If power use & reliability are key I would seriously suggest you go the route of a TrueNAS Mini (a variety of options based on your needs). You’ll likely have a hard time matching or beating the minimal power use. They can support a 10G link as well if you even need that. Based on your use case all of the passmark data you mention is probably useless since you can’t push the system hard enough under normal file access operations to even max the system out. I am also a bit confused as to why you’d want to do ZFS by hand as opposed to using something like TrueNAS core/scale. Especially when reliability is a concern. Having easy access to the snapshot functionality and backups seems extremely useful. Maybe I am missing something…
PS: All of this comes from someone that did build a custom TrueNAS storage server but I had some different requirements than your needs. If they were simpler I wouldn’t have bothered with the hassle of building something custom.
I’m the guy in the room that knows less than everyone else, but just a thought, perhaps an i3-9100F (4C/4HT) + ECC RAM + SuperMicro board. It’s low power, but if you’re only after reliable storage and no VM’s, it might do you? I just figure if you’re using a reliable file system, you could add a bit of reliability with ECC?
For super low usage, some pre-made NAS’s have the G4560’s (I think that’s what they’re called), really low power and ECC friendly.
I’m sure you’ve factored it in, but a UPS would be a welcome addition.
This message comes courtesy of one of my setups for TrueNAS (Credit to Yorick on the TrueNAS forum):
Motherboard: SuperMicro X11SCL-F (6 x SATA Ports + 1 x NVMe)
CPU: Intel Core i3 9100F
RAM: 1x 16GB ECC
PSU: 550W Corsair RMx
UPS: Riello iDialog 600VA 360W UPS with 4 AC Outlets (very TrueNAS compatible)
@ChrisA
Yes, whichever set up I decide to go with is going to be connected to a UPS and use ECC ram. Also - SuperMicro X11SCL-IF(pretty much the mini-itx version of the mb that you’re using), would be my choice for the DIY Xeon v5 configuration if I decided to go with SuperMicro.
Well, I’ve checked out TrueNAS Mini, and getting it here is difficult. The shipping alone would cost me almost 500$US. Also all of the TrueNAS solutions look like rebranded SuperMicro boxes(just look at here and here)
Yes, they do use SuperMicro boards & parts but its the overall fit & finish and reliability testing you pay for. Could you build the exact same thing maybe a little cheaper, probably but maybe not. Definitely not when you factor in your time. All of this counts towards overall ease of operation, the value of your time, etc.
I spent way more building my own system. Power levels are much higher too. It really all depends what you are looking for, not trying to sound harsh, but quoting passmark numbers and focusing on that when you say you want reliability & low power seem like you are focusing on the wrong metrics.
What location are you in, this is definitely helpful to provide.
I have the TS-h886 and TS-h973AX. Purely for storage, both saturate my 10 gig cards. Both are a year and close to a year with no issues.
I also have an ASRock Rack (mATX variant) AM4 that’s been in 24/7 operation for about 2 years. Not a NAS, but I run a bunch of VMs and containers in my lab. The IPMI features were one of the reasons I picked it. The few times I had to use is, it would have been a pain to drag a monitor over to the rack.
Either way, I don’t really see a bad option in the bunch as far as your round up and the other suggestions made.
If you’re not going 10GBit Ethernet, any performance metric is superfluous. Any single old HDD with an old dual core CPU can address 1GBit ethernet bandwidth and a 5$ USB drive for the OS. Or get a 2-4 bay cheap pre-built NAS. Way less trouble and probably the least amount of power you can get. Reliability is also the sum of moving parts in a system. Installing everything yourself is the source of many errors.
Save yourself the money for that OS drive. There is a reason for microSD slots on some server boards and why so many people use USB drives. It just isn’t under use except for KBs worth of logs once in a while. Get a Ryzen 5000 (5600x on ECO is 45W TDP with insane boosts) or memory or L2ARC or whatever.
Maybe I should have clarified, because this point keeps getting brought up.
Both PassMark scores and TDP(unreliable as both of those may be), were used calculate PassMark/TDP, that I thought would at least help me assess the efficiency of each configuration.
I was never comparing performance by itself. What I tried to do was compare efficiencies and performance/unit of currency(basically “bang for the buck”).
Honestly at this point Qnap TS-473A is the most appealing of the whole lineup - the CPU is the most energy efficient, and the price is relatively low compared to others. The energy efficiency seems to be confirmed by this STH review of the 8 bay variant, where idle power consumption was 26W and max observed was 58W, and that’s with 8 x 8TB Seagate IronWolf drives.
I used to have a system with the operating system on a USB stick, and I’d rather avoid repeating that experience, but considering that I want to run this NAS together with a UPS, maybe supercaps on the OS drive aren’t that crucial, and I could go with a cheap 35CHF(or 36.71$US ) ssd instead.
Reliability is the one thing that makes me hesitant about choosing Qnap TS-473A. I’ve never used their products, but on top of negative opinions about their reliability that I’ve read online, my friend(who’s a professional computer janitor) also said that the quality of Qnap hardware is questionable. But I think it’s conceivable that they had several dodgy products in the past and the popular opinion just stuck. I don’t know - I simply don’t have enough experience with their stuff.
