My first personal tinker project as an IT student

[TheGeekno72]

Budget (including currency): not planning to buy any more hardware at this time, already at 450€ into this

Country: France

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mainly a file storage server but planning on testing features to learn on them such as docker containers among other things

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): not supposed to have peripherals but most likely will at first, for a long while, til I do everything remotely eventually

 

Hi there people !

 

I'm fairly new around here, been looking around and found this category so I thought I'd share my first tinker project in there ! I'm a french IT student, been so for 6 months but following tech news and learning bits from about everywhere for years now. I've thought of starting some kind of project on my own and thought that solving my latent data capacity issue while learning stuff would be cool and fun ! So far it's been, I've got 90% of the hardware at this point in time, looking around what to do for the software part and thinking of the objectives of this project so I pulled all the stops, dumped a fair amount of cash in storage capacity and unearthed an old workstation I wasn't using.

I've thought that I'd make something simple then decided that I wouldn't have it that way, otherwise I'd just let it rot on the side after making the simplest NAS build possible just by following a tutorial off youtube.

So I took on the "challenge" of making a linux based server (which I've never actually used before beyond installing GLPI once) with RAID setup'd drives (which I've never handled before either) and thus ended up picking TrueNAS as my weapon of choice ! This way, from what I've read, I can also put many other functionalities, plug-ins, modules and learn while setting up and using them ! I also learned that ZFS and RAID-Z were a thing ! So much to learn, so much to do, so many things I can fail, yay !

 

 

Oh well, I've made this infographic of the current revision of my project, the hardware isn't assembled just yet and while I'm waiting on my last couple parcels, I'll be learning some more stuff about the software I plan to use and what to look out for.

Feel free to comment on my project and giving out advice, I've opened this thread for that !

 

Til next time,
Geek over and out

[TheGeekno72]

Hi there !

 

Back in here with some IRL pics, something substantially more concrete I guess.

 

Unpacked my parcels yesterday, listing one SSD for boot drive and three 4TB Ironwolf NAS type HDDs (plus a SATA-USB cable and thermal pads for my daily drive laptop)

Opened the machine I had on hand, it definitely works, been bought refurbished and saw rather little use as is. Does need quite the cleaning but I'll do that when the actual MT size machine I want comes in. As some of you may notice, this is an SFF case and as such, it only got a 3.5" slot, a 2.5" slot and a thin disk reader and the motherboard has only three SATA slots too, which is quite the problem when I'm planning a 4 drive build... I'll be selling this one for parts and getting a 9020 MT off ebay in the next couple days, which will have all the slots necessary for my use case (pun half intended).

 

 

Some may have noticed the 3D printer peeking on the right side, I had intended at first to print one of these drive enclosure but I didn't have enough plastic wire left and it'd both pull quite a bit on my already blown up budget (that's what you get for pulling all the stops...) and the printing time is stupidly long and I don't intend to let it print while I'm not there to check on it if it needs to be stopped (had hiccups on big prints before and wasted too much plastic on those)

 

 

for those who may be interested by this fantastic design, here's the designer's page : https://www.cgtrader.com/products/aero-space-hard-drive-enclosures-ssd-hdd-4-or-6-drive

 

At school, we have machines of different size factors so I... borrowed a machine that coincidentally has the same CPU as the one I'm planning to use and *installed* the freshly unpacked boot drive and went onto setting up TrueNAS SCALE on it

 

 

After the install process and small hiccup regarding the password I had setup (by default, TrueNAS has QWERTY layout and despite my best efforts, I have been unable to change it to AZERTY even though it has registered the changes applied and subsequently rebooted to take them in) but from the web interface, I just had to log on with QWERTY once and change it to what it should be with AZERTY. With that fixed, I have been looking around the many options available, taking in the layout, change the hostname and tweak localization settings

 

 

Once I'll have the case, after having it go under a deep cleaning process and repasting the CPU (for peace of mind), I'll just have to stuff it with the drives, create a pool, RAID-Z1 them together and I'll be done with that part ! Doesn't mean I'll stop there with this thread though, the initial project is a NAS server but what I really would like to do is make it multi-purpose with possible assignments and projects I could add on it, temporarily or permanently, inquiring possible hardware changes in the future as well.

 

That's the state of things so far and coming soon, feel free to comment on my project and giving out advice !

 

Til next time,
Geek over and out

[TheGeekno72]

Hi there fellas,

I'm getting my last orders delivered tomorrow and so inching ever closer to actual setup time, issue is, as I'm looking up info regarding RAIDing drives, I'm not quite sure if I can be confident about the content I'm reading and as such I wanted to ask to people familiar with RAID-Z and if RZ1 is actually the way to go for my planned 3x4TB config or if there was other options I missed/didn't consider...
At first I was planning on using RAID 5 then realised that due to the file system used, RAID-Z1 would be better then there went the rabbit hole of googling info and having 3445864 results to read opinions from lol

Fire away, I'm all eyes !

Geek, over and out

[TheCamba]

Following for the build.  Curious about the 3D prints to incorporate for this build.