A Few Questions Regarding a Home NAS Setup

[RelentlessAF]

Hey everyone,

 

I've been using an Rpi 3 Model B for awhile as my home NAS that just has a single external SSD plugged in which has been okay for the most part. Really stretching the limits of that 1GB of RAM.

 

We have been running into more and more issues with finding the shows we like without paying for 30 different streaming services so I want to expand to a much larger NAS that has Jellyfin and rip all our favorite shows onto it.

 

After a few upgrades I have some extra hardware lying around but I also intend to use this to host other things like my home webservers that I set up (which at the moment I just host on whatever PC I am coding on), my Wife's minecraft server and maybe other things in the future.

 

What I Have:

• CPU: Ryzen 5 3600
• RAM: 2x8GB Corsair LPX 3200MHz
• Storage: Corsair MP500 250GB NVMe SSD
• Cooling: AMD Wraith cooler / NZXT X53
• PSU: EVGA 650W 80+ Gold PSU

What I Plan on Getting:

• Motherboard: MSI B550A Pro
• RAM: 2x32GB Corsair LPX 3600MHz
• Storage: 6x4TB WD Red Plus 256MB cache HDDs
• GPU: GTX 1080 (A friend is sending me his old one for the cost of shipping; I want to use it for hardware transcoding on Jellyfin)

I'm planning to use the Corsair SSD for cache. I was originally looking into Unraid but it looks like TrueNAS is a also a really good option and also supports docker containers for me to run different servers on it plus I've been reading about RaidZ2 on TrueNAS and it sounds like a really good way for me to add redundancy to my data.

 

My Questions:

1. In the case of RaidZ2 am I correct in that it works the same as RAID 6 where I would have 4 of the 4TB drives available for storage as a single vdev and then the remaining 2 would be for parity?
2. Do you think the Corsair SSD would be fine as far as cache goes? I've also heard a lot about intel optane.
3. Should I look into a motherboard that supports ECC RAM instead? The one I picked I chose because it has 6 SATA ports and was pretty inexpensive
4. I have an extra AIO water cooler (the NZXT X53) but I feel like I'm right in assuming that Air would not only be more reliable but water wouldn't really even be necessary?
5. I wanted to look into 10G networking to the NAS from all my devices but I'm pretty obviously limited by the speed of the harddrives so this feels like a waste no?

Thanks in advance for any answers!

[will0hlep]

1 hour ago, GingerbreadPK said:

Hey everyone,

 

I've been using an Rpi 3 Model B for awhile as my home NAS that just has a single external SSD plugged in which has been okay for the most part. Really stretching the limits of that 1GB of RAM.

 

We have been running into more and more issues with finding the shows we like without paying for 30 different streaming services so I want to expand to a much larger NAS that has Jellyfin and rip all our favorite shows onto it.

 

After a few upgrades I have some extra hardware lying around but I also intend to use this to host other things like my home webservers that I set up (which at the moment I just host on whatever PC I am coding on), my Wife's minecraft server and maybe other things in the future.

 

What I Have:

• CPU: Ryzen 5 3600
• RAM: 2x8GB Corsair LPX 3200MHz
• Storage: Corsair MP500 250GB NVMe SSD
• Cooling: AMD Wraith cooler / NZXT X53
• PSU: EVGA 650W 80+ Gold PSU

What I Plan on Getting:

• Motherboard: MSI B550A Pro
• RAM: 2x32GB Corsair LPX 3600MHz
• Storage: 6x4TB WD Red Plus 256MB cache HDDs
• GPU: GTX 1080 (A friend is sending me his old one for the cost of shipping; I want to use it for hardware transcoding on Jellyfin)

I'm planning to use the Corsair SSD for cache. I was originally looking into Unraid but it looks like TrueNAS is a also a really good option and also supports docker containers for me to run different servers on it plus I've been reading about RaidZ2 on TrueNAS and it sounds like a really good way for me to add redundancy to my data.

