TrueNAS build

[Chris Hasinski]

Budget (including currency): 3000 EUR

Country: Poland

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: TrueNAS, possibly Plex (I already have a separate server with Plex, but I might want to consolidate)

Other details
 

I already have a mini-ITX chassis with eight 3.5" HDD slots, some leftover 1 TB NVMe SSD (Samsung 970) and a Mellanox 56 Gbit card (which is a huge overkill for this build, but it's sitting on the shelf ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

I'd like to get ~40 TB of storage with one drive for parity. I'll have a workstation connected to this machine directly over that 56Gbit connection and a 10 Gbit Ethernet switch (but with HDDs even with NVMe cache it's probably pointless as well). My girlfriend stores a lot of data for astrophotography, hence the update from a small Synology NAS that just couldn't keep up.

[brob]

Is there a question?

[Robchil]

A bigger Synology NAS?.. 

[cmndr]

So hard to really assess what you're asking...

8 drives either means striped RAIDz1 (so 2x 4 drives with one spare per array) or 1x RAIDz2 (possibly with a hot spare).

If you go with the latter then you'd have 5 drives of storage capacity and would need 8TB per drive to hit 40TB. If you ditch the hot spare then you'd have 6 drives of capacity and might be able to get away with 6TB (keep a cold spare around). Note that you might pick up around 10% more space or so (look into ZSTD[takes longer to write] or LZ4 compression[doesn't compress as much] - also 1MB block size HELPS and it's not the default; though I've heard something about 16MB being a future option - note that comrpession CAN improve read speeds [if the HDDs are the limit, not the CPU then anything to cut their load is a performance win]). Already compressed photos don't really compress THAT well unfortunately.

As far as hardware is concerned... my bias is towards low power stuff. Do you need a full hardcore server? Atom is probably the answer unless you have a use case that benefits from something more performant. If you're trying to save on up front costs then used server hardware is often good even though it has worse perf/watt. If you can find 12VO or similar (18V?) systems that helps on energy costs.

 

Also AVOID shingled magnetic recording (SRM) drives. These tank performance. It's bad. They aren't much cheaper and you will be much less happy with them.

 

As an aside on cache - nvme SSDs help with cutting IO from the HDDs. The general rule of thumb is 1GB ARC for every 10GB l2ARC as kind of an upper bound, so you'd be targeting ~100GB RAM. Give the nature of your work, you might WANT to enable prefetch. Also be sure to increase the initial feed rate.

[Chris Hasinski]

Yeah, I can see now that I haven't put a question after the required fields, sorry I was looking for parts recommendations for the build, mostly what CPU, MoBo and drives should work for this kind of build.

[brob]

2 hours ago, Chris Hasinski said:

Yeah, I can see now that I haven't put a question after the required fields, sorry I was looking for parts recommendations for the build, mostly what CPU, MoBo and drives should work for this kind of build.

 

Are you sure the case is mini-ITX? I ask because if you plan to use the network card the motherboard has to supply all the SATA ports. Most modern mini-ITX motherboards have no more than 4 such ports.

 

[Chris Hasinski]

On 3/5/2022 at 9:34 PM, brob said:

 

Are you sure the case is mini-ITX? I ask because if you plan to use the network card the motherboard has to supply all the SATA ports. Most modern mini-ITX motherboards have no more than 4 such ports.

 

Yes, I'm pretty much sure. I think 4 SATA ports is probably enough for now (4x 14 TB drives should give me ~42 TB capacity with one drive spare). If I need to expand it later I can replace the stupidly overkill 56GBit card with a thunderbolt/usb4 10gbit card (or even onboard 2.5Gbit if I get a decent MoBo, 2.5Gbit is plenty fast for spinning rust drives even with an NVMe cache) and use the PCI-Express slot for more SATA ports.

I'm still not sure which CPU and MoBo should be enough and what HDDs are considered good these days.

[brob]

A 4-core i3 should be more than enough cpu. It will have to have an iGPU, so no F models. I'd check out availability of Alder Lake i3-12100 or i3-12300. But I suspect you'll have to settle for a Comet Lake i3-10100 or i3-10300.

 

Boxed versions of these cpu, i.e. intended for retail, will include a perfectly adequate cpu cooler. 

 

Given the motherboard limits, I'd suggest getting 2x8GB or 2x16GB of memory. Speed and timings are not super important. Most of the latency in this system will be in storage and network.

 

The motherboard doesn't need to be much. Four or more SATA III ports, port for a monitor (only needed during setup), usb ports for keyboard, mouse, and thumb drive. 

 

A good quality 80+ Gold PSU, 350W - 450W should be sufficient. At least 4 SATA power connectors. Fully modular will make assembly easier.

 

I'd suggest HDD designed for small raid arrays. Seagate Iron Wolf Pro and Western Digital WD Red Pro are two such brands.

 

With at least 4 HDD in a mini-ITX case, cooling will likely be an issue.