Is this a good nas?

[Indian pc builder]

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ZLngcH

 

Are the red pros worth it or should I go for the red plus instead?

[filpo]

1 minute ago, Indian pc builder said:

Are the red pros worth it or should I go for the red plus instead?

Red Pros could be noisier cuz of the higher RPM speed, though the higher rpm speed would mean higher read/write speeds but apart from that they look like they're the same

Why do you need a 13400 for a nas? A 12100 would probably be overkill, it does depend what you use it for in terms of a NAS. For example, what software you're planning to use (TrueNAS, Openfiler etc.)

Definitely don't get ddr5 ram for a NAS, this DDR5 doesn't look great at all (you can get 32gb of ddr4 for the same price)

PSU is a bit overpriced, you won't need more than 450 let alone 650

Motherboard seems a bit overpriced too

I swear optane died at 11th gen?

Where's your case?

try this (you could also use this rip off of the 4000d, but it saves a lot more space, it doesn't look too bad as a case BGears b-Masstige MicroATX Mini Tower Case (b-Masstige) - PCPartPicker

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i3-12100 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($121.98 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: ASRock B660M Pro RS Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($94.99 @ Amazon) 
Memory: Silicon Power GAMING 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($33.97 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Mushkin Helix-L 512 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($37.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital Red Plus 2 TB 3.5" 5400 RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($79.98 @ Amazon) 
Case: Deepcool MATREXX 40 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($44.98 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Apevia Prestige 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply  ($51.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $465.88
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-12 13:30 EDT-0400

[Indian pc builder]

19 minutes ago, filpo said:

Red Pros could be noisier cuz of the higher RPM speed, though the higher rpm speed would mean higher read/write speeds but apart from that they look like they're the same

Why do you need a 13400 for a nas? A 12100 would probably be overkill, it does depend what you use it for in terms of a NAS. For example, what software you're planning to use (TrueNAS, Openfiler etc.)

Definitely don't get ddr5 ram for a NAS, this DDR5 doesn't look great at all (you can get 32gb of ddr4 for the same price)

PSU is a bit overpriced, you won't need more than 450 let alone 650

Motherboard seems a bit overpriced too

I swear optane died at 11th gen?

Where's your case?

try this (you could also use this rip off of the 4000d, but it saves a lot more space, it doesn't look too bad as a case BGears b-Masstige MicroATX Mini Tower Case (b-Masstige) - PCPartPicker

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i3-12100 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($121.98 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: ASRock B660M Pro RS Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($94.99 @ Amazon) 
Memory: Silicon Power GAMING 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory  ($33.97 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Mushkin Helix-L 512 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($37.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Western Digital Red Plus 2 TB 3.5" 5400 RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($79.98 @ Amazon) 
Case: Deepcool MATREXX 40 MicroATX Mini Tower Case  ($44.98 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Apevia Prestige 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply  ($51.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $465.88
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-04-12 13:30 EDT-0400

Planning on truenas scale and the rationale is:

13400: I’m running an omada controller , a back blaze personal backup and a jellyfin server on this and I am ok with a bit of headroom if it means it stays stable

 

ddr5: on chip ecc, although not quite as stable as proper ecc memory is in theory, more stable than ddr4, and also I went with the Crucial 4800 as it’s probably the most stable one I’ll get

 

optane: unmatched read and write endurance among seeds and it’s cheap and runs faster too, as a boot drive at least ( I will look for a smaller drive)

 

red pro/plus: better failure rates on backblaze. As something that say will be written to once every 6 months, I’m debating going for the plus for the quietness advantage you mentioned 

 

psu: I specifically went seasonic as I know that they can be trusted and I have had dried die in me before due to bad psu’s, one of them even managed to kill a sata ssd, which really confused me as to how my ssd died.

mobo: I went for a 760 as I usually pair i5’s with b series boards, also It lets me get 6 sata drives off the board without an expansion card 
 

case: I’m not buying these parts online but am going to my local wholesale consumer electronics market and the case selection will be more limited there, I was thinking of a jonsbo n whatever and then subsequently switching out to an itx mobo.

