I’m looking to build a NAS/Plex box using either unRAID or TrueNAS Scale. If unRAID I’ll use it for the hyper visor, if TrueNAS I’ll use Proxmox as the hyper visor and install TrueNAS as a VM.
I’ll starting to side with Proxmox and TrueNAS but I’m not opposed to unRAID.
This will be for a home server running some automation and networking stuff. Basically a hobby box managing the home network and media streaming.
I still have to pickup a GPU for Plex and HBA controller and SAS drives for spinning rust storage.
I’m not yet sure what drives to use for which tasks. Not sure if I should pickup anymore drives besides data drives. Some systems will utilize app data, caching, metadata, VM and docker images. Not sure if my 4 x 2TB nvme storage will be sufficient for all that or if I should get additional drives to split up the tasks. I was thinking putting all the nvme drives into a raid 10 with 4TB usable.
I am in an identical situation, with the same motherboard. Mine came with the 7313p open box special under $550. my 256gb ram is still on the slow boat from china, and I have 8gb arriving in 2 days. I also have a nvidia 750ti to drive hdmi.
For storage I have an optane drive to accelerate my eventual zfs, an optane drive to store the scratch disks, and a 0.5tb nvme to be l2arc. I have a bunch of drives on the shelf that are empty, but I don’t know if any are the same size. There are 14 sata channels, so I should be able to make some sort of array of mirrors work.
i will probably do the proxmox route, booting off of a microsd card. I am still reading documentation. I have a decade of IT experience with freebsd and linux, I am just updating my skills and learning docker/kubernetes.
SSDs don’t fail as often, probably just make a raidz with proxmox and don’t worry about it anymore, if it is still a worry, make snapshots and periodically apply them to a pool of a single 6tb or larger magnetic drive. This way the magnetic drive can spin up when needed, but will be off most of the time, it can also accumulate the snapshots giving you a history that you do not need to keep active on the SSDs.
Only passing thoughts, but for simplicity you might prefer unRAID, I only say that because Virtualising TrueNAS can get messy and break quite easily - and I’m a TrueNAS user.
You could look into XCP-ng perhaps? I don’t have any experience but heard it mentioned by those that I trust.
Incidentally, if you’re only going to use Plex via your LAN and a TV or large screen, you won’t need any transcoding/GPU use. I have a dual core 4 thread “always on” CPU and untranscoded Blu-Rays barely hit 5% CPU usage. It hovers around 80-90% when transcoding to a mobile phone, but I don’t really do that.
Also, I tried JellyFin on TrueNAS Scale recently (doesn’t install on Core) and it works really well with a minor amount of fiddling. It’s not as bloated as Plex and has plenty of options. I did try Emby and was a subscriber for several months, but stopped the subs as I only needed local playback. Plex is nice and convenient for non-LAN / mobile playback though.
For drives, may be it would be worth splitting up your NVMe’s into 2 x mirrored pairs, with you spreading the tasks evenly.
For data storage, such as Film/TV Series storage, you might end up preferring the use of separate lower performance machine. I only say this because it’s how I ended up - initially I had one machine with 8x4TB that I was going to store everything on. But then I realised all those drives would be storing about 80% of my data that isn’t modified (films, TV Series, backups, etc.). So in the end I built an ‘always on’ machine with just 2 x 4TB Mirrored. That sends replications/snapshots to 2 other machines that are periodically turned on, in between those backups I just use backblaze.