 

My Questions:

1. In the case of RaidZ2 am I correct in that it works the same as RAID 6 where I would have 4 of the 4TB drives available for storage as a single vdev and then the remaining 2 would be for parity?
2. Do you think the Corsair SSD would be fine as far as cache goes? I've also heard a lot about intel optane.
3. Should I look into a motherboard that supports ECC RAM instead? The one I picked I chose because it has 6 SATA ports and was pretty inexpensive
4. I have an extra AIO water cooler (the NZXT X53) but I feel like I'm right in assuming that Air would not only be more reliable but water wouldn't really even be necessary?
5. I wanted to look into 10G networking to the NAS from all my devices but I'm pretty obviously limited by the speed of the harddrives so this feels like a waste no?

Thanks in advance for any answers!

 

1) yes

2) Those HDD will do about 180MB/s (assuming the data is stored sequentually and not randomly), with 6 drives in RAIDZ2 you will get (in an ideal world) 4x the read speed (720MB/s), at which point, I'm not sure there is much need for a cache at all in your use case. I'd just setup the SSD as the boot drive and nothing more.

3) I wouldn't. I'd just have a good backup policy.

4) AIO is defo overkill, go air cooling, in fact I'd use a stock cooler if you have one.

5) Remeber that networking speeds are in bits not bytes and therefore network is often a bottleneck. 10G networking means a transfer rate of 10Gb/s or 1.25GB/s, 2.5G networking only gets you about 320MB/s and 1G networking is only 128MB/s. I went with 2.5G for my NAS cause it's relitively cheap, but it is still easily the main bottleneck in my NAS, however 10G networking seems to be ultra expensive atm. This is also another reason cache dosn't matter.

 

Other notes:

I'm a happy TrueNAS user, it's complicated but there are lots of good Youtube tutorials to do basically anything you want.

If you go 2.5G networking using a NIC, go Intel not realtek.

[RelentlessAF]

9 minutes ago, will0hlep said:

 

1) yes

2) Those HDD will do about 180MB/s (assuming the data is stored sequentually and not randomly), with 6 drives in RAIDZ2 you will get (in an ideal world) 4x the read speed (720MB/s), at which point, I'm not sure there is much need for a cache at all in your use case. I'd just setup the SSD as the boot drive and nothing more.

3) I wouldn't. I'd just have a good backup policy.

4) AIO is defo overkill, go air cooling, in fact I'd use a stock cooler if you have one.

5) Remeber that networking speeds are in bits not bytes and therefore network is often a bottleneck. 10G networking means a transfer rate of 10Gb/s or 1.25GB/s, 2.5G networking only gets you about 320MB/s and 1G networking is only 128MB/s. I went with 2.5G for my NAS cause it's relitively cheap, but it is still easily the main bottleneck in my NAS, however 10G networking seems to be ultra expensive atm. This is also another reason cache dosn't matter.

Thanks for your response I appreciate you answering each of my questions. I did not know the read speed would get increased by raidz2 so that is good to know! I'll probably stick with 2.5 in the meantime, 320MB/s is still significantly better than the current transfer speed to my pi of 10MB/s lol.

[will0hlep]

Just now, GingerbreadPK said:

Thanks for your response I appreciate you answering each of my questions. I did not know the read speed would get increased by raidz2 so that is good to know! I'll probably stick with 2.5 in the meantime, 320MB/s is still significantly better than the current transfer speed to my pi of 10MB/s lol.

The read speed increases cause the data is striped accross the (non parity) drives. The first bit you want is on drive A, the next is on B, ect... So in the time it take 1 drive to find 1 bit, your 4 drives can find 4 bits. There is some overhead to factor in but that is the basics.

[voyager_]

I would keep the SSD as a cache but have it mirrored. I haven't used truenas but with unraid I use the SSD as the storage for all of my dockers, VMs, and plex metadata. Moving these to the SSD was a big jump in performance, especially with plex I noticed loading thumbnails was much quicker. I don't know if Jellyfin supports it but you could look into using ram as the transcode directory rather then the drives, it just saves a little wear and tear on them. 

 

I would also try to go air cooling, at work we run AIOs on our production computers and only get a couple of years out of them before they seem to start running into issues.