advice on first server/nas build in jonsbo N1

[Zohan2000]

Hi, looking at making my first server/nas build to run pihole, plex, game backups, etc, was going to use the jonsbo N1 case like linus did in one of his videos as i wanted something small and compact, will be reusing a 3900x underclocked and undervolted to keep things cool and a 16GB ram kit from gigabyte at 3600, trying to find an am4 itx motherboard that has 2 m.2 slots is the main issue at the moment so looking at the 2nd hand market for a decent board with 2 m.2 slots and the sata slots on the right side of the board (asus strix x570i has them separated and i think? it might cause issues with routing cables)

 

on the OS side of things ive got no idea what to run as ill probably start with just 1 4TB ironwolf pro drive from seagate and buy another drive when ive got money to spare or they come on sale

 

so far im thinking this for a start https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/PfyPMb

 

am also open to scrapping this setup and going entirely a different route if it meant easier and better, just looking for something small, power efficient and easy to use

[Inception9269]

@Zohan2000 In recent months I built a NAS with that exact same case, using unraid as my OS.

 

As far as motherboard compatibility goes, that one bit me in the ass. Originally I bought a mobo that was around $200 because the case had a type C connector, and the board I bought seemed to be the cheapest AMD itx board that had one. Didn't even matter though for that part, since the case's front type C connector shares the usb 3 header, so no type C connector required. The biggest thing though that I got fucked over on was something that reviews of the case didn't mention (at least the ones I watched), where if your motherboard uses 90 degree sata headers then it is completely impossible to plug in sata cables due to clearance issues. Fortunately I had an older b450 motherboard that I could swap the newer one out for (and was able to return the newer one for a refund). Sata connectors must be front facing to be accessible. Also it's very recommended to use sata cables with 90 degree headers to attach to the PCB that drives are plugged into, to avoid them getting cleaved off when you slide on/off the panel.

 

Also the case has room for five 3.5 drives, but seems like most itx boards only have 4 sata headers. From what I read about unraid, if you were to use some kind of expansion card to get more sata headers, apparently 2 extra headers is the max, or you will run into issues with the software, with a sas controller being recommended instead if you wanted to get more than 2 extra ones (not that it's really needed since case only supports 5 drives).

 

One more thing if you decide to go with unraid (which I do love quite a lot, and works great), you install it to a usb and boot from that, instead of installing it to a drive. As far as compatibility goes, I find out the hard way (bought 2 different USBs) that they don't work with Sandisk drives anymore. I ended up ordering a 32gb Samsung usb drive, which was compatible.

[Zohan2000]

2 hours ago, Inception9269 said:

@Zohan2000 In recent months I built a NAS with that exact same case, using unraid as my OS.

 

As far as motherboard compatibility goes, that one bit me in the ass. Originally I bought a mobo that was around $200 because the case had a type C connector, and the board I bought seemed to be the cheapest AMD itx board that had one. Didn't even matter though for that part, since the case's front type C connector shares the usb 3 header, so no type C connector required. The biggest thing though that I got fucked over on was something that reviews of the case didn't mention (at least the ones I watched), where if your motherboard uses 90 degree sata headers then it is completely impossible to plug in sata cables due to clearance issues. Fortunately I had an older b450 motherboard that I could swap the newer one out for (and was able to return the newer one for a refund). Sata connectors must be front facing to be accessible. Also it's very recommended to use sata cables with 90 degree headers to attach to the PCB that drives are plugged into, to avoid them getting cleaved off when you slide on/off the panel.

 

Also the case has room for five 3.5 drives, but seems like most itx boards only have 4 sata headers. From what I read about unraid, if you were to use some kind of expansion card to get more sata headers, apparently 2 extra headers is the max, or you will run into issues with the software, with a sas controller being recommended instead if you wanted to get more than 2 extra ones (not that it's really needed since case only supports 5 drives).

 

One more thing if you decide to go with unraid (which I do love quite a lot, and works great), you install it to a usb and boot from that, instead of installing it to a drive. As far as compatibility goes, I find out the hard way (bought 2 different USBs) that they don't work with Sandisk drives anymore. I ended up ordering a 32gb Samsung usb drive, which was compatible.

was going to use either a m.2 drive for the OS or use a sata ssd for the OS that way i could use the other m.2 for an optane drive while the front m.2 is being used for more sata ports

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Zohan2000 said:

was going to use either a m.2 drive for the OS or use a sata ssd for the OS that way i could use the other m.2 for an optane drive while the front m.2 is being used for more sata ports

What do you need Optane for? You probably don’t…

 

I would figure out what OS to use first (unraid is what you will want if you plan to slow roll the storage, truenas and ZFS are not friendly to slowly adding drives), and for a gigabit network you really don’t need to worry about adding Optane, or really even a cache drive at all for most use cases. 
 