 

Also the amount I have budgeted for thus is actually quite a bit more than what this comes out to and I was considering going for 2.5 gig networking as well but again, I think I should be fine with gigabit.

 

youre very much welcome to correct me on anything I have wrong tho as we all like to save money 

 

also should I consider 32 gigs or would 16 be fine?

[LIGISTX]

8 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

Planning on truenas scale and the rationale is:

13400: I’m running an omada controller , a back blaze personal backup and a jellyfin server on this and I am ok with a bit of headroom if it means it stays stable

Good choice, scale is the right way to go. The 13400 will still be incredible overkill... I ran my homelab on a ie 6100 (thats a dual core with HT) and I was running ESXi as my hypervisor, VM's I had running under it were:

Truenas

3x Ubuntu server (one of the VM's was a plex server)

Windows LTSC running Veeam backup

home assistant

a handful of docker containers

 

and the i3 was a non issue. I did eventually upgrade to the system in my signature, but that was more because I was starting to run out of RAM (i3 system only had 28 GB...).

 

Nothing wrong with the 13400, but it will be massive overkill.

 

10 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

ddr5: on chip ecc

Good rational

 

10 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

optane: unmatched read and write endurance among seeds and it’s cheap and runs faster too, as a boot drive at least ( I will look for a smaller drive)

This is entirely pointless for a truenas boot drive. Truenas never hits the boot drive, it writes literally 0 bytes unless you make config changes. Nothing wrong with optane either, they are cheap and reliable, but jsut wanted to make sure you understood what is needed for a truenas boot drive (basically nothing, also you can save config backups very, very easily, so even if boot drive dies its easy to recover).

 

12 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

red

WD Red's are fine. How many drives are you planning on running is a much more important question? What redundency level?

 

12 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

psu: I specifically went seasonic as I know that they can be trusted and I have had dried die in me before due to bad psu’s, one of them even managed to kill a sata ssd, which really confused me as to how my ssd died.

Good choice. Total wattage for a NAS is next to negligeant, but quality is extremely important. Spend money on a good PSU, its worth it especially for a NAS. Both from efficiency standpoint, but also not losing drives due to failures.

 

13 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

also should I consider 32 gigs or would 16 be fine?

16 will be fine unless you want to start running VM's and stuff. But for ZFS alone, 16 GB will be plenty sufficient.

[Indian pc builder]

10 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Good rational

This isn’t sarcastic right?

 

10 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

See, I’m not always going to be here and I’m planning to leave this thing running indefinitely ( and I have had ssd failures happen before) so I’m going for it for the higher stability, I’ll find a 32 gig one though

10 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Good choice, scale is the right way to go. The 13400 will still be incredible overkill... I ran my homelab on a ie 6100 (thats a dual core with HT) and I was running ESXi as my hypervisor, VM's I had running under it were:

Truenas

3x Ubuntu server (one of the VM's was a plex server)

Windows LTSC running Veeam backup

home assistant

a handful of docker containers

 

and the i3 was a non issue. I did eventually upgrade to the system in my signature, but that was more because I was starting to run out of RAM (i3 system only had 28 GB...).

 

Nothing wrong with the 13400, but it will be massive overkill.

Programs I plan to run exactly: 

truenas

jellyfin 

tplink Omaha controller

a pfsense Vm maybe if the omada stuff doesn’t pan out which it will 

backblaze pc backup in a docket container for unlimited cloud ( keep in line I only have like a terabyte of data and the storage is a good future proof)

so you recommend an i3-13100 instead of the i5? ( I’m only buying new ) 

10 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

16 will be fine unless you want to start running VM's and stuff. But for ZFS alone, 16 GB will be plenty sufficient.

