Advice on building a quiet NAS using NVMe and bifurcation.

[gc71]

@LorenzoVonMatterhorn

My internet connection is dsl 250 mbit/s down 15 mbit/s up. I can get 5G mm for the same monthly cost. I am very tempted to change provider.
The LAN is currently running at 1 Gbps. I only have the ISP router connected to my Thunderbolt dock (1 Gb) and desktop (2.5 Gb).

My understanding is that I could directly connect the NAS to any computer and achieve 10, 25 Gbe, etc, depending on what network cards or Thunderbolt adapters I choose to invest in. I could still connect the NAS with 1 Gb to my ISP router. To make it accessible from “the road” but at a very slow throughput.

This is not the case. If you want your local network to run at 10Gb speed, you need the router to support 10Gb speed. You also need to double check your Ethernet cabling to make sure its at least Cat6 since I believe that is the minimum for 10Gb ; the older Cat 5e only goes up to 1Gb I believe

Speeds of Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a, Cat7, and Cat8 Cables Compared - Cablify

If you have any network switches involved those need to support 10Gb as well.

Your ISP internet speed does not matter because this data is not going out over your internet, this is for local use only as described between your local systems on the local network.

@homeserver78

Is no-one bothered by the 120 Hz hum?

as I described, the Fractal Design Define 7 case has been dead silent for me, cannot hear anything.

[IgorDe]

I’ve been in that boat some time ago, though I didn’t need an absolutely silent NAS.

I went with an AMD EPYC 8024P (should’ve gone with 8124P, but I got the other one for very cheap), 96GB DDR5 ECC RDIMM RAM, 2x SATA SSDs for booting, 4x NVMe 3,84TB U.2 drives for storage (got them cheap, they’re usually quite expensive otherwise, but they’re also blazing fast; I went with Samsung 983 drives) and a Micron 7400 MAX m.2 for image storage (as in: system or software images).

It’s not silent, but thanks to a suitable Noctua cooler it’s very cool and runs at 70-90W.

Before I went with enterprise-ish stuff, I tried using a i5-12400, 128GB UDIMM DDR5 ECC RAM and a some ASRockRack w680d4u-2l2t/g5 board, but just couldn’t make it work, probably because the RAM was borked. However: since Linux support for UDIMM DDR5 ECC RAM is really bad (edac-util for example doesn’t recognize monitorable memory controllers and not all errors are ECC errors apparently), I decided to go with something with better support. That system would’ve used even less energy and thereby need even less cooling.

TrueNAS Scale is fine, though I prefer to have more control, which is why I went with Proxmox and Talos Kubernetes VMs. For simplicity you could ditch both for TrueNAS Scale or even plain Ubuntu + Docker and some UI (e.g. Portainer and/or Cockpit).

I am not sure EPYC ROME has all the power saving features implemented. For a homelab NAS you also do not necessarily need ECC memory - on my old NAS (>10 years) I am using normal drives in a RAID array + backups, no ECC memory, though you might never find out which files fell victim to bitrot (if at all).
It will be hard to find powerful enterprise-ish gear, that basically runs silent.

[LorenzoVonMatterhorn]

@IgorDe, thanks for sharing your knowledge. That is some fine enterprise SSD in your system. It seems that consumer hardware will never reach parity with enterprise hardware in reliability and features. I will revisit the idea of enterprise hardware once I build/buy myself a house. I need ECC, I will be in charge of digitalizing some important documents from the farm that has been in the family for 8 generations. Some data exist on 1980s computers. Some only in paper. I will be the custodian for many years to come.

Thanks everyone for the input. After pondering deeply, I’ve adopted a more relaxed set of criteria. I will like @gc71 and @Kougar and @ThatGuyB recommend use internal or high-speed external storage for the editing.

Since any such drive would not be redundant, I will try and find a solution for doing snapshot replication of the external drive. I believe it would be very un-manageable to do daily backups of the entire content. My guess is that snapshot replication would allow me to edit remotely, while still doing daily backups.

I have also rethought my recruitments for availability. Upload availability must be much higher than retrieval. This will be solved by using (1) the NAS, (2) Cloud storage providers, if my NAS were offline. Hence, my system does not need IPMI, only ECC.

Since the scope has been reduced to a file server. I would be fine with AM4, AM5 or older.
I might go 2xSSD or buy 2x12TB WD red plus 12 TB, the forums seem to believe it is a quiet HDD.

I can geta Motherboard with C-type chipset, ECC RAM and a processor from 100 euro to 200 euro, depending on it being either Xeon e3 v2/v4/v6 and RAM amount. Is this a solid option?

With going AM4 and AM5 it all seems like a hot mess. ECC support breaking with BIOS updates. How ECC works in varying degrees with integrated graphics. How much would it cost me to go with an AM4 or AM5 system if I aim at the lower end of the spectrum?

@gc71

This is not the case. If you want your local network to run at 10Gb speed, you need the router to support 10Gb speed. You also need to double check your Ethernet cabling to make sure its at least Cat6 since I believe that is the minimum for 10Gb ; the older Cat 5e only goes up to 1Gb I believe

It should work without a switch Ethernet crossover cable - Wikipedia. I can build one myself if the NICs do not support it. I have the tools and supplies.