I come to you in my time of need, asking for help building a NAS for our small studio… We are around 6-8 VFX artists who are looking to upgrade our storage solution to something more modern and can sustain decent 10 gig speeds.
Our current setup is a dual Xeon with around 20TBs of drives on a FreeNAS box (64 Gigs of DDR3 ECC). (Nothing NVME, just pure SATA). Its slow but reliable and have been working for 5 years without a single failure)
It’s time to upgrade, and we are looking into making a new box with a more modern CPU, some good NVME cache drives which can hopefully make use of our 10gig network.
My questions are…
Is ECC still a thing? I mean, is it as important nowadays for a storage system. Can we get away with using some good reputable fast memory and let TrueNAS do the error correcting?
Space… This is not yet decided yet, but i’m thinking something in the 50-100TB or less. With some cache drives… Please recommend based on your understanding.
CPU. We really want to do AMD, so now the decision is if it should be a top of the range 5000-7000 series Ryzen or a last generation threadripper. (The ECC argument plays into this too I guess). This is a point I really need your help on, so please share your views with me.
OS. We are very well used to FreeNAS and I have no compelling reason to jump to unraid or anything else with our experience. Please let me know if we are mistaken.
Caching. Never done it, so please advise on how a typical configuration would be!
Any other configuration traps I should be aware of. We are going to use a Intel 10gb Convergence adapter with link aggregation for some decent speed upto the switch.
Can you share a little more about your current setup?
How did you acquire it? DIY build or commercially?
How many HDD drives are in this NAS? Does it contain (SATA-) SSDs?
Do you know the motherboard specs? E.g. name, does it have NVMe slots? Does it have PCIe slots (how many are open/what speed/how many electrical lanes)?
Do you have requirements for your upgraded NAS beyond storage (increase capacity and speed)?
Based on what I read there is a chance that your current NAS can be upgraded to satisfy your current requirements. My questions can help clarify that. Otherwise I am sure someone will recommend a good upgrade path.
Since this will be a pure storage solution for bandwidth starved creators I recommend you go full rackmount with a 20+ drives chassi.
I am sorry to say, but your needs are above hobbyist levels / DIY and even a threadripper is a worse fit than an EPYC platform today. I recommend you find some local IT company that can help you here.
That said, here are some concrete answers;
With DDR5, not as much as it used to be, but still a thing. Whenever data corruption risks ruining hours of work, DDR is extremely cheap insurance, especially on EPYC workstations.
For a home NAS, I usually say, don’t bother. For something like this? You want it, for sure.
Space is hard to advise, but given your line of work … 100 GB will be way too small way too quick. You want room to grow so you should go with a 20+ HDD combo.
EPYC for sure, though a 16-32 core is plenty here.
I think any OS you are used to is a good fit here.
No experience either, just know you can do it - I think FreeNAS can do this easily though, but never done it myself.
Lots, which is why I recommend you seek pro help for this one. The time saved will be well worth your while.