I’m planning an rebuild/upgrade to my NAS and also building a media server using Jellyfin.
Current NAS I have:
AMD Ryzen 3 3100
ASUS B450M-A
Kingston DDR4-2400 8GB ECC
FSP HEXA 85+ 350w power supply
WD Green 120GB SSD (Boot Drive)
3x 6TB NAS drive (2xHGST, 1xToshiba)
Unraid Basic
What I plan to do:
Put New Drives and convert to TrueNAS Scale
Replace Case with Silverstone CS351
Put Old Drives in a spare system as offsite backup
Build another system for jellyfin to live on
Questions for NAS:
1. What drive config would be better for reliability? 2x16TB Mirrored or 3x8TB Raid Z1? (These configs cost about the same at my local retailer)
2. Would it make sense to have 2 SSDs (Maybe Crucial MX500) mirrored as a cache for 1GbE Network?
3. How does not having ECC effect ZFS?
4. How bad are the stability issues with the intel i225-V NIC? should I go with a RTL8125 instead if I want 2.5Gb Networking?
Plans for Media Server:
Intel Core i5-9400F
Intel Arc A380 GPU (For AV1 Hardware Encoding)
Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS + Jellyfin
Mount directory from NAS over SMB or NFS for media library
Remote access through port forwarding and nginx reverse proxy
Questions for media server:
1. How does not having PCIe ReBar affect Arc in terms of media encoding and decoding?
2. Are there any more severe general issues with Arc on Linux?
Other General Suggestions appreciated as well
Putting them on the same box is not going to be considered because:
1. Intel Arc isn’t the most stable thing
2. TrueNas Scale is based on Debian so no Arc drivers without updating kernel
3. Docker configuration doesn’t work properly with fallback fonts resulting in weird rendering of subtitles
Not having ECC for ZFS is about the same as not having ECC for any file system, for a home media server it’s perhaps nice to have but not worth going out of your way for.
For how you configure your drives you want to think about how you plan on expanding in the future as you will need to add more of the same VDEVs. In terms of performance a 2 disk mirror and a 3 disk raidz1 will probably have similar read performance but the raidz1 may have better write performance.
For a media server a cache drive probably won’t be that useful but it depends on whether or not you’re going to have data that you access frequently. If it’s random access then it may be worthwhile even over gigabit.
Reliability as in uptime? 2x16TB Mirrored, for sure. Reason:
Let’s assume the chance of a drive not having a failure at any given time is 99.9%
One drive might fail, so we want a RAID of some sort, either via ZFS or via HW
If via hardware, that controller could fail too, let’s assume 99.9% reliability on that too
The chance of catastrophic failure with 1 drive is 1/1000
The chance of avoiding failure with 2 drives + controller is 0.999³ for a combined chance of roughly 3/1000, chance of catastrophic failure on top of that is 1/1000
The chance of avoiding failure with 3 drives + controller is then 0.999⁴ or ~4/1000, and after that chance of catastrophic failure is 2/1000
Thus two drives will always be more reliable than three
No, it is a cache and an NVMe is already fast enough to saturate a 1GbE connection. Though, you might want to look at something like this:
For a home server? That server will see some light home use, so the chances of ECC actually making a difference is about one in a billion or so. ECC is nice to have here - but definitely not essential.
No idea here.
Moving along, for your Jellyfin server, I would invest in either a 5600 or a 12400 depending on which give you the better platform cost. Twice the amount of threads for a bargain price, really. Here are two quick example builds for ITX, feel free to alter, I took ITX since people usually like to have their NAS/HTPC small and cosy but it is possible to go a few bucks lower:
I think there is some misunderstanding there, the main storage devices are going to be mechanical hard drives. I am thinking of adding a pair of SSDs as a write cache to smooth out writes of lots of small files as well as not having the drives bogged down when read and write operations are happening at the same time
For upgrading the network card I’m thinking more towards I225-V(~$30) or RTL8125(~$15) cards for 2.5G and Aquantia card (~$100) for 10G however I don’t have the networking gear to take full advantage of a faster network yet.
While these are nice choices I went with a 9400F because I have a few 9400F platforms lying around collecting dust. I am planning to use the A380 because of the AV1 support.
Only real reason for a cache is to speed up the process of reading/writing. This can only happen as fast as your network port can accept and/or send data.
A single SATA SSD can write roughly 5 times the speed of a 1GbE port, though in these modern times 2.5" SATA drives don’t really make much sense over NVMe anymore. Still a thing, especially for bulk storage, but more for older PCs.
Oh, the reason I suggested that card is because it gives you an SSD cache and 10GbE card in one, for a decent price. If you have no need for it then just shop for something better, the goal is to expand your horizons and make you think outside the box a little
If you already have the hardware by all means use it, though ninth gen feels a bit dated nowadays. In about a year or so I think AM5 will be cheap enough to recommend, at that point all AM5 CPUs will have built in AV1 HW enc/dec as part of their IO die, but right now I still recommend 5600 / 12400 if you are going with a brand new system.
