I’ve been running a TrueNAS box for the best part of a decade now, with an AsrockRack C2550D4I and 6 disks in a Fractal Node 304. It started out as a FreeNAS box, and now the next step would be to switch to TrueNAS Scale from Core, which I’m not sure I want to do on this hardware.
The C2XXX atoms are very end of life now, and I’m really not sure which way to go with a successor. I just use the system for storage things all the services I might run on a box like that get run on an M1 Mac mini, so I’m not looking for lots of extra cores or transcoding support.
AsrockRack’s C3758-based board looks old, and there’s no sign of a C5000-based successor.
I need at least 2.5GbE, and onboard USB 3. ECC has always seemed non-negotiable, I need at least 6 SATA ports for the spinning rust, plus a couple of SSDs of some description - I really need to not be booting off a USB anymore, that’s not even recommended for TrueNAS Core these days…
It’s not obvious to me which way to jump. I’m seeing lots of boards (CWWK/Topton, for example) which don’t have ECC, but have the rest of what I’m looking for.
Should I be so worried about ECC these days? Should I just switch to the ASRock Rack C3758D4U stick a 10GbE NIC in and be done with it?
So here is my take. Do you need ECC, for most home lab use I see it as nice to have rather then a need to have. As for the rest of it the real question is how much do you want to spend? When I replace my TrueNAS box it will be with enterprise grade hardware (AMD Epyc w/ ECC) but my current implementation is all consumer grade hardware (Ryzen 4600G and standard desktop memory) and that works well and is cheap. As for the NIC I don’t see a reason to run anything less then 10G as even if your current network won’t support it will someday and those expansion cards are cheap even if your MB doesn’t have onboard support.
Whether I need ECC is one of the main questions I have. When I started with a NAS build it was pretty much decreed that ZFS needed ECC.
To be honest, I’ve never fully understood the risks of memory errors and how they might (or might not) cause undetectable file corruption.
If the risks are acceptable, then my options open up. This NAS contains media, important documents, and irreplaceable family photos and the like. I don’t mind the trade off of extra $$ in exchange for security (with, obviously, a good backup regime, or lack of memory-corruption-caused-file-corruption will be the least of my problems…)
The power footprint of the box I have now is low, and it’s effectively silent (thank you Noctua). Those are also important to me… (should have mentioned that in my first post)
If you don’t mind spending the money for a more robust system than by all means build a proper server complete with a Xeon or Eypc CPU, ECC memory, and sever MB with SAS connections. None of us can tell you how much your data is worth to you. What I can tell you is that I haven’t seen any data corruption from non-ECC memory in my TrueNAS box. In fact the only machine I have that has ECC memory is my Threadripper system and while I would prefer all my machines have ECC memory I don’t view it as necessary.
Same here…i have a z840 and a z440, both with ECC, and i have an Asus x99 thing and an MSI B250 thing neither with ECC, and i havent had any issues with corruption ony any of them and all run zfs. My main file storage runs ECC because it has it whereas my backup does not. Im far far more likely to wreck my storage by doing something stupid than i am from cosmic rays or whatever. Imo these days ECC is optional for anything but enterpise use. This is what backups and redundancy is for. While i think it should be standard nowadays, it isnt, but personally i havent had any issues running a homelab (and a few servers at my school) with non-ECC with ZFS at all. That doesnt mean no one ever has or will, just that i havent.
If you can find a decently priced Asrock - Epyc Embedded (3000 series) ITX board. That would tick a lot of your boxes. However, after a quick look around, the prices and availability of those boards is a little ridiculous right now.
My old NAS was an Atom C2000 system (A Supermicro A1SAi-2550F board with ECC UDIMMs).
Regarding ECC: one of the sticks in the system developed an issue and started throwing (correctable) ECC errors. Just once every few days when idle, but during zfs scrubs and replications once every few minutes or so! I ran it like this for several years. Without ECC I guess I’d have had to deal with frequent scrub errors – in essence the system would have become useless and I would have had no idea where the problem was! So for me, ECC is a must-have on servers/NASes.
My new system is a Ryzen 4650G in an ASRock B550M-HDV motherboard, with ECC UDIMMs. It’s cheap, low power at idle, and has >10x the CPU performance compared to the C2550.
You might like the B550M Steel Legend:
ECC UDIMM support
2.5 Gbit/s LAN
6 SATA3 ports (note only one M.2 slot usable when SATA port 5 and/or 6 used)
1x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A + 1xUSB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C
Additional USB 3.2 Gen1
2x PCIe x16 slots (only one x16 electrical, the other x4 electrical via chipset). Too bad these aren’t usable as x8 + x8 to CPU; that would have been awesome! I think the x16 slot supports bifurcation to x8x4x4 (at least it does on my MB). Also note all PCIe is Gen3 with the Ryzen 4650G CPU. You need the 5x50G for PCIe Gen4, but they are a lot more expensive!
Also note “non-PRO” G CPUs (4x00G rather than 4x50G) doesn’t support ECC.
