Advice on NAS Build

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1

Hi everyone!

I am looking for advice on a NAS build. I would like to have a NAS at home and I have an old Dell Vostro SFF which I would like to know if its a viable option.
Specs:

  • i5-3470s
  • 6 GB DDR3
  • 2 SATA ports + 16x PCIe (prob Gen3) + 1x PCIe
  • 220W PSU

My requirements for the performance of the NAS are nothing fancy as I mainly intend it for backup purposes, no heavy workloads. I would like it to be quiet, so I was thinking about running all SSDs with TrueNAS Core. Now my questions are:

  • I would split out the PCIe 16x slot into SATA ports an get splitters for the only 2 SATA power connectors the PSU has. Is this advisible? (SSDs should draw significantly less power than the HDD and DVD drive connected prior, right?)
  • What’s your opinion on the Crucial BX500 2 TB as a “NAS SSD”?
  • I gathered that TrueNAS likes a lot of RAM for caching purposes, but would it be necessary to get 16 GB of RAM or could I start out with less?
  • There is a wifi card in a mini PCIe slot. Is there an adapter to install a small amount of storage in such a slot or the PCIe 1x slot for the OS? I don’t need the wifi.

Would this be feasible? I would like to give a purpose to this older, but working computer. I was considering starting out with 6TB (3x2TB) raw storage (raidz1, so 4TB usable) with the option of adding a second vdev later.

Any and all comments and feedback are greatly appreciated!
Cheers,
Smile

2

You’re going to need more SATA connectors, but you’ve already got that covered it seems.

If it’s a SFF build, where are you going to store the drives?

Personally I always use HDDs for backup purposes, ideally with redundancy. SSDs are great, but a) they’re more expensive per GB, and b) they will decay over time. However they are solid state so you don’t have to worry about mechanical failures. You probably should be thinking of retiring drives every N years which ever plan you go with.

Unless you’re running a departmental server or there are a lot of people generating a lot of content in your household, what you’ve described has more than enough raw performance and bandwidth.

You should do some calculations re: the amount of data you expect to generate, whether you can meet the read/write demands (I would think more than enough, but you know your use case), and the sort of MTBF figures (Mean Time Between Failures, also Mean Time To Fail) of the disk topology and type that you’re intending to use.

Most household NASs are simple affairs: the main variables tend to be the number and capacity of the drives you attach.Raspberry Pi NAS is a thing (if you can get your hands on a RPi!)

Good luck!

3

First of all, thank you for the response!

Well, tbh, since if I am using this build, I can only use SSDs, I was thinking about frankensteining them inside, with only one screw each into the 3.5" bay of the HDD and the 5.25" bay of the optical drive. Or, you know, double-sided tape :grin:

Yes, they are way more expensive per GB, but for now I don’t expect a lot of data accumulation in my household (at the moment I’m pretty sure it does not exceed 500 GB, growing very slowly), so the cost savings of reusing an old computer willl make up for it, I guess. Plus, I would like it to be very silent.
Regarding the RPi: Is it powerful enough to run a ZFS-system? And connectivity for redundancy might be an issue there as well, or not?

Regarding the longevity: From my understanding, HDDs fail much more abrupt than SSDs, due to their mechanical nature (for example, while resilvering) and e.g. the IronWolf drives state a MTBF of 1.2 million hours, whereas the BX500 states 1.5 million hours, so on paper the SSDs should live longer, right?
Or are there aspects not represented well by these numbers (I suspect there are, but I want to learn :slight_smile: )

The bandwidth really should be a non-issue for my use case.

Cheers,
Smile

4

Hello!

Have you already had a practice with TrueNAS?

I’m reminded of an issue with TrueNAS and those SSD’s - Boot Drive? | TrueNAS Community

I think that’s the only justification for using SSD’s, just on a cost per TB basis.

I’m not sure about power usage, but you might be safer getting an LSI HBA for greater reliability (make sure it’s preset to IT mode) - TrueNAS gets funny about SATA adaptors and splitters

Ideally you’d have as much as possible, but I would say install it and see how it goes. I had a very basic config when I was initially playing with it and had 4GB. There were some minor issues so I switched to 8GB and it was all well. As you’re only backing up, I think 6GB will be OK - the RAM is mainly used for re-reading existing data that’s been pulled, but you’re only sticking stuff into the machine and not really looking at it.