Also, the CPU is extreme overkill, but since you already have it, I guess thus is life. But realistically you can sell it and buy a much cheaper CPU and end up saving money this way. That CPU is like trying to kill an ant with a nuke unless you have plans to run MANY (deep into the double digits) worth of VM’s all of which need heavy CPU resources. I ran my homelab on a 4 thread i3 6100 for years, ESXi hypervisor with VM’s of: truenas, windows LTSC, 3x Ubuntu server VM’s (one was a Plex server the others did various other things), ~8 docker containers, home assistant, and I was never CPU limited…. Just to put this in perspective. 

[Zohan2000]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

What do you need Optane for? You probably don’t…

 

I would figure out what OS to use first (unraid is what you will want if you plan to slow roll the storage, truenas and ZFS are not friendly to slowly adding drives), and for a gigabit network you really don’t need to worry about adding Optane, or really even a cache drive at all for most use cases. 
 

Also, the CPU is extreme overkill, but since you already have it, I guess thus is life. But realistically you can sell it and buy a much cheaper CPU and end up saving money this way. That CPU is like trying to kill an ant with a nuke unless you have plans to run MANY (deep into the double digits) worth of VM’s all of which need heavy CPU resources. I ran my homelab on a 4 thread i3 6100 for years, ESXi hypervisor with VM’s of: truenas, windows LTSC, 3x Ubuntu server VM’s (one was a Plex server the others did various other things), ~8 docker containers, home assistant, and I was never CPU limited…. Just to put this in perspective. 

thats actually a good idea, sell it and buy a 13th gen intel cpu and motherboard or 7th gen amd cpu and motherboard since finding an itx motherboard for the 3900x is proving difficult and also could probably save money on power consumption, ill have a look at unraid watch some reviews and information about it since i do plan on adding more drives over time, dont need a massive storage pool right away

[Inception9269]

2 hours ago, Zohan2000 said:

was going to use either a m.2 drive for the OS or use a sata ssd for the OS that way i could use the other m.2 for an optane drive while the front m.2 is being used for more sata ports

I recommend using an m.2 drive as a cache drive. Like I said in my post, unraid runs entirely on a USB, meaning you keep that USB plugged in the entire time that machine is in use, booting to that USB whenever you start the machine.

 

Also for OS's. TrueNAS is only recommended if you plan on buying all the drives you want to use upfront. Unraid allows you to start your NAS with whatever combination of drives you want. I started it with an 8tb drive which I dumped contents onto from a 6tb drive I had, and once I finished with that I threw that drive in as well for 14tb total. I don't have a parity drive set up yet though, I should get one but don't have the cash for that. Your parity drive needs to be the largest capacity drive in the machine, and as far as expandability goes with your array, you do become limited by the size of your parity drive. My plan is to pick up at least a 12tb or greater drive for a parity drive, so that with the remaining drive slots I have a lot more room to expand vs if I made my parity drive just 8tb.

[Inception9269]

23 minutes ago, Zohan2000 said:

thats actually a good idea, sell it and buy a 13th gen intel cpu and motherboard or 7th gen amd cpu and motherboard since finding an itx motherboard for the 3900x is proving difficult and also could probably save money on power consumption, ill have a look at unraid watch some reviews and information about it since i do plan on adding more drives over time, dont need a massive storage pool right away

Short of running VMs a high end CPU is a waste. For my NAS I went with a Ryzen 3200G, which was cheap and had an integrated GPU, so didn't need to waste money or physical space in PC on one, while keeping energy consumption down.

[Zohan2000]

28 minutes ago, Inception9269 said:

I recommend using an m.2 drive as a cache drive. Like I said in my post, unraid runs entirely on a USB, meaning you keep that USB plugged in the entire time that machine is in use, booting to that USB whenever you start the machine.

 

Also for OS's. TrueNAS is only recommended if you plan on buying all the drives you want to use upfront. Unraid allows you to start your NAS with whatever combination of drives you want. I started it with an 8tb drive which I dumped contents onto from a 6tb drive I had, and once I finished with that I threw that drive in as well for 14tb total. I don't have a parity drive set up yet though, I should get one but don't have the cash for that. Your parity drive needs to be the largest capacity drive in the machine, and as far as expandability goes with your array, you do become limited by the size of your parity drive. My plan is to pick up at least a 12tb or greater drive for a parity drive, so that with the remaining drive slots I have a lot more room to expand vs if I made my parity drive just 8tb.

wouldnt it be better to install unraid to a drive though? would help with accidently bumping it and knocking it out while running or if the usb drive dies

[Inception9269]

25 minutes ago, Zohan2000 said:

wouldnt it be better to install unraid to a drive though? would help with accidently bumping it and knocking it out while running or if the usb drive dies

That's legit not how it works. You can't run unraid without the USB installed.