List above

Is 16 enough-ish? I may plan to put more and more things on this server in the long run and I would really need it to be extremely stable so I wouldn’t mind overspecing it but I would be happier if I could save money 

10 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

WD Red's are fine. How many drives are you planning on running is a much more important question? What redundency level?

Initial setup with 4 2tb wd red plus running raid 5 for an effective capacity of 6tb and the possible loss of 1 drive with the option to add 2 more drives down the road

 

 

Also say I want to stick in an atlas os or tiny 11 vm of backblaze docker( I found a GitHub and a Reddit thread for it ) doesn’t work out or I want to get some other windows only

software down the road, will these specs still cut it? Like i3 instead of i5 and 16 not 32 gigs?

[Needfuldoer]

That's a perfectly good NAS which will serve you well for years to come. 

[LIGISTX]

14 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

This isn’t sarcastic right?

No not at all, I would take any amount of ECC over no ECC every day of the week.

 

14 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

backblaze pc backup in a docket container for unlimited cloud

That won't work... backblaze does not allow you to backup network locations via their home tier, you would need to use B2 which is more expensive, but still worthwhile. I have been using B2 for 8+ years at this point.

 

14 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

s 16 enough-ish?

Maybe jsut get 32GB...

 

14 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

Initial setup with 4 2tb wd red plus running raid 5 for an effective capacity of 6tb and the possible loss of 1 drive with the option to add 2 more drives down the road

I wouldn't do it this way.... get more storage up front, you can't add more drives to a vdev later down the road, you would need to create a fully new vdev which needs its own redundency. Thats the major downside of ZFS. They are working on implimenting a way to add drives to a RAID Z vdev, but that is not out of beta, and I wouldn't make purchasing decisions based on potential future software... Buy enough storage now to last you a long time, especially since harddrive don't cost all that much. I would go with 4 4 TB drives at a minimum, or just get all 6 right now and do a Z2 array of 4 TB's. I build my 10x4 TB array in 2015 and initially only used about 20% of the array, its now ~60% full and I am happy I made the choice I did way back when.

 

14 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

software down the road, will these specs still cut it? Like i3 instead of i5 and 16 not 32 gigs?

i3 would be totally fine. That is still an 8 thread CPU with pretty performant threads... I ran more than that on an i3 6100 which was way, way slower. I would 100% save some money on the CPU, spend more on more RAM, and get more larger harddrives. Nothing wrong with going the i5 route, but it is certainly overkill and if the budget is tight, RAM and harddrives are a better place to spend the money. 

 

When virtualizing things, you don't need to worry toooo much about overprovising CPU resources. Think of guest OS's like programs running on your PC... you way WAY more running on your PC at once then a few cores can support, but CPU's are very good at swapping out what they are working on, and operating systems (thus your hypervisor in this case) is good at allocating time to each VM to do what it needs. You don't need as many cores as you have VM's at all. I run a 28 thread chip mostly because it was extremely cheap to buy used server gear, and it was the best bang for buck option for the generation of server mobo I decided to get, and I only really went that route to have A LOT of PCIe lanes and RAM. Bellow is my proxmox current usage, and proxmox runs pfsense as my main router/firewall (don't do this, don't virutalize your main firewall..... I do it, but I never recomend anyone else do it...) and its still seeing almost no CPU usage. 

 

 

For fun to prove a point, I started watching a full 1080p bluray rip, compressed down to 720p + watching WAN show on youtube, and CPU went up to 9%, and that is with plex transcoding at 1.6x speed (to get ahead of where I am so it can build up a buffer which is what plex autoamtically does). And this is full 1080p from bluray, source file is large with 34471 kbps bitrate.... 

 

 

 

 

The below is 4k content (only 9736 kbps source, but 4k is way more difficult to transcode) and that is how hard its hiting my system down to 720p. And remember, this is all doing it on CPU, not GPU since Xeon's do have have iGPU's and I don't have a GPU in this system. With an iGPU, it would barely hit your CPU at all...

