of the case - for which, there's a gap between the case and the shelf wall PSU exhaust: top of case With all that in mind, what would be your thoughts about this setup? Any input is greatly appreciated! Cheers! -Sergey.

Thanks so much for the help!! You saved an innocent computer system today. Your great contribution shall not be forgotten!

WELL I'LL BE! There weren't any bent pins, but what I found when I lifted the CPU is there was a super tiny piece of dust laying over a few of the pins. BARELY noticeable! I removed it, scrubbed a couple of the CPU contact points along the way and now it posts with both channels!! Does that sound like something that might've caused it or am I celebrating prematurely?

Looks like this is specific to the slot! If I place the single ram stick into the other one, it doesn't post... But this started happening after I upgraded the CPU. Any idea what settings to look at in the BIOS (if any) to make these components play along nicely?

Hi! I'm building a SFF machine with the following parts and I'm having a strange issue. I got the motherboard below with 16GB of ram (2x8GB) with a Core i5 4670 and it booted perfectly fine, but this is meant to be a NAS and I needed more juice for some services, so I upgraded the CPU to a Core i7 4790K and that's where a strange thing started happening. The system won't post with 16GB of memory, even though both CPU and motherboard should support it, but it will post with just 8GB. So I thought it's a capacity issue and I tried to boot with 8GB of different ram sticks (2x4GB) placed in 2 DIMM slots, but the result was the same - Can boot with one, doesn't boot with 2 DIMMs Could this be related to the RAM brand? Has anyone encountered this issue before? Any help would be very appreciated!! Machine specs: Motherboard: Biostar Hi-Fi B85N 3D (Mini-ITX) CPU: Core i7-4790K (LGA1150) - Was Core i5-4670 RAM: 16GB (Patriot Viper PV316G186C0K)

Update: It was suggested on the TrueNAS forum that the freezing is due to having SMR drives, but according to this: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd only one of the drives I'm passing to TrueNAS is SMR and the other 2 are CMR. So I'm wondering if that freezing is being caused solely by passing the drives individually, instead of a physical PCIe controller. Since I have the drives plugged through a single USB3 enclosure box cable (Mediasonic PROBOX 4 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Enclosure), which shows up in Proxmox as a USB device, I'm gonna try to pass that instead and see if it makes it better... An alternative would be to get a PCIe controller card and an enclosure box that connects each drive with its own SATA cable and pass the PCIe controller to Proxmox. But I wanna see if the first option works before I start spending money

Yeah, it's generally working, it's just showing some strange hiccups. I checked all the logs but there's nothing suspicious there. As for the cables, I've been using the same ethernet cables in the last 4 years, nothing changed there. The ping is completely fine too. I'm wondering if these hiccups are due to the fact that I passed the HDDs individually one by one, instead of passing the enclosure PCI controller... I've asked about this on the TrueNAS forums and people there seem to be terrified of passing drives through individually, but also running TrueNAS as a VM in the first place...

Some more information about my setup: The disks are passed to TrueNAS CORE through the following VM configuration: Scsi(2-4) in the image below are the storage HDDs connected to the machine through a USB3 4-bay enclosure. Scsi1 is a cache drive connected through SATA internally, but isn't used in the pool where I'm copying the files from. Scsi0 is TrueNAS's system virtual disk stored on the machine's internal HDD. (Image attached) The machine has the following hardware: CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz (12 threads) RAM: 4x DIMMs: Kingston 8GB KHX1600C10D3 1333 MT/s (Non-ECC, I think, though TrueNAS says they are) Chipset: Intel Corporation C600/X79 series chipset Storage: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9172 SATA 6Gb/s Controller Network: Intel Corporation 82579V Gigabit Network Connection GPU: NVIDIA Corporation GK104 [GeForce GTX 660 Ti] USB3 4-Bay HDD enclosure: JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JMS567 SATA 6Gb/s bridge Storage drives: 1. 1TB HDD for Proxmox and VM virtual disks (Connected internally through motherboard controller) 2. 500GB SSD for caching one of TrueNAS's pool (Connected internally through motherboard controller) 3. 3x 6~8TB SATA3 HDDs (Connected through USB3 4-Bay controller ) Note: The HDDs were previously connected through the same USB3 4-bay enclosure while running just Windows 10 instead of Proxmox and all was running at peak speed with no issues at all. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!

1. Interesting. What kind of ZFS tuning would you look into in this case? 2. It's probably not that, as I'm using Windows 10 (though I read about this in older posts). 3. It's using a network bridge with one 1Gig network port, but there aren't any other services on Proxmox and I brought down all ubuntu services for the testing. I mentioned that it copies at peak bandwidth (when it does), but it actually copies at ~85-90% bandwidth, which I imagine is the toll for bridging. So could it actually be related to the fact that it shares a NIC? Otherwise what ZFS settings should I look into? Thanks!