Can't decide on NAS HW-setup

[Nicnac]

Hey everyone,

So I can't make up my mind about the NAS build I am planning.

It starts with SSD or HDD. I would go for HDD because its still about half the price/TB compred to SSD but power consumption is considerable as I add drives...

I live in Germany and pay 0,43 cents per kWh so yea... for a 20W system that is more than 70 Euros per year.

Also I have a Celeron J1900 board that I want to use but then again I am unsure if SSD Storage is just wasted on such a low-power board.

I plan on storing up to 10TB of research-related data (right now it's only about 2 TB but i like to have headroom) and use the rest for other things like game saves, movies, etc.

I thought about just getting two 12 TB drives and running them in Raid 1 for now to see if I am actually going to use this system and if performance is ok...

on the other hand I could splurge on 4TB m.2 SSDs and an Asus hyper-card but that would be kinda ridiculous wouldn't it? Also I wouldn't have parity/redundancy...

What are your thoughts on this? what else should I consider?

[leadeater]

For a small amount of data RAID 1 would likely be the best. Don't forget HDDs can spin down so comparing power usage isn't so straight forward.

 

Going SSDs is of course nice and if only 2 storage devices is the most likely to have suitable performance for anything you could do. With only 2-4 SSDs I don't think they would be wasted on a Celeron J but performance will be limited.

 

I'm leaning towards HDDs and have a single SSD for unimportant game installs that can be re-downloaded aka no real data loss.

[Nicnac]

31 minutes ago, leadeater said:

For a small amount of data RAID 1 would likely be the best. Don't forgot HDDs can spin down so comparing power usage isn't so straight forward.

 

Going SSDs is of course nice and if only 2 storage devices is the most likely to have suitable performance for anything you could do. With only 2-4 SSDs I don't think they would be wasted on a Celeron J but performance will be limited.

 

I'm leaning towards HDDs and have a single SSD for unimportant game installs that can be re-downloaded aka no real data loss.

Thank you! The separate SSD for fast but non-redundant storage is a great idea! Will have to see how I'm going to implement that software-wise.

[Needfuldoer]

If you already own the hardware, there's no harm in throwing it together just to see how it runs. I bet the J1900 will easily saturate a Gigabit Ethernet connection off a pair of hard drives.

 

A 100% flash NAS would theoretically draw less power, but it would take ages to pay back the additional purchase cost in power savings. (Not to mention that you won't see any speed benefits over just a single Gigabit connection; that's only 100 MB/sec over SMB.) You'll want a pair of small SSDs for the boot mirror though, and if you run a media server I highly recommend an additional SSD for the metadata and thumbnails. 

[Nicnac]

6 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

If you already own the hardware, there's no harm in throwing it together just to see how it runs. I bet the J1900 will easily saturate a Gigabit Ethernet connection off a pair of hard drives.

 

A 100% flash NAS would theoretically draw less power, but it would take ages to pay back the additional purchase cost in power savings. (Not to mention that you won't see any speed benefits over just a single Gigabit connection; that's only 100 MB/sec over SMB.) You'll want a pair of small SSDs for the boot mirror though, and if you run a media server I highly recommend an additional SSD for the metadata and thumbnails. 

You're right I should just try it out. And good point on the Gigabit speed... HDDs it is then

 

[Nicnac]

Spoiler

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

One more question, do you think the Celeron will be able to run TrueNas in a proxmox VM with only 8GB RAM?

 

Edit: nvm it'll have to run bare metal