I am thinking of buying a TrueNAS Mini. (Building a machine would be fun, but I won’t have the time in the foreseeable future.) Its primary uses would be as a backup and low-intensity file server (no streaming, no enormous video files, no VMs). My home network is only gigabit, so I’m inclined toward the Mini X (rather than the X+) with 16GB RAM. Does that match my needs? Would more RAM be advisable?
I am an academic and have grown increasingly concerned about the integrity of my data, which is what led me to a ZFS-based NAS. The trouble is that I know little about ZFS. My tentative plan is a single raidz2 vdev comprised of 5x4TB hard disks. Is that reasonable? I would be open to using mirrored vdevs instead (2 vdevs, each 2x4TB). In that scenario, might a hot spare in the 5th bay be a good idea?
My other question has to do with the boot drive(s). If I understand correctly, these iX Systems boxes come with the OS on a SATA DOM. Would it be better for the OS to live on a mirrored vdev comprised of 2 SSDs? The case has two 2.5" hot swap bays that appear to support something like that. If so, should this vdev be in a separate pool?
I realize I have asked a lot of questions. Your help and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
I am a newbie relative to some of the other people here, but hope it helps:
The short answer is yes. More longer one would be that it depends and the 3 factor that you can optimize for are 1- available space, 2- performance, 3- redundancy, and as these things usually go, you can only optimize for 2 out of the 3.
you don’t seem to be concern about available space or even performance so, it makes more sense, imho, to use a z2 or even a z3 instead of a mirrored configuration as it gives you the best redundancy.
In a system like this the boot OS simply doesn’t matter, As in you don’t get like a “faster” system by having a better boot media. It only improves boot speed which really doesn’t matter. The point of adding ssd to a system like this is to have high IOPS scratch disks which can be used for a variety of things, such as a write cache which would be the one you would commonly see on a nas server. You probably would be fine without them.
It is, but even if your boot drive dies, you don’t loose any data. You just have to reinstall truenas again. Your pool configuration would be on the vdevs themselves and loosing boot drive would have no effect on them. Also, you can have SSDs and used them for various things ( a mirrored partition for boot drive, a raid 0 for a write cache, … ). I am definitely for having as much hardware as one possibly can in general. just want you to have them for the right reason.
Fellow academic here - you may wish to consider talking to your university IT / library about the data storage. Our IT department and library offer bit-rot protected & backed up storage for researchers.
You may still want a NAS - I love my TrueNAS box for personal use - just thought I would mention is since I was not aware of the option in my first couple years and only used USB hard drives until a fellow researcher lost ALL their data to hard drive failure
@blooper98, thank you for the helpful suggestion. I will ask IT, but will likely also go ahead with the NAS at home. The story of your colleague is painful to read. That’s the kind of scenario I am eager to avoid, perhaps influenced by Jim Salter’s incantation that “if there aren’t 3 copies it doesn’t exist.”
Our (small) school does not provide any kind of bitrot-protected backup, so I will be going ahead with the TrueNAS Mini. IT recommended backing up to an external HD. That made me cringe a bit.
Doing leap frogging incremental backups to a pair of external HDDs is in some ways more reliable than doing backups to single NAS.
Unless you have lots of data - requiring lots of disks, I’d recommend sticking to a 2 disk mirror.
If you need more reliability (e.g beyond your main computer+NAS you need a third copy), get a second NAS (e.g. keep one under your desk in the office, and one at home).
Avoid SMR drives in NAS devices - ironically, larger/enterprise disks (12/14/16/18T) with 5year warranties and higher rated durability tend to not use SMR and they tend to be relatively cheap per terabyte of storage - a slightly safer bet.