That’s best removed, TrueNAS doesn’t work over wifi (of course once network connected via cable, it will), same goes with sound cards.

Hopefully it has Intel NIC’s, they work with the least fuss and avoid strange issues.

I would test drive the machine as is with a TrueNAS install if you have access to a few random drives (320GB, etc.). ideally you’d have an SSD (small one is ok, down to 32GB) for use as the boot drive.

I think a recent Backblaze report has concluded the opposite, and from experience traditional hard drives at least make some noise before they pop. SSD’s just tend to stop, never to be access again.

Speaking of which, backblaze B2 would be quite cheap as an off-site backup solution. Running RAIDZ1 only gives you one drive failure at any one time, while Z2 allows another drive to fail while you replace the failed drive.

In someways it’s a shame it doesn’t have NVMe on the board, cos then you could use that as the install drive, then keep it simple by using the 2 SATA ports for a mirrored pair of drives. The only downside is that it doesn’t make it very upgradeable, over time yes, you could replace the 2TB drives with 4TB and then expand the pool when all drives are done.

I don’t use it, but you might even want to look at UnRAID if it’s non-critical situation.

Hope that helps!

5

Thank you for the information!

Sadly the person there did not link any article and I can find no mention elsewhere. I did however find a reddit post SSD Reliability note - two Crucial BX500 failures in my setup in a few months. : freenas (reddit.com), where a commenter claims that BX500-like drives are expected to fail quickly on zfs due to their lack of DRAM cache. Is that true? The TrueNAS CORE-documentation (CORE Hardware Guide |) does not mention DRAM cache at all.

I will look into an HBA and I’ll also see what hardware I have lying around to do a test run, since I haven’t played around with truenas yet, but I would like to get to know it. If I fail, I might try unraid :wink:
And yes, an offsite backup still needs to happen for the really important stuff :grin:

Thanks so far!

1 Like
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You’re very welcome!

I’m not sure about why the BX500’s are huffy with TrueNAS, I’d be surprised if it’s a DRAM cache thing, but that’s heading into territory that’s unknown to me. I suppose it must just be a data handling issue (I am Jack’s complete lack of knowledge). I wouldn’t look too closely to the TrueNAS manual for hardware, they can’t really validate every single bit of hardware, because there’s a lot out there. Of course it does expect high end’ish gear, for example your average NIC (non-Intel) doesn’t occasionally play well with it. And it won’t tell you, it will just play up a little. Ultimately if you’ve got a system that runs reliably for a month (on 24 hours a day) without complaint, you’ve got a good system. That’s not to say you shouldn’t burn in and test all components.

This sounds strange, but there’s a theme that TrueNAS likes Intel, for that reason I used an Intel SSD (535 Series) to start with and that was fine. I think my current machine has mirrored SK hynix SSD’s and I’ve had no issue at all.

Kingston are supposed to be pretty TrueNAS friendly as well :slight_smile:

If you’ve not experienced TrueNAS at all, I strongly recommend knocking together a test install. Get familiar with it, because you might need that familiarity in the rare event that it goes wrong. It’s designed to not trust hardware though, which is nice because hardware comes and goes - but you don’t want your data going the same way! For example:

A drive goes wrong - if you have email notification on and some fairly easy scripts to install, it’ll tell you drive XX is buggered. You make a note of the serial number (on the GUI), shut the machine down, add a drive to replace it, boot up and press things to indicate which drive you want to replace and hey presto you’re back in business.

If the boot drive goes wrong - you previously make sure you saved a copy of the config file. Shut down machine, install truenas onto that new drive, import your config file and again, hey presto, back in business.

If the motherboard / cpu goes pop, you shift all the drives into a replacement machine, install truenas, import your config and hey presto again, you’re back in business.

The ease and freedom of the above is the reason I didn’t go for Synology, I’m not that keen on being forced to buy from the same place after experiencing a problem. It’s a bit Apple like!

Do give UnRAID a go if it’s (TrueNAS) is too taxing for you, it’s really easy to use and very much a GUI experience. I’d have probably gone that route if it weren’t for having critical business files.

Good luck, happy to help with any teething issues, though many here know way more than me. Final advice is - Google and read before asking a question on the TrueNAS forum. :+1:

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Okay, thank you very much again! Especially for the final advice :wink:
Then I’ll try to find more on the DRAM-thing and then I’ll look for hardware which should work.

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You’re very welcome, enjoy playing, that’s what I did :slight_smile:

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