Pretty simply put, I really like the TrueNAS Mini X system, but the price has gone up and it’s doesn’t seem like such a deal anymore. Seeing the recent home server videos reminded me of the Supermicro mini tower, but it only has 4 bays (in fact the TrueNAS Mini E system appears to be exactly this chassis).
Some requirements:
What’s the lowest I reasonably go for budget for this (driveless)? I would like it to be $500 but it seems like I’m not going to get that. eBay hardware is fine.
I don’t yet have any non-1GbE devices, but I suppose 2.5GbE or higher would be nice for future proofing. Definitely at least two NICs of some sort.
At least 5x 3.5" SAS compatible bays + anything else for boot drive (SATA, M.2, etc.)
Small NAS-like form factor, not rack mount
Preferably low power; this will run some really not performant VMs (like Home Assistant or photo sharing) and mainly serve as a backup device
I would like ECC RAM but I know I may not get that at this price point
If DIY, unsure if onboard SATA is fine or if I need a HBA from eBay
If I go DIY, the Fractal Node 304 looks like a decent option. I have no clue where to start looking for the motherboard though. Something newish and embedded from Supermicro or ASRock seems like the way to go, but there are so many options. Looking through most DIY builds online they don’t seem very power efficient since they use a lot of older hungry second-hand Xeons.
I know this is vague, but any thoughts or direction to put me on the right path is appreciated!
If you want SAS compatibility then you will need an HBA. You can just use breakout cables rather than have a hardware backplane to keep costs down. Otherwise I believe icydock sells a SAS enclosure that fits in 5.25 bays.
The Jonsbo N1 case seems to fit your checklist fairly well. Alternatively, the N2 case is essentially the same in a slightly different form.
As for a mainboard, I’d suggest the Gigabyte MJ11-EC0 board. Onboard AMD EPYC 3151 SoC, ECC ready, can connect to max 8 SATA drives (4x SATA via SFF 8654-4i port, requires extra breakout cable). Has IPMI port, but alas, just 2x 1Gb/s onboard network. May not be easily obtained, depending on your location, but I managed to get me one for some 500€ (I’m in the eurozone).
SAS means extra cost for essentially no additional benefit in a home NAS setup. I’ll take it you’ll use TrueNAS, Unraid or Proxmox on that box, having dual-path access on consumer-grade hardware doesn’t add anything for your use case.
That case looks really nice and compact! Hard to tell from the photos, but these seems to have some sort of SATA-backplane-adapter card? I suppose this won’t support SAS drives. Maybe I could remove it and squeeze in a breakout cable?
Yeah I was thinking AMD is the way to go since the lower-end Intel stuff won’t allow for ECC. SFF 8654-4i sounds like SAS! Though maybe I would still need a HBA because that’s only 4 drives.
Honestly, 2x1GbE is fine and the day that I get 2.5GbE or 10GbE I can put in a PCIe card or one of those sketchy M.2 Ethernet cards. I’m still using HDDs here with like 1 or maybe 2 client devices, so speed is not really my concern yet. So I guess I need either 1) 5x or 8x SAS onboard + 1x PCIe for later NIC or 2) 2.5GbE or 10GbE onboard + 1x PCIe for HBA or 3) 2x PCIe for HBA and later NIC.
Maybe my insisting on 5 drives is not necessary? I’ve thought about this a lot. I’m trying to roughly match my friend’s NAS in storage capacity (they have a big 2U dual socket beast) so that we can remote-snapshot-mirror and have offsite backups of each other’s NASes. We originally built that NAS with 4 drives in RAIDZ2 but later reworked it to 5 drives because it seemed to make more sense for capacity vs. cost with RAIDZ2. We already have a pile of 10TB SAS drives, so I would need as many drives (I’m not going to spend more money on higher capacity drives to have fewer of them). I would like to stick with RAIDZ2 as well.
I’ll look through the Gigabyte product list! I hadn’t seen those yet. Thank you!
Actually, no. The SFF connectors are often used for SAS connections, but in reality, they’re just connectors, any signal can be carried. In this case, the adapter cable I linked to fans out into 4xSATA connectors. The board has 4 native SATA ports as well, so max 8 SATA on the MJ11-EC0 board. Suffices for the 5xSATA backplane the N1/N2 case comes with. Forget SAS as a system to provide redundant paths to the drives, as stated before there’s little benefit in a home NAS setup. Your SAS drives can be accessed via SATA anyway.
B650I Aorus Ultra (hopefully they fix the ECC issue Wendell mentioned or I can roll back the BIOS?) $260
65W Ryzen 5 7600 $240 new (about $220 used, so not worth it used)
Fractal Node 304 $100
SAS 3008 HBA in IT mode (I definitely don’t need PCIe 5.0) $70
SAS breakout cable (since no backplane) $20
5x SAS 10TB drives in RAID Z2 (I got for $500)
2x mediocre SanDisk SATA SSDs for TrueNAS boot pool (I have lying around)
Onboard 2.5 NIC is great, can always upgrade with a M.2 NIC later (case has dual PCIe slots, mobo has 3x M.2)
Can add 2x M.2 cache Optane drives even with an extra NIC
With all new components (maybe I can find some used) and without the NIC/Optane this is $690USD. Not horrible; that beats the iXsystems Mini X! Including what I originally got the drives for, this would be $1190USD.
So now I just need to figure RAM, cooler, and PSU I think.
Does the Ryzen 5 7600 come with a cooler? I imagine the stock cooler would fit fine in the Node 304?
I am slightly doubting this motherboard though. It seems that looking at the non-mITX B650 options that I am paying a premium for the mITX. That’s annoying because I want something small but maybe I need to think about if that’s worth it and if I could get away with mATX. The mATX stuff is often more than $100 cheaper! I guess I would lose out on power consumption too though.