First Home server/NAS

[Mdubs71]

Hi,
I'm new to home servers and building my own NAS, and would like some advice. My main use cases are photo backup, file sharing and storage, Plex media hosting, and hosting a Minecraft server. I have a couple of questions:

1. Is anything under/overkill
2. Are there any better options than what I've picked for my use case? My final diskless budget is around $600 (U.S) is ok
3. For the storage, is my SSD for caching a good size?
4. Anything else that stands out as stupid or could just be better?

Thanks for the feedback

[1human]

39 minutes ago, Mdubs71 said:

Hi,
I'm new to home servers and building my own NAS, and would like some advice. My main use cases are photo backup, file sharing and storage, Plex media hosting, and hosting a Minecraft server. I have a couple of questions:

1. Is anything under/overkill
2. Are there any better options than what I've picked for my use case? My final diskless budget is around $600 (U.S) is ok
3. For the storage, is my SSD for caching a good size?
4. Anything else that stands out as stupid or could just be better?

Thanks for the feedback

Is there a specific reason why you want a 10G network card? It would be slightly overkill if your devices can only support 1G max, however if you are planning to saturate the 1G connections on multiple devices then 10G is a way to go.

I will say that network cards are very readily available and I would start off with one that is 2.5G unless you need 10G

[porina]

What OS and disk configuration will be used? I don't want to assume and it can impact some choices.

 

What is the SATA card? If it is a cheap one, they can have performance impacts when used with many drives, as I found out the hard way myself. You may be better off running the array off mobo SATA, and switch the the boot SSD to another M.2 NVMe which the mobo appears to support two off, leaving the other for the cache. If you want to go above 4 storage drives in future, get one of the popular LSI cards.

[Mdubs71]

7 hours ago, 1human said:

Is there a specific reason why you want a 10G network card? It would be slightly overkill if your devices can only support 1G max, however if you are planning to saturate the 1G connections on multiple devices then 10G is a way to go.

I will say that network cards are very readily available and I would start off with one that is 2.5G unless you need 10G

I don't need the 10G and I think I'm limited by cat 5e in my walls. Thank u

[Mdubs71]

5 hours ago, porina said:

What OS and disk configuration will be used? I don't want to assume and it can impact some choices.

 

What is the SATA card? If it is a cheap one, they can have performance impacts when used with many drives, as I found out the hard way myself. You may be better off running the array off mobo SATA, and switch the the boot SSD to another M.2 NVMe which the mobo appears to support two off, leaving the other for the cache. If you want to go above 4 storage drives in future, get one of the popular LSI cards.

I was thinking raid 1 with trueNAS scale, so 12 terabytes of usable space. It makes sense to go with another NVMe for the boot then. Does it’s size matter or is around 120 GB fine?

 

From what I can tell the SATA I picked is about 500 MB/s read and write: Kingston 120GB A400 SATA 3 2.5" Internal. What speeds should I look for on the boot?

 

[porina]

6 minutes ago, Mdubs71 said:

I was thinking raid 1 with trueNAS scale, so 12 terabytes of usable space. It makes sense to go with another NVMe for the boot then. Does it’s size matter or is around 120 GB fine?

That's raid Z1, not raid 1. I'm not the most familiar with TrueNAS but it doesn't use much space. When I did a test install I was using a 32GB Optane stick for it. If there is spare space I don't know if it could be used for something else, or if it will be idle. 

 

I'm not an expert in ZFS but there seems to be a lot of question about when adding cache (L2Arc) is useful. Give it further consideration and possibly drop it.

 

Based on what you describe I think following is a possible configuration:

• 4x HD on mobo SATA ports
• 1x M.2 NVMe as boot
• 1x M.2 NVMe as cache (optional)

If you do the above, you wont need another SATA controller. You can't use M.2 SATA without taking away from the other SATA ports.

 

6 minutes ago, Mdubs71 said:

From what I can tell the SATA I picked is about 500 MB/s read and write: Kingston 120GB A400 SATA 3 2.5" Internal. What speeds should I look for on the boot?

Performance doesn't really matter for the OS.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I'm not an expert in ZFS but there seems to be a lot of question about when adding cache (L2Arc) is useful. Give it further consideration and possibly drop it.

L2Arc won’t help here at all. 
 

@Mdubs71, don’t use a SSD for “caching”, ZFS doesn’t really work how you likely think it works. ZFS caches everything it can in RAM, and even just a few drives in a ZFS array will easily saturate gigabit networking. An L2arc cache also does literally nothing for writes which is what most people think it would help with.

[Bersella AI]

18 hours ago, Mdubs71 said:

What speeds should I look for on the boot?

Even a tiny stick of Optane 16 GB will host TrueNAS without much hassle, as TrueNAS itself requires only 6 GB of storage for one instance and an upgrade, and would benefit from Optane's excellent 4K performance, with which no SATA SSD could catch up. It also leaves 6 GB of available storage for more apps.

 

As for caching, it should be noted that ZFS plays a little differently in that: generally speaking, you need at least two SSDs, with one for L2ARC, a second-layer synchronous reading cache, and another for SLOG, a concurrent writing cache, both bound to one specific pool. They work only with synchronous sessions like NFS and iSCSI, which would be rare in home use; that is, they would not work with asynchronous ones like Samba, the protocol we use mostly and probably solely. Hence, caching would be of limited value in regular home use. Please read this guide for more insights into ZFS and caching, and another for why caches may not be beneficial.