I’m prepping to build my next truenas system. I’m going form 8TB drives to 18TB drives. But I’m still struggling to pick out a cpu and mobo. I’d really like to have ipmi but I’m not dead set on it. I was also hoping to be able to have more than one hba in the system since most seem to only support six drives. I was hoping to do eight or ten drives depending the cost of the rest of the system. And then theirs always the debate on to ECC or to not ECC.
My use case for truenas is I’d like Z2 pool with a minimum of 6 drives preferably 8 or 10. How many drives is determined by the cost of the rest of the system. A second mirrored pool that has data that needs to get backed up. Important items I want kept separate from my other media. I’m planning on running two jails at this time. Plex with no more than 4 streams and that will probably be extremely rare. The second being Nextcloud. Nextcloud will only be for me so not much going on there at any point. Anything else will probably on my VM host.
My thoughts so far are a Ryzen system offers the best bang for the buck. I can even get server features if I can get an Asrock Rack motherboard but they seem to be sold out everywhere. I can’t even get them through work with one of vendors listed on Asrock’s site. I’m also confused on the ECC requirement for these boards. I know the CPU plays a roll and as I understand it AMD doesn’t officially support ECC on Ryzen but it usually works. The exception being Ryzen Pro.
Alder Lake is more of the same as Ryzen. Especially sticking with i5 without E cores. The Asrock Rack boards for Alder Lake seem to all require DDR5 as well, which is an additional cost. I’m a little shy of DDR5 right now.
The biggest issue I see with the Asrock Rack motherboards for consumer cpus is that they are almost all micro-atx and only have 1x16 pci-e slot. That really limits my options for any expansion or adding more drives.
Then theirs of course Epyc. I can afford it. I’m just not sure its worth it. It seems like if I decided that was the best cpu is a 7262 from ebay I don’t see myself needing more power than that.
Lastly theirs Xeon. I don’t know much about the newer Xeons. It does seem theirs a few options that work out to be cheaper than an Epyc based system. I’m not sure what the tradeoffs are though.
Any suggestions on a platform are welcome. I’m also curious on any advice on getting more than 6 drives on an HBA. I’m not at a point where I want to flash anything myself so I was looking at ordering this part from ebay. Its what I did last time and its worked well enough.
@BonesofTibado, have you thought of purchasing an already made Synology system instead of building a True Nas system?
I will buy a Synology system for my nas needs as soon as I save the money for it. If a Synology system isn’t for you, meaning you want to build your system, I would stick with Ryzen. A Theadripper Pro or EPYC is a waste of a CPU for a nas system. I am also hesitant to purchase used EPYC CPUs from ebay because, in most cases, they are pulled from servers the manufacturer has system looked the EPYC. At least I have been told most manufacturers of EPYC servers system lock the EPYC CPU to that server.
Unless you’re dead set on building your own server, and you have the $$$, the path of least resistance is simply to get something like a TrueNAS Mini XL+. It’ll accommodate your drives, and should be well-supported by TrueNAS for just about ever. And you’ll be running Scale rather than Core, which is really the future for TrueNAS. The only sort of thing it won’t do well OOTB is hosting stuff like Pilgrim w/Coral. Comes equipped with 10GbE and ECC RAM, both of which are (IMHO) essential for a home storage-focused server.
Your other path – building a machine – can be done a little less expensively, but to do it right won’t be cheap, unless you can score the right components and don’t mind a noisy machine. For new builds, if you want to use an Alder Lake CPU, the ASRock IMB-X1314 is available, and there’s the new Gigabyte board that was just featured on a Level1Techs YouTube (both of these use DDR4 uDIMMs, I believe). Or go the Supermicro route; spendy but very nice hardware. Lots of Ryzen boards available, but best to focus on the X570 chipset, and to make sure that the board manufacturer explicitly supports ECC RAM on the board you want, and 8 SATA drives unless you’re willing to use a PCIe HBA card. And then you’ll need to find a case and PS that’ll accommodate all the disks you want to run. And realize it’ll all take some time, and you’ll be a bit on the bleeding edge with a lot of this stuff, since with the latest and greatest you’ll be the one discovering bugs etc. for the vendor(s) to fix.
Thanks for your input. I appreciate the ideas. I don’t think either one is right for me though.
I hadn’t considered it. I looked at them on newegg and I would want a 12 drive system. Those start at around 2k. I already have a chassis and maybe a PSU. Depends on what I end up putting in the system if its enough or not. I also don’t like the idea of shoe horning in TrueNas on something that was intended to run a specific OS.
I had not considered this either. I took a look their systems. The largest tower isn’t as flexible as I would like. And I can’t justify the rack mount system starting at 3k. It did give me some idea about how much processing power and ram I will need. It tells me an 8 core system with 64GB of ram should be plenty.
I’m worried about this to. Some specifically state that they are unlocked but you can’t know till you get your hands on it.
My Idea was to pick up a twelve-bay Synology system and run Synology’s operating system. Synology is cheaper than a pre-built True Nas or 45 drives system.