Hello team,
Please apologies if there is already similar discussion already opened on this forum, but i couldn’t find it.
I’m thinking about building home lab using Minisforum MS-A2 - specifically version with 7945hx cpu. I want to add PCIE extension card for additional two NVME’s. So, in total i would have 5 nvme’s. 4x4TB (probably WD SN700) and 1x1TB (same WD SN700). Am planning using Proxmox as hypervisor and create few VM’s mainly for PfSense ( OpnSense is viable as well) and TrueNas (those 4 Nvme’s will be passthrou). I will add 64GB ram, so that TrueNas would have at least 16GB ram allocation. Now the question is to you, do you think will this work, or do you based on your experience foresee any potential issues? I want to MS-A2 specifically because of its small footprint and real 32 threads. Thank you for any comment, really appreciated.
Old PCIe 3.0 drives with a “NAS premium” price tag. There is really nothing special about them, no PLP, not enterprise features. If you can find cheaper drives, go for them. Just avoid trash tier like Kingston NV3, Kioxia Exceria and their kin.
Performance doesn’t really matter, neither ZFS nor dual 10Gbit NIC will bring NVMe to their limits. DRAM-less drives use a bit less power but write-throttle earlier. Heat may be a concern in that small form factor.
You can create VMs in TrueNAS too and avoid Proxmox and passthrough. Or run everything in Proxmox, Proxmox has ZFS too. More easy to administrate setups with less complexity.
Just my thoughts…but otherwise MS-A2 is a beast. Sadly doesn’t have room for 2xU.2 NVMe, so that’s the dealbreaker why I won’t get one myself 