All right… now I need some hardware recommendations. Now I need:
A reliable and possibly efficient PSU that is able to power the old CPU and the different hard drives (6+)
A PCIe LAN card to put on the Asus P7H55-V and get fast connection to the local network
A PCIe SATA card that can support all the drives that I’m gonna put into the computer
The local network at the moment is limited by some cable and switches to 100Mbps, but I’m gonna redo the cabling and put newer switches.
Do you have any switches suggestions? Switches faster than 1Gbps are quite expensive here in Italy on Amazon, but maybe there are better options…maybe from the server used market? IDK
Seasonic is one of the best brands, but I’d say get a gold PSU and be done with it. The number of watts you need is whatever your CPU draws + 50-100W for drives + 50-100 extra for any increased storage. So a 300W CPU with plenty of SATA power cables should be able to serve you just fine here. And if you need more SATA power, get a splitter cable.
Not hard to find one, but I do recommend intel-based circuitry. Those are 20-50% more expensive though, so not great.
You can go PCIe Gen 3.0 with 8 ports, which should cover pretty much all requirements you have. Do note you will most probably never saturate your 10Gb NIC with spinning rust drives, even a 1Gb NIC is too fast for that.
Yeah, they do great PSUs. I know also FSP does good stuff, as an OEM too.
Thank you very much.
Are there any good 300/400W 80+ Gold ATX redundant options? I was thinking redundant for this use case…
Thanks for linking me that model… has it good compatibility with Linux? I decided to use FreeNAS on this machine.
That said, the hard drives speeds will be slow, the local network will be wired up to 1Gbps and the Ethernet card you linked me costs 4 times as much as I’ve spent for the rest of the computer, so… I don’t think I need to spend all that money to get a 10Gbps card.
Any cheaper suggestions? Maybe for 1 Gbps Intel hardware that I can look for on Amazon or the used market?
Figuring out how to do stuff in the EFI shell was the hardest part for me when I flashed the controller in my NAS, but that was just because it was the first time I’ve really done anything in it. Otherwise, it’s just following one step after another from your guide.
Don’t reinvent the wheel here. If you’re comfortable with OMV, keep using that. Storage needs to be robust, tinker on your other platforms. You almost certainly want ZFS, which means you may need to add an HBA (host bus adapter) rather than an actual RAID card if you run out of SATA ports, because most modern OSes will want direct access to your physical disks and the redundancy and other magic will be handled in software (versus RAID controller). Look into FreeNAS 12.0 (or TrueNAS as I think it’s new name) but it’ll want more RAM. Consider tiered storage (fast ssd cache on top of HDDs for volume storage), however this adds additional complexity. ZFS on Linux is becoming more mature, it may be ready for use in our homes, but ask someone much smarter than I (i.e. @wendell - I think he has video tutorials)…
Personally, I think you should run whatever distro you’re most comfortable with unless one of the aforementioned prebuilt NAS options are your cup of tea, heck even Windows makes a great and simple storage server if that’s your preference, but requires a license. MANY of your answers are contained here if you want to roll your own: https://perfectmediaserver.com/
Good luck with your fun project. Great use of hardware you already have on hand. Jot down your requirements and work backwards from there; total storage (plus future growth)?, ZFS?, physical disks layout? Redundancy? RAIDZ2
Actually, I haven’t been using OMV for a long time, so I don’t even remember how to set things up… if I forgot what a wheel is, then might also reinvent it…
…especially if I need to make changes to OMV to properly use ZFS (which I’ve never used before)…
And that’s why I was thinking of buying this, which is also already configured in IT-mode…
That said, at the moment I only have 6 100% working SATA drives on hand, and my motherboard should have 6 SATA ports.
I should be able to expand storage in the future, right?
Yes, it was already suggested to me and I was looking into that
I managed to get 2x8GB DDR3 sticks, so I should be runnin 12GB RAM now… is it enough?
Maybe in the future I’ll get a cheap SSD to put the OS on, but I don’t think I need caching at this stage.
At the moment I have an SSHD that should be fine to put in the machine, but that’s probably the most I’ll do.
I’ve been using Windows most of my life, but I’m switching more and more towards Linux, as it’s also what I’m using for university (I study Physics).
I still require Windows to run a lot of programs, but I have many Linux machines on hands, and I like to experiment with new distros, DEs and other stuff like that.
Setting up TrueNAS should be fun!
It would be nice if he could answer my questions, but I think he has more important stuff to do and I don’t want to annoy him.
Thank you very much!
Thank you very much. I hope to do something right and to share my experience.
I used to have a small Italian tech channel, and I’m thinking about publishing videos again in English, so that I can share my passion for tech and also train my English speaking abilities. It’ll be akward at the beginning, I guess…
Yeah… I have this hardware on hand that is working fine but that is worth nothing on the used market. I also have many computers and external hard drives around the house, and the files are fragmented everywhere, so consolidating my data on a single machine would be great.
I’m a cheap person, I have fun with tech and I care for the environment, so exctracting the best from this hardware for a cool project was a no brainer to me!
Alright, great stuff. You’ve made huge progress already. I would get a USB flash drive (or two), install TrueNAS 12.x onto that, which will then become your boot device moving forward, which you’ll need to specify in some way. That way, booting directly from USB stick, you’ll still have all six SATA ports available for bulk storage. What size are you disks, how many of each?
Regarding memory, 12GB will be a really nice boost from 4GB original (obviously 16 would be better, but i think that’s sufficient). I believe next step is to plan your drive layout into pools and vdevs.
Did you say you have 4 x 1TB & 2 x 500GB ? I would separate those, building redundancy into both, unless you just want a 2 x 500gb (1TB usable) for storing ISOs, etc. Lots to decide here, but you’re really close I think. Keep up the great work.
TrueNAS Core requirements are 8GB RAM minimum, so I’m at least above the minimum specs
At the moment I have 2x2TB (with possibly another coming), 1x1TB, 1x500GB and another one of which I can’t remember the capacity at the moment (it’s already installed in the old case, so I don’t have it on hand).
I don’t like the boot drive to be an USB stick: the boot time would be even worse than it already is with TrueNAS.
If I manage to get 3x2TB drives, I could set up RAID 5 on those, but other users here have suggested me that it’s not particularly useful with ZFS.