 

 

And my Xeon is from the era of DDR4 back in 2015. My CPU does nopt have nearly the per core power of a 13th gen, and my clock speed is damn near half. Yes, I have a lot of cores and threads, but the CPU is much slower and less efficient. Also, all of these CPU %'s are while running VM's of:

truenas

pfsense,

4x Ubuntu Server

• one runs plex
• docker host
  • a dozen docker containers
• second docker host for even great seperation for less trusted containers
  • 3 containers
• yet another docker host
  • 3 cnotainers
• one runs a nextcloud server

Ubuntu LXC container for unifi controller

home assistant

proxmox backup server

 

 

[Indian pc builder]

20 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

No not at all, I would take any amount of ECC over no ECC every day of the week.

 

That won't work... backblaze does not allow you to backup network locations via their home tier, you would need to use B2 which is more expensive, but still worthwhile. I have been using B2 for 8+ years at this point.

 

Maybe jsut get 32GB...

 

I wouldn't do it this way.... get more storage up front, you can't add more drives to a vdev later down the road, you would need to create a fully new vdev which needs its own redundency. Thats the major downside of ZFS. They are working on implimenting a way to add drives to a RAID Z vdev, but that is not out of beta, and I wouldn't make purchasing decisions based on potential future software... Buy enough storage now to last you a long time, especially since harddrive don't cost all that much. I would go with 4 4 TB drives at a minimum, or just get all 6 right now and do a Z2 array of 4 TB's. I build my 10x4 TB array in 2015 and initially only used about 20% of the array, its now ~60% full and I am happy I made the choice I did way back when.

 

i3 would be totally fine. That is still an 8 thread CPU with pretty performant threads... I ran more than that on an i3 6100 which was way, way slower. I would 100% save some money on the CPU, spend more on more RAM, and get more larger harddrives. Nothing wrong with going the i5 route, but it is certainly overkill and if the budget is tight, RAM and harddrives are a better place to spend the money. 

 

When virtualizing things, you don't need to worry toooo much about overprovising CPU resources. Think of guest OS's like programs running on your PC... you way WAY more running on your PC at once then a few cores can support, but CPU's are very good at swapping out what they are working on, and operating systems (thus your hypervisor in this case) is good at allocating time to each VM to do what it needs. You don't need as many cores as you have VM's at all. I run a 28 thread chip mostly because it was extremely cheap to buy used server gear, and it was the best bang for buck option for the generation of server mobo I decided to get, and I only really went that route to have A LOT of PCIe lanes and RAM. Bellow is my proxmox current usage, and proxmox runs pfsense as my main router/firewall (don't do this, don't virutalize your main firewall..... I do it, but I never recomend anyone else do it...) and its still seeing almost no CPU usage. 

 

 

For fun to prove a point, I started watching a full 1080p bluray rip, compressed down to 720p + watching WAN show on youtube, and CPU went up to 9%, and that is with plex transcoding at 1.6x speed (to get ahead of where I am so it can build up a buffer which is what plex autoamtically does). And this is full 1080p from bluray, source file is large with 34471 kbps bitrate.... 

 

 

 

 

The below is 4k content (only 9736 kbps source, but 4k is way more difficult to transcode) and that is how hard its hiting my system down to 720p. And remember, this is all doing it on CPU, not GPU since Xeon's do have have iGPU's and I don't have a GPU in this system. With an iGPU, it would barely hit your CPU at all...