 

Also speaking from personal experience using this case, if you plug the drive in at the bottom there's no risk of it getting knocked out of it. Also when you buy the license from unraid, if your drive does die, which realistically speaking shouldn't happen for a very long time, you can just install unraid to a replacement drive. Your license still carries over.

[Zohan2000]

1 hour ago, Inception9269 said:

That's legit not how it works. You can't run unraid without the USB installed.

 

Also speaking from personal experience using this case, if you plug the drive in at the bottom there's no risk of it getting knocked out of it. Also when you buy the license from unraid, if your drive does die, which realistically speaking shouldn't happen for a very long time, you can just install unraid to a replacement drive. Your license still carries over.

and the new OS should just pick up the drives and remake the storage array? honestly got no clue on this type of stuff haha

[Inception9269]

33 minutes ago, Zohan2000 said:

and the new OS should just pick up the drives and remake the storage array? honestly got no clue on this type of stuff haha

You won't lose what's on your drives just cause you need to replace the USB. You can read up on their official site.

 

But unraid is your best bet, unless you plan on buying all your drives upfront and being restricted in your ability to expand.

 

*Also you generally have less available storage with TrueNAS vs unraid, due to the way it sets things up with your drives.

[Electronics Wizardy]

I'd skip 4tb drives. Id start with fewer bigger drives like 12-18tb drives, and add more as needed. Unraid makes this easy. Those 4tb drives are a bad value for $ per gb, and you can get ssds for those prices.

 

What network speed are you working with? If your on 1gbe there isn't really a point to a cache drive.

 

 

[Zohan2000]

15 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I'd skip 4tb drives. Id start with fewer bigger drives like 12-18tb drives, and add more as needed. Unraid makes this easy. Those 4tb drives are a bad value for $ per gb, and you can get ssds for those prices.

 

What network speed are you working with? If your on 1gbe there isn't really a point to a cache drive.

 

 

probably should upgrade my network first so i can get at least a gigabit on devices around the house, probably be cheaper to do that first then get myself a server setup later, should i try to get a motherboard with 2 m.2 slots for future upgrading? 

[LIGISTX]

6 hours ago, Zohan2000 said:

probably should upgrade my network first so i can get at least a gigabit on devices around the house, probably be cheaper to do that first then get myself a server setup later, should i try to get a motherboard with 2 m.2 slots for future upgrading? 

Going faster then gigabit isn’t super simple, and it’s relatively expensive to do it “well”. I wouldn’t worry about faster speeds until you have a reason to need them. What do you plan to do that makes you think you need more then gigabit speed?

[Inception9269]

9 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Going faster then gigabit isn’t super simple, and it’s relatively expensive to do it “well”. I wouldn’t worry about faster speeds until you have a reason to need them. What do you plan to do that makes you think you need more then gigabit speed?

Also the only real way to benefit from a gigabit connection would be for your array to be SSD based, and not HDD based. My NAS uses an 8tb & 6tb HDDs, and my write speeds to them max out at around 115MB/s

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Inception9269 said:

Also the only real way to benefit from a gigabit connection would be for your array to be SSD based, and not HDD based. My NAS uses an 8tb & 6tb HDDs, and my write speeds to them max out at around 115MB/s

That isn’t entirely true. It depends on what file system you are using. 
 

I run truenas with a 10x4TB 5400rpm array, with no SSD’s in it at all, and I can write and read at about 3-4gigabit to it over a 10 gig fiber link. So you can certainly go faster then gigabit with spinning rust. But the real question is… to what end. What’s the need to go faster. What is the use case. 
 

I got a few conectX3 cards for free, so for 40 bucks I got 2 fiber transceiver and 25 feet of fiber to do a dedicated link between PC and NAS at 10gig, but I almost never use it… I didn’t need it. But for 40 bucks, why not. Most home use cases simply have no use for that speed. 

[Zohan2000]

14 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Going faster then gigabit isn’t super simple, and it’s relatively expensive to do it “well”. I wouldn’t worry about faster speeds until you have a reason to need them. What do you plan to do that makes you think you need more then gigabit speed?

honestly no idea, thought gigabit was like a standard, at the moment my network setup is pretty basic with just the isp router at one end of the house and a long ethernet cable to the other side for my pc, was thinking of getting a better router that at least allows me more control in the settings and use the long ethernet cable to have a small switch in my room for my pc and the server to connect up to, probably will need an unmanaged switch? so there wouldnt be any conflicts between the router and switch and the connected devices

[LIGISTX]

11 minutes ago, Zohan2000 said:

honestly no idea, thought gigabit was like a standard, at the moment my network setup is pretty basic with just the isp router at one end of the house and a long ethernet cable to the other side for my pc, was thinking of getting a better router that at least allows me more control in the settings and use the long ethernet cable to have a small switch in my room for my pc and the server to connect up to, probably will need an unmanaged switch? so there wouldnt be any conflicts between the router and switch and the connected devices

Unless you know what settings you want to change in the router (really not much to need to change...), you probably don't need much.

