Planning new TrueNAS Scale system - consindering Zimacube and looking for alternatives

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Hello! First time, long time, etc.

Currently I am running my primary TrueNAS box out of a Fractal Define R5, with a Ryzen 5 3600, 64GB DDR4, and a 650W 80+Gold PSU from EVGA. For drives I’ve got a mix of Ironwolf and WD Red drives, 6TB each, 8 drives in a raid Z1 with 2 vdevs which is giving me about 32TB of usable capacity.

Primarily the NAS is just for hosting media for Plex, and it has a small dataset for some regular file storage that I don’t use terribly often.

I am planning on downsizing the box in both size and power. The R5 is massive, physically, and right now looking at a kill a watt, it’s idling in the low 90s, and typically gets to about 150W while doing tasks, and it can hit 220W plus at times.

The N100 CPUs seem to sip power compared to my current chip. And I can’t find an option that seems to be more bang-for-your-buck than the Zimacube (not the pro, the N100 version it’s like 650$ USD.)

  • N100 for low wattage
  • I can install TrueNAS Scale on it
  • physically small
  • 6 3.5 bays + the NVME carrier card
  • i am not sure about hot swap, but they are way more accessible than they are now in the R5
  • it seems the max is 32GB of RAM, which is a technically a downgrade but I think I would survive
  • PCIE slot where i can add a 10GBE network card

I currently have 8 drives now, but I also need to up the capacity as a part of this, so going down to 6 bays is fine for me. (for instance if I get 6, 12TB drives in a raid Z1, I’m looking at about 55TB. which dear god I hope is enough for a long time.)

I have watched a few different youtube videos about this device and I know people have some issues with it. I think primarily it’s about how the PCIE lanes are distributed to the NVME carrier card IIRC.

I would consider not using TrueNAS Scale if the rest of the box had the rest of the features, as I run TrueNAS bare metal and I don’t run any VMs or containers on it. But I would like to keep ZFS

My primary question for this post is: is there some other box or DIY solution out there that can hit all of these points on my wishlist for around the 650$ price point?

Thanks!!

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The 16G version is 679$
…and there’s no slot for a 10Gbit card (which probably is more than what that SoC can manage)
16Gbyte is official tops for the N-series, not sure if you want to go out of spec on that if your data is important. They’re really vague about the hardware in general.

On the R5 you remove the side panel and there are trays not sure why you’d risk data because of hot-swap but oh well…

If you’re looking at the same platform the Odroid H4 Plus seems like a much better option.
Get the board + M.2 2×2 Card – ODROID + RAM
Get one of these controllers: Short Review: Edging ASMedia 1166 PCIe Gen3 x2 to 6 x SATA HBA Chipset. It doesn't suck 👍

Grab something like the Sagittarius NAS case, mount the Odroid H4 Plus on standoffs and reuse your old PSU.

That’ll be around half the price of the Zimacube but with more storage.

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Have you looked at TerraMaster F6-424 Pro or Max models ?

They are small and come with great CPUs and 2x10G network already.

You can install TrueNAS on it as well.

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+1 Odroid

Korean company that provides BIOS support and a lot of accessories and documentation (unlike Chinese companies).

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thanks for the replies!!

in the time between making this post and now, after more looking around, i think i am going to pick up a UNAS Pro from Ubiquiti.

it meets less criteria on my list from the original post, but after some soul-searching i realized that TrueNAS as an OS is kind of too much NAS granularity for me i think. i am the only one who accesses it, and it’s really only for media files.

it doesn’t run ZFS and it doesn’t have a ton of RAM, but it does have native 10gig, and for me it seems more simpler to manage than TrueNAS. and it seems extremely power efficient. and 7 bays for 500$ is pretty good price as well for the package.

if i don’t like it i’m sure i can find someone to take it off my hands and go back to TrueNAS. if i do that, the TerraMaster F6-424 models are probably where i would look next.

anyways!! thanks!!!

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You wont as you’re buying a system with a rather old ARM CPU with no open source support at all (if you’re even going to run another version of a Linux distro on it). I have my doubts of it ever reaching 10Gbit and there seems to be a lot issues, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TOX1NIVQyQ .