 

 

And my Xeon is from the era of DDR4 back in 2015. My CPU does nopt have nearly the per core power of a 13th gen, and my clock speed is damn near half. Yes, I have a lot of cores and threads, but the CPU is much slower and less efficient. Also, all of these CPU %'s are while running VM's of:

truenas

pfsense,

4x Ubuntu Server

• one runs plex
• docker host
  • a dozen docker containers
• second docker host for even great seperation for less trusted containers
  • 3 containers
• yet another docker host
  • 3 cnotainers
• one runs a nextcloud server

Ubuntu LXC container for unifi controller

home assistant

proxmox backup server

 

 

I3 it is

Does that mean that backblaze cannot backup network locations or does that mean that backblaze cannot backup drives that are also shared as a network location?

see my plan was to have backblaze backup the nas and then use separate software to backup up all  my pc’s and laptops to it 

 

also when I say backblaze I mean backblaze home

Also should I look into running a windows vm ?

alos if I can’t add drives to a truenas vdev, that what about unraid?

[LIGISTX]

7 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

Does that mean that backblaze cannot backup network locations or does that mean that backblaze cannot backup drives that are also shared as a network location?

see my plan was to have backblaze backup the nas and then use separate software to backup up all  my pc’s and laptops to it 

Home backblaze is only supported on Windows and Mac, and it will not back up anything that is reported as a network drive. So you can’t backup what’s on a NAS via a windows machine or a windows VM. The only way to backup truenas or unraid to backblaze would be via using backblaze B2, it you theoretically could spin up a VM and give that VM an equal size harddrive, run some script to keep data from the NAS updated on that VM’s storage, and then back that up…. But that is just a kludgy solution. 
 

7 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

alos if I can’t add drives to a truenas vdev, that what about unraid?

Yes, you can add drives to unraid. I would do some more research into both of them before picking one, or before buying hardware. Understanding the benefits and limitations of each is important. 

[Indian pc builder]

8 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Home backblaze is only supported on Windows and Mac, and it will not back up anything that is reported as a network drive. So you can’t backup what’s on a NAS via a windows machine or a windows VM. The only way to backup truenas or unraid to backblaze would be via using backblaze B2, it you theoretically could spin up a VM and give that VM an equal size harddrive, run some script to keep data from the NAS updated on that VM’s storage, and then back that up…. But that is just a kludgy solution. 

I respond with :

On 4/3/2024 at 6:48 PM, Wardus said:Unraid can be backed up with Backblaze using a docker container mentioned in this Reddit thread. An unraid machine will be more functional, more reliable, and safer for your data than a Windows server. It's also specifically designed for this purpose. It can run Pi-hole, backup services, or even run your AI models without the OS itself taking up much CPU power when idle. It's also more storage efficient than most raid systems.

Also 

I was trying to avoid unraid, but now I’ll have to look into it 

 

[LIGISTX]

5 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

I respond with

That is a totally different thread… 

 

But no, I don’t believe you can use standard backblaze with a NAS unless that NAS was running on windows. Backblaze will not backup network locations… 

 

5 hours ago, Indian pc builder said:

Also 

I was trying to avoid unraid, but now I’ll have to look into it 

Both have pluses and minuses. The big plus of ZFS and thus truenas is it will try much harder to keep data safe… but it is not as flexible in terms of storage expansion later on. 

[Indian pc builder]

9 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

That is a totally different thread… 

 

But no, I don’t believe you can use standard backblaze with a NAS unless that NAS was running on windows. Backblaze will not backup network locations… 

 

Both have pluses and minuses. The big plus of ZFS and thus truenas is it will try much harder to keep data safe… but it is not as flexible in terms of storage expansion later on. 

Should I do windows on the nas? That was my original plan hence the i5

[LIGISTX]

6 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

Should I do windows on the nas? That was my original plan hence the i5

I wouldn’t, no. I would run a proper NAS OS, not windows. Windows can work fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it. 
 

Even if you did, you wouldn’t need an i5. 

[Indian pc builder]

23 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I wouldn’t, no. I would run a proper NAS OS, not windows. Windows can work fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it. 
 

Even if you did, you wouldn’t need an i5. 

I’m just going to look into the backblaze contianer and if not I’ll get windows