Wow, actually hearing from someone who’s has some problem is different!
At this point, I’m quite sold to go ECC, even it costs a bit more.
Thanks, those options look sweet for the price!
Sadly, space is sort of a premium where I live, so I’m looking at mATX boards only.
Those are indeed nice boards!
In fact, I’m still hesitating between older Xeon and AM4. It ultimately boils down to if I need m.2/u.2 drives.
(1xHBA and 1x10G NIC will use all the large pcie slots)
100-150$ is the price delta for those two, so I might just go for used Xeons.
Do you think an m.2 SSD will be useful in any way?
m.2 is just a form factor. If you’re wanting the speed of NvME then cost of hardware capable of taking advantage of it make it pretty much go out the window.
I have messed with NvME in TrueNAS core and Ubuntu server on older lower clocked Xeon hardware and was not impressed…especially for the cost of the drives and the cost of precious PCIe lanes on mid or lower tier xeons. Though if I had a spare 4 lane slot putting a NvME drive and m.2 SSD card in it would gain me some more drives to play with.
IMO as a NAS, m.2 SATA SSDs are kinda pointless and has too many disadvantages. Sticking with 2.5” SSDs on newer SATA would be plenty for a home user and in a software defined array, would be more than enough to saturate a 10Gb nic.
Is that from e-trend? I just bought mine from there in late March so I guess I got lucky with the timing… my last choice was to order from the US, e.g. from Amazon US, although the yen has gotten really weak lately…
Amazon US:
Order Summary
Items: USD 296.62
Shipping & handling: USD 45.01
Total before tax: USD 341.63|Estimated tax to be collected:*|USD 0.00|
Order total: USD 341.63
Payment Total: JPY 44,438
Just my 2 cents, but I think the real question is “what is your data worth?”
If you’re just practicing, install it on whatever you’ve got, using whatever hard drives you have, even old laptop drives (preferably the same size). If you start to seriously depend on the data and it’s a very active machine, consider investing in ECC and the usual redundancy (backup, etc.).
TrueNAS isn’t a system that you can casually start using, it takes time to become familiar with it - ideally with disposable data! The more you learn about it, the safer your data.
Hope that helps!
True, I always forget that there are m.2 sata SSDs 
.
Thanks for the info!
Yup, looks like you got lucky!
Buying a pricy piece of tech from overseas Amazon isn’t the thing I’d like to, especially when I don’t really need all the goodness it provides over a conventional motherboard (the very first motherboard I bought was faulty, and I didn’t understand at that time. YMMV). And yes, recently the yen has gotten quite weak, sadly.
True, I’m currently putting all my data into a single box of spinning rust without any backups, so…
At least for me, this started because I was bored and wanted something to work and learn at. So I’m fine spending extra money - it’s a hobby after all, I can spend some extra if I feel so. Maybe I just wanted some justification in spending the extra bucks.
My first experience when playing on a virtual machine when it was still FreeNAS was quite the opposite, it was surprising easy and pleasant! (Although yes, I’ve not used anything but the basic stuff, not jails)
I’m more used to Linux than BSD, so it should be fine. Worst case scenario I’ll restore from a backup.
Well, at least the TrueNAS install will serve as a backup-backup, no harm in that!
You definitely have the right to spend as much money as you want, but before you delve too deep, do ‘use what ya got’ and get a feel for TrueNAS. I practiced with fake data for around 2 years before I put it into production.
It is incredibly easy to install, that’s the easy part. The hard part is making it do what you specifically want from it, and have the experience to recover from any number of failures. It’s a bit like driving a car - turning the key is easy, the driving bit takes some getting used to.
When I first started using it, I created problems intentionally to see how easy it was to recover. If you’re a Linux user, I’m sure you’ll have an easier time of it than I did. The summary of my experience (from vague memory) is that the following is important:
- Experience having to replace a drive (I did this by buying a batch of very cheap drives, some of which didn’t work - ebay of course)
- Get a UPS, TrueNAS really doesn’t like cold shutdowns.
- Learn how to setup email notifications (there are some extra scripts that are fantastic and very easy to implement, like THIS ONE).
- Get schedules for SMART/SCRUB properly setup - the latter is what protects from bit rot.
- learn a bit about ACL permissions - really important and a common issue is mucking it up and losing access to your data
- Get a free Backblaze account and set that up.
- Snapshots are great, learn those.
- Give your system a good burn in.
I hope that helps, there’s much more than that, but it’s a start. 
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