I’m currently in the middle of buying and planning a NAS / server for home use. I currently have an old Synology NAS (4x 4TB) that I would like to retire or sell. Its mainly used as PLEX and backup server. Its been working nicely but it is aging and I wanted to set up a system myself. I already own the following
Jonsbo N3
Minisforum BD790i AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX
Seagate Focus 650
2x Noctua 90mm + 1x 120mm fan
64GB Crucial DDR5 4800 ECC SO-Dimms
The 7945HX is a bit overkill for what I need but I got a good deal on it. I’m planning to further purchase:
8x Seagate Ironwolfs 4TB
WD 1TB SN770
StarTech PCIe 8 Port SATA Controller
My main goals are a NAS for savely backing up my data, possibly replacing my google drive for good, a Plex server (+ a Jellyfin to see the difference) and a steam cache, possibly a local gitlab instance. After reading up on things and going through Lvl1Techs past projects I thought a ZFS pool and Proxmox as a base could be a good start, plus Truenas. Adding containers on the fly to test out things is very appealing. I currently started to work with Ubuntu at work but I’m still fresh on that.
I’m unsure if the combination of Proxmox and ZFS is the way to go and if an additional M.2 drive might be useful as a cache drive for the steam cache or TrueNAS. Maybe a 256GB boot drive and 0.5-1TB cache drive could be better?
I have a fairly big photography and movie collection as I just ripped a lot of my old blurays and DVDs. I also get more and more fed up woth Plex and its stupid little problems so I wanna test Jellyfin as well.
Any input would be appreciated, like suggestions for ressources or simlpy what solution could be good for my use case. Thanks!
I would be considering an LSI 9300-8i instead. Its cheaper, and can support sas if you have a backplane that supports it.
The choice of filesystem configuration and host OS is a pretty personal journey… however I recently played with TrueNAS scale and they added support to expand a vdev a single drive at a time. Thats a pretty big development that would sway me. There are some quirks with the UI, and some bugs to be ironed out but none of that is a deal breaker.
Proxmox is tried and true but I dislike the tinkering it can require to make use of everything you might want to do with it. There is some validity to how knowledge gained from proxmox can translate to other linux operating systems. Patience is maybe a virtue you must posess to use it… I’m less gifted there.
You didnt post anything about networking, so as relates to cache… I dont know if its strictly necessary. You can easily saturate gigabit on spinners with ZFS. Are you considering mirrored vdevs or raidz1/2/3?
I’m a daily Jellyfin user so feel free to ask me anything you’d like to know about. I never used plex so I’m ignorant as to the real differences.
Thanks for the pointers, that LSI 9300-8i looks promising, the Jonsbo N3 runs Sata.
Network wise I’m planning to put it on my 2.5G switch but the TV for example only has gigabit as does my Steamdeck. The only true 2.5G device is my main computer.
I think I will go for RAID Z2 or Z3, saturation will only really come into play with the Steam cache or when I backup large data volumes, which is less frequent.
Plex has some weird issue that certain movies sometimes won’t load at all BUT if you modify the datarate and it has to re-encode it, it works fine. It is also very strict with naming conventions to find episodes or recognise series, plus the UI can be a bit clunky.
I’m building in an N3 right now, the bays can do SAS as well as SATA. The 50cm SAS cables are the perfect length to go from the drive cage to the position an HBA would be.
Also since the N3 can hold mini-DTX motherboards, so you can get a motherboard with 2 PCIe slots.
With some light modding you can also run two 5.25" bays in the N3.
In 2024 you should probably go with higher capacity drives as the price/TB optimum is likely between 8-12TB right now.
Even if the idea is to expand your existing 4TB drives into a larger pool, consider larger drives.
It hurts feelings, but it makes sense, replacing perfectly functioning older and smaller drives with much larger ones.
@twin_savage What would be the advantage to run SAS over sata drives beside speed and reliability? The equivalent of a 4TB SAS drive over SATA is almost double the price. Power consumption is also higher on the ST4000NM001B vs ST4000VN006. I could consider buying 4x 8TB SAS drives for better speed and reliability and combines yours and @jode’s suiggestions as 4x 8TB SAS is very close in price to to 4x 4TB SAS at least for my dealer here. Also the N3 looks like the backplane is Sata connectors, not SAS but the side where the drives mount is sas or sata?
I could run Raid Z1 in the beginning with 4 drives and than upgrade later with another 4 drives. I initally thought of 8TB Sata drives but the price difference wasn’t as high, for SAS that price difference seems a lot more appealing.
I ordered this controller now after @Adubs suggestion. For SAS I would probably need to order additonal cables.
Generally, the only reason to go with SAS over SATA in a homelab would be significant price savings over equivalent SATA drives.
SATA drives can be used without SAS HBA and its cost and power consumption.
While there may be tiny speed and reliabilty advantages to SAS (in protocol and architecture), I doubt any normal homelab would be able to notice and benefit from it - so, should not be a deciding factor.
That said, SAS HBAs can be a great addition to a homelab, especially if there is the desire to scale the number of HDDs.
in your situation, I’d say price. I know what I said is exactly the opposite of what @jode is saying (EDIT: whoops bad reading comprehension on my part), but I’m talking about using enterprise castoff drives rather than new. SAS enterprise castoff drives can often be had for very cheap because there is a kind of barrier to entry to use them of having a SAS HBA.
the backplane connectors are sff-8639/sff-8482 physical connectors, almost certainly wired in a 1 port SATA/SAS configuration.
I knew that, but the other side uses SATA connectors. Is the physical connector the same but the protocol different? I’ve never use SAS in my life, so I’m just curios. The minisforum is a standard mini-itx size, now I just need to wait for the card to arrive and order the drives.
I did some math, 8 TB SAS drives are about 200 Euros totalling almost 1600 Euros for harddrives, my original 4TB SATA drives are about a total of 900 Euro. Sure I could try to find used ones on ebay for months but that kinda defeats the purpose of buying new harddrives for reliability in the first place. Who knows how old they really are and what state they were kept in. The ebay auctions I found here were a little questionable or only had maybe 1-2 drives, probably the market in the US is different.
I think I stick with my 8x 4TB SATA as even that in Raid Z3 should result in over 60% more storage (12 TB to 20 TB) with 3 failsafe hardrives. I will probably never need more than that in the foreseeable future as I only use about 8.2 TB right now.
Still, thanks a lot for the sugesgtion, that HBA will work beautiful so I can change to SAS later if I want to.
This doesnt always work out the way you think it should.
I have some used 8tb enterprise drives that have served me for nearly 5 years now with no signs of stopping any time in the near future. I’m not sure what you would pay for them but I paid about $50/ea. The price/perf is good enough that I can just have a few cold spares on hand if one fails.
OTOH I have warrantied at least one HGST drive out of the 4 new ones I bought.
Anecdotal being sample size of 1, but its an interesting thought experiment for me. If the used enterprise drive is cheap enough.
RE: SAS/SATA Backplanes and drives
The pins between the power and sata are technically not necessary for SAS drives to communicate. I was confused and surprised myself.
ahh I understand where you’d coming from now. Yes, the other side of the backplane uses SATA connectors which will happily carry SAS signals that are pin compatible with SATA. All that is needed is the cable that goes from the HBA to the SATA connectors which are readily available.
@Adubs I hope it goes better for me, I ordered the drives now. I could have gambled on it on ebay but I hope the more expensive route works out. I found some offers that are actually not too bad now after switching to my German account from the italian one, well too late.
Maybe I go for sas next time. I keep you updated how setting up everything works out. I guess I have my work cut out for me, Proxmox, ZFS and truenas are all new to me and thats only the base.