That’s a new one for me. You need only look a few ServeTheHome hardware reviews. Perhaps he was just dealt a bad hand. Personally I have owned or operated 20 QNAP devices and build quality wasn’t much of an issue. The low end plasticy single and dual bays I could see, but not the ones discussed so far.
I’m sure had positive experience with QNAP, but I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t heard those opinions. Even after casually browsing L1 forums I’ve already run into this exchange(and I wasn’t looking for it, I was actually interested in running OpenBSD on RockPro64):
We’re also running two QNAP NASes at my workplace, and they’ve been running without any issues for a couple years now, it’s just that negative opinions like those quoted above make me a bit anxious, and none of the options that I’ve mentioned are exactly cheap.
I would worry much more about running a custom freebsd install before considering the reliability of the hardware.
There’s no good and bad hardware (to a certain degree), but the hardware you linked is all ‘good’ unless you get unlucky and something comes dead on arrival or you get a lightning strike or a case of bad electronics luck. At that point it’s the quality of support that counts more that the quality of the hardware. If the hardware is somewhat unreliable, but you get excellent support that gets you a spare part/fixes it without it taking two months and without your data leaving your premises, then I would take that over stellar hardware that you won’t be able to get a spare and/or a replacement should it fail …
I’ve seen similar sentiments about anything in the tech space. You’re less likely to hear from people who have had good experiences. Then those who have had bad ones amplify them. At the end of the day, you gotta do what’s best for you. Not trying to sell you on QNAP really, only wanted to share my personal experience.
FreeBSD handbook is one of the best pieces of documentation around, and BSDs generally are very well documented and comfortable systems to run(especially on servers). I used to administer a server running OpenBSD and it was so smooth and easy, that I wish I could use it for this, but the lack of ZFS precludes that. NetBSD is also sweet, but it’s ZFS support isn’t up to scratch just yet, so I’ll go with FreeBSD.
Also I don’t think I’ll have to install a ton of additional stuff(if any - I just need ZFS and sshd), and I expect that I’ll be running the stock kernel, so I don’t think that qualifies it as “custom”.
I get that what you’re saying is that both QNAP and iXsystems have teams of engineers working on their software(fixing, updating and providing support for it), but their solutions are orders of magnitude more complex than what I want or need.
I’m comfortable using the command line and reading man pages and howtos and other forms of documentation when I have questions, conversely, it’s the graphical interfaces that I find superfluous and sometimes confusing(and both TrueNAS and QNAP software are built with this kind of usage in mind).
I understand the risks, and I get that I’ll have to be my own tech support, and I accept that, but then again voiding the warranty is the first thing I do when I buy new tech, so I’m used to that.
I really hope that all this didn’t make me sound like an elitist or something, it’s just how my experience with computers influenced my current approach. My first OS was MS DOS - so that was command line only, then I moved to Windows(which wasn’t great, but 3.11 was just a graphical overlay, and 9x still allowed me to use my MS DOS chops), and when I was 12 I’ve installed Slackware(I’ve tried RedHat, but it sucked, Slackware was amazing though). Back then I didn’t have access to the internet, so if I wanted to make something work I had to use the documentation that was included with the system(and even MS DOS included very nice documentation - both for the OS and the BASIC language).
And I’m very grateful that you did share your experience! It wasn’t my intention to devalue it in any way.
I’m glad that you’ve shared that you’re happy with QNAP products, because it might be a much needed counterbalance to the amplified voices that you’ve mentioned.
I hope they work well for you, but in the company I worked for, we were all-in on QNAP. They were cheaper than alternatives is all I can say, but my colleagues told me they sucked, so that’s what impression I had on them. I was just a helpdesk at the time, so it was a while ago, but given that I know personally people who worked with them and I trust their opinions, I won’t be using QNAP NASes.
But for a NAS, I prefer things that I have more control over anyway.
I get your point, my point was that with the current quality of hardware in general, either you’re unlucky and get a non working componenbt from the start (or DHL kills the hardware by tossing it around) or you get a lightning strike, or the probability of it failing is less than you screwing up something while doing an update/maintenance/trying out something on your platform, even if you have decades of experience. This is from someone on the same boat actually, I was just tryng to make the point that worrying about the reliabiliy of the harware should not be a factor in your choice, or it should have minimal weight …
I am not questioning you willingness/ability to roll your own custom NAS and for your GUI allergy condition … again, to each its own
Did they ‘suck’ because the hardwar was constantly failing and you couldn’t get support, or did they ‘suck’ because the OS was losing data, or did they ‘suck’ because they were a pain to administer for your use case, or were they constantly hanging on you?
These are all different kind of suckness, and I would be wary of any tech that sums all of if on a single metric. To me it looks more like a PEBCAK than an indicator of the hardware/software actually not performinig …
I don’t remember what problems they had with them, so I can’t say, but given that we had 2 Gentoo admins, with experience with everything from Samba, to DNS, to DBs, to Asterisk PBX, to web servers, to Linux storage arrays (the most important factor I would say, when talking about NASes), to networking and more behind their back, I would definitely not attribute it to being a user error on my ex-colleagues part. In fact, I find it highly unlikely.
Unfortunately, I left the company long ago, so I don’t know what purchasing decisions they made afterwards, maybe they continued buying QNAPs, but I did hear they had plans to move part of the infrastructure to Azure.
) ssd instead.
and for your GUI allergy condition … again, to each its own