Recycled HexOS/TrueNas build

background

I am looking to reuse some of my old PC parts to build a home NAS with either HexOS or TrueNas (if the fall through with their promises).

This NAS will be used to host my media, photos + phone videos, os backup, and potentially as a matrix server for friends and family. I want enough storage at a reasonable price that I don’t have to think of it for a long time.

parts list

These are the parts that I right now. I also have a Ryzen 2700x and a Ryzen 5 1600. If I were to opt for am4, I’d need motherboard

I was thinking of picking up 8 these drives, but heard that the hotswap sleds will get toasty

I’m open to swapping out the drives

questions

  1. Do I need ECC memory? How much do I need relative my storage
  2. Do I need a ssd boot/cache drive?
  3. How much energy is saved running am4 vs my x99 board? Does the asrock rack boards have 8+ sata ports

The metric Ive commonly heard is 1GB of ECC RAM per TB of usable HDD capacity.

More if you want fancy Apps or RAM hungry Apps.

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Your board supports Xeon v4 CPU’s and 256 GB of DDR4 ECC UDIMMS
For a NAS, I’d strongly recommend swapping RAM and CPU but this is a fantastic MoBo to start with.
Don’t use it for anything mission critical or setup a backup NAS until you’re runnin ECC.

We deploy 6 wide vdevs in ZRAID2 for prod
Makes recoveries MUCH easier

And after a LOT of math, that’s the happy balance between redundancy and expense.

You know I’m gonna advise 1GB per TB of installed storage (or at least usable)

You cannot perform dedupe with less than 5GB RAM per installed TB.
And that can still crash without additional allocations.

So far as drive choice, I always run HGST (now rebranded as WD) enterprise drives.

We have yet to have an ultrastar die in prod to the point it could not be recovered, but Seagate Enterprise data recoveries bought the motorcycle I rode today…
That’s a matter of low up front cost at time of deployment.
Don’t buy more capacity per budget, buy required capacity and move up in quality if budget allows.

consider:
3x 20/22TB WD Enterprise drives ( ZRAID1, 40-44TB usable)
6x 18/20TB WD Enterprise drives ( ZRAID2, 64-80TB usable)

sauce:

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Sorry, forgot to mention:
iops and throughput over network are limited by the single gig NIC

you can compute local, but strongly recommend adding an NVME for the VM

X99 can not boot from NVME, but that’s ideal in this deployment

Good to know

Is the Xeon more power efficient over the 5820k? Is it because the Xeon has more PCI lanes or threads?

This is the advice I was looking for

If I opt for this, if I get more drives will zfs/TrueNAS/hexos automatically be able to expand to the other suggested config?

Also does it matter in the placement of the drives? I was thinking of leaving a space empty for better airflow for now and as I expand I fill empty space with more drives.

This seems better as I can gauge how much storage I actually need

This can be solved with expansion cards right? Also I don’t have ethernet to my desktop, so it’ll probably be limited to my WiFi speeds

Are you thinking it would be used as a VM is storage?

I will refer to my mega chart, please hold after i math out some solutions for you…
relevant thread:

GREAT QUESTION
ZFS managed HBA backplanes don’t care where you are plugged in, RAID controllers DO care what port you’re plugged into as ZFS/ReFS uses UUID for drive identification.
You only learn this handling a ton of enterprise gear.

You can now expand vdevs, but that is potentially destructive so you’d need a backup location capable of taking that load…

U.2 / M.2 add in adapters, and / or faster NICs can remediate both.
I’d say U.2 to PCIe adapter for the VM storage
PCIe 3.0 x16 can run dual 100 gig NIC’s

odd translation, but I am thinking your NVME will be VM backing storage
Keep VM’s off SATA SSD and configure backups to the big pool.

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5820K
9839 / 140 = 70
That is incredibly low…

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E5-2650L v3 or E5-2630L v3 or E5-2696 v3

First one is 25% faster

second is 25% slower

third is 25% faster and 25% slower per thread

happy hunting

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Thanks, I saw your other thread. Will need to review everything on a bigger screen tomorrow

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  1. No, but it depends on how much you value your data. In my (6+ years ago) experience ZFS would panic rather than corrupting data with faulty memory but it might not always be the case.
  2. As compared to? Having a reliable boot drive helps? :slight_smile:
  3. Neither of your platforms are very power efficient however adding costs for a motherboard etc it’ll take probably take a few years before you’d start to save cash on power usage and by that time the hardware is well beyond time to replace anyway so unless you plan to load it close to full most of the time just use the i7-box as-is. If anything you might want to see if you can boot without a video card to reduce power consumption and r

Haswell-E series

Ryzen 2000X-series

Given your stated use case 16Gbyte (with the planned storage) will be more than enough however 24 or 32Gb wouldn’t hurt. However given the age of the hardware etc it’s not worth pouring a lot of money into it. ~150$ is about tops I would pay for ECC RAM as it’s going to be e-waste once this box dies or is decommissioned.

Not sure how much storage you really need but less drives would help in a lot of different ways, people including myself like the Toshiba MG** series (enterprise) but the Seagate Exos should be pretty good too. In terms of layout mirrors or RAID-Z(1) with a hot spare (4+1) are probably the best options in terms of value but do keep in mind that resilvering can take a while and your data isn’t secure during that time and of course RAID isn’t a backup either way.

Regarding replacing drives, “pad” your HDDs (ie use partitions) as size might differ slight even between the same model and you need to have least as much space as your smallest storage device/partition offrers.

Regarding performance you can pretty much use a potato and it wont be an issue. If you could reduce the amount of 3.5" HDDs to 4 I’d honestly recommend going for a Odroid-H4 Plus instead, enable IBECC and possibly grab the 4x PCIe “splitter” card for NVME storage as that would serve you well for years and also offers decent 2.5Gbit NICs.

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