 

Yes, you want an unmanaged switch for basic home networking.

 

If this is your setup, just stick with gigabit. Faster is just a pain, and unless you know you have a need for it, you probably don't.

[Zohan2000]

2 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Unless you know what settings you want to change in the router (really not much to need to change...), you probably don't need much.

 

Yes, you want an unmanaged switch for basic home networking.

 

If this is your setup, just stick with gigabit. Faster is just a pain, and unless you know you have a need for it, you probably don't.

the isp router is pretty locked down, cant port forward or setup dns settings, tried setting up pihole and couldnt get it working since i cant really change any settings, back to getting the first few HDDs for the server, i went with 4tb drives cause they were cheaper and at least 7200rpm, prices are annoying in australia

[Zohan2000]

what would be better for unraid, intel or amd? also ram speed and capacity whats the ideal setup for it? gonna sell the 3900x and the 16gb of gigabyte ddr4 ram to spend on a low end cpu with intergrated graphics and use ddr5 ram, also should i use a m.2 card for more sata ports or get a pcie card for more sata ports? if using a pcie card for more sata ports, should it be a raid card?

[LIGISTX]

4 hours ago, Zohan2000 said:

what would be better for unraid, intel or amd? also ram speed and capacity whats the ideal setup for it? gonna sell the 3900x and the 16gb of gigabyte ddr4 ram to spend on a low end cpu with intergrated graphics and use ddr5 ram, also should i use a m.2 card for more sata ports or get a pcie card for more sata ports? if using a pcie card for more sata ports, should it be a raid card?

Intel, simply because intels integrates graphics is better supported by Plex.

 

RAM speed doesn’t matter at all. 
 

Get a SAS HBA: https://www.ebay.com/itm/155421555013?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=zq9OX4YXQYW&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=B1xTkXm_Qfe&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

 

SAS HBA flashed to IT mode (IT mode makes it simply pass the drives through to the OS, it basically just makes it a break out card which is what you want for any form of software RAID, which in this case unraid is software “non”-RAID). 

[Zohan2000]

1 hour ago, LIGISTX said:

Intel, simply because intels integrates graphics is better supported by Plex.

 

RAM speed doesn’t matter at all. 
 

Get a SAS HBA: https://www.ebay.com/itm/155421555013?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=zq9OX4YXQYW&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=B1xTkXm_Qfe&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

 

SAS HBA flashed to IT mode (IT mode makes it simply pass the drives through to the OS, it basically just makes it a break out card which is what you want for any form of software RAID, which in this case unraid is software “non”-RAID). 

thanks, gonna makeup a quick list and have a look around for pricing, also noticed thats theres an updated version of the n1, the n2 from jonsbo more like a cube shape but doesnt seem to have much cooling for the harddrives

 

 

EDIT: found that sas hba on ebay AU and if i use a ddr4 intel board i can save some money on ram, made this list, does it look good for a start? https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/vRhnZw

 

EDIT 2: the fans are to replace the included fan but only to be bought if the included fan is annoyingly loud, few reviews of the cases ive watched have said that

[LIGISTX]

9 hours ago, Zohan2000 said:

EDIT: found that sas hba on ebay AU and if i use a ddr4 intel board i can save some money on ram, made this list, does it look good for a start? https://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/vRhnZw

Yea, looks fine. I would consider getting all larger drives instead of even wasting time with a smaller drive, and you could easily step down to a an i3 if you wanted. 

[Zohan2000]

4 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Yea, looks fine. I would consider getting all larger drives instead of even wasting time with a smaller drive, and you could easily step down to a an i3 if you wanted. 

went with the i5 cause i thought the extra speed and better igpu would be better overall and the drives, earlier in the thread it was said that the parity drive should be the largest drive in the array 

[LIGISTX]

6 hours ago, Zohan2000 said:

went with the i5 cause i thought the extra speed and better igpu would be better overall and the drives, earlier in the thread it was said that the parity drive should be the largest drive in the array 

Parity drive should be the largest, but that doesn’t mean they all can’t be the same size… parity drive must be the largest, no other drive can be larger.

 

What is the intent of this machine? What will it be doing? I ran my homelab on an i3 6100 for YEARS, VM’s consisted of: truenas, 3x Ubuntu server (one hosted a Plex sever), home assistant, windows LTSC, multiple docker containers to include pihole, and a few other VM’s for random stuff. My CPU was never the limiting factor. And that was a 2 core 4 thread part from 2015. A current gen i3 is a very power chip, plenty enough for almost any homelab setup.