can i run truenas on this as the main os ?
HP EliteDesk 705 G4 Mini Desktop - with 32gb of ram an 1tb nvme upgrade
Almost certainly, but it wouldn’t be my choice
It’ll work, but people usually use TrueNAS with lots of spinning storage … there’s a non-mini variant of G4 that has some space for 3.5" drives - you could even go with G3 it’d work fine for basic storage and might be cheaper.
I’m sure you can, but it depends on your purpose. If you want storage, you can definately attach a NAS to it over Cat. But TruNAS uses ZFS which needs more RAM as you have more storage.
TLDR: technically speaking yes, but don’t.
my plan is to use the hp as a server hub for managing my two Yottamaster [PS400C3]
that are on my main pc an shared with the other pc’s but only when its on id like to move them to the hp an manage with truenas with plex server for all my vids an tunes for my network
also would i be able with truenas to connect a usb scanner to the hp an scan an image with some integrated app in truenas directly to a folder on one of the drives
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It’ll be ok as a master to hook up your two das toys.
You need two USB-C ports and this HP only has one C… so you need to think about a USB-A <-> USB-C adapter. Just pay attention to the type of usb ports, C or A and their number and speed.
Alternatively, you can also think about OpenMediaVault.
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each of the yott’s currently are 40tb vi 4 x 10tb with the 4th as raid redundant backup for the 30tb
how much ram would i need as i plan to load the hp with 32gb
How many gigs of ram - more is clearly better, but …
… what do you want to do with your NAS … what kind of files/data and what kind of apps beyond e.g. Samba?
So first of all, two das-es, hook it up to mini pc to turn DAS into a super capable NAS, great plan.
As an example , I have a setup doing a stingy thing myself, torrent-ing 35T of stuff off of a pair of WD elements (“easy store for US folks”) and a 1TB USB3 nvme, all hooked up to a 4GB ram SBC.
Here’s the thing with software developers, when they write software, they’re thinking “aaah, f-it, a bit of ram is fine, nobody buys a system with less than 32G, and it’ll only go up”, and they completely miss the fact that NO, their stuff is not the only thing running on the machine and it’s not the most important thing running on these machines in the minds of their users.
So, how much ram for your NAS, depends on what you want to do.
There’s a baseline for the OS, + bells and whistles of TrueNAS (UI, monitoring, this and that), let’s round up to 4G.
Big files only or mostly, and/or don’t care about access latency because it’s all done in background, and you don’t care how long it takes. +2G for whatever the OS + fancy UI + monitoring built into TrueNAS uses, is fine and plenty for ZFS to keep track of where things are. It’s not enough to keep all the metadata about where things are in ram (40T things / 1M == 40M things to keep track of… there’s raid and overhead and ZFS is a 128bit filesystem, but there’s some compressional and yadda yadda, it’s hard to estimate, but so what if you need to seek once in a while to get to some metadata).
I’d say this is very minimalistic, but doable and would require tuning (e.g. I had to deal with an OOM killer even without ZFS in the mix, ZFS is known to be both greedy and lazy about freeing RAM relative to other filesystems).
If you want small files, or you want to traverse the whole filesystem frequently and churn the caches, or ZFS records under 1M make sense for you, then you’ll need more for metadata and caches (ARC and stuff).
… and I’m thinking what if you did an L2ARC on USB SSD in addition to your yottamasters instead of ram, it’s much much slower than ram, but 512G maybe you wouldn’t care about RAM, because flash is much much cheaper than ram, and you don’t need to care much for longevity vs cost (L2ARC dying whatever), … you might even have an M.2 inside you can use which would be better than USB.
… on top of that (unclear amount), you may want to run additional non-NAS stuff in a VM, or in containers (e.g. with TrueNAS scale). That stuff will have their data in memory, on top of that whatever OS filesystem buffers, on top of buffers and caches within the filesystem implementation itself (ARC/L2ARC and stuff that’s taking up ram).
the file an data stuff i mostly deal with
is iso’s for games (23 or so ) ,movies (50 right now uncompressed on the first yott) & 12 linux distro’s avg max file size 5gb (os’s) 25gb (games)
45gb (blu-ray rips - currently after re-code & compress down to avg 12gb an stored on 2nd yott the a total 458 flims)
10,000 flac tracks , image pixs 9,231 (currently) done vi krita avg 2gb
a few thousand docs an assorted apps that on one yott thers a little more on the other
in-regards to the blu ray rip both hd an 4k from my collection , my current way of backup is to rip with makemkv straight to my main pc then to transfer the uncompressed file to yott1 then render to the
compressed 12gb file to the pc’s 2nd 1tb drive which i use for renders an games i currently play
on avg iv got 300gb free that allows meto do a few batch at a time but slows down an is the only task i can do
at that time id like to direct rip with a external blu-ray drive to the hp an then render the file to the 2nd yott
is it possible to install an run both makemkv & handbrake in the truenas core os to perform these tasks
an as a os drive would for truenas core a
Intel Optane P1600X 118 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive work better the a
SK Hynix Gold P31 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
So basically media storage, would recommend much larger zfs record sizes (1M is probably smallest I’d go). I don’t know otoh whether truenas supports bigger, but maybe 4M is where I’d go if yes.
To go above 1M there’s some shenanigans needed and a modern ZFS implementation.
You can’t really install much onto TrueNAS, it’s an “appliance OS”, it’s note really customizable in any way ixsystems supports. What they expect you to do instead is various bs with kubernetes aka. true charts… and VMs.
makemkv can work pretty efficiently in a teeny tiny alpine or Debian 1GB VM, so can handbrake CLI.
Does 705 G4 have two nvme slots? … can you put L2ARC on optane and VM storage on 1TB nvme at the same time, if yes, do that.
The other part I’d be more wondering about is, do you ZFS the two yottamasters independently e.g. raidz1 each, or do you raidz2 both of them… probably independently, and then you can split the L2ARC between them.
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- Which file system to choose?
ZFS
- What do you eat for dinner?
ZFS
- What toothpaste to buy?
ZFS
Be a cowboy, head towards the wild west… EXT4 + OpenMediaVault 
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I use a 2400ge as the CPU in my truenas server. It is a great APU for something like that as it is very power efficient but has plenty of compute power available for most things. Mine has more ram than that but I also run some other things on that device like a Minecraft world my kids use and a couple of other things.