Best hardware for TrueNAS

katie279

katie279

katie279

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Hi all,

Got a couple of Synology NAS' and looking to upgrade. Always had half an eye on things like TrueNAS as conscious my use of Synology gear isn't hugely past a glorified filestore (eg don't really use Plex etc)

Fairly comfortable setting up TrueNAS itself, but interested in how you'd set up the hardware.

Ie primarily :

1) how do I pick the right PC itself - ideally low wattage, high performance!

2) what case/rack setup should I get to house it all? I like the extension units that synology have as I've ended up with 8-9 HDDs, so like the idea of loads of space to extend them!

Many thanks in advance!
 
Nothing special needed to be honest. I migrated from a HP microserver n40l to my old PC, a 6600k with 32 gb of RAM. The idle wattage was the same (about 40w) and performs far better.

If you're installing bare metal then you don't have to worry too much, just get something relatively modern and stuff it in a nice big case with loads of bays. If you run out of SATA ports on the motherboard then budget for a HBA card.

As you're researching this you'll find a lot of people saying you must have ECC RAM. ZFS is no more at risk from bad RAM/cosmic rays than any other file system, but ultimately the choice is a personal one. and will depend on cost and how important the data is to you.

Think carefully before going down the truenas/ZFS route, you have to plan your storage layout carefully, and it's not as flexible as other solutions (e.g. unraid). FOr example, I started with 6x2tb drives in RAIDZ2, and my only option to expand this was to replace all 6 drives with 4tb models. Once they were full I couldn't afford to replace all 6 with larger drives and so I had to start a new pool with 2 large drives. It worked out fine in the end, but as I say, it's not very flexible.
 
Uhtred said:
Nothing special needed to be honest. I migrated from a HP microserver n40l to my old PC, a 6600k with 32 gb of RAM. The idle wattage was the same (about 40w) and performs far better.

If you're installing bare metal then you don't have to worry too much, just get something relatively modern and stuff it in a nice big case with loads of bays. If you run out of SATA ports on the motherboard then budget for a HBA card.

As you're researching this you'll find a lot of people saying you must have ECC RAM. ZFS is no more at risk from bad RAM/cosmic rays than any other file system, but ultimately the choice is a personal one. and will depend on cost and how important the data is to you.

Think carefully before going down the truenas/ZFS route, you have to plan your storage layout carefully, and it's not as flexible as other solutions (e.g. unraid). FOr example, I started with 6x2tb drives in RAIDZ2, and my only option to expand this was to replace all 6 drives with 4tb models. Once they were full I couldn't afford to replace all 6 with larger drives and so I had to start a new pool with 2 large drives. It worked out fine in the end, but as I say, it's not very flexible.
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Really helpful - will have a nose around at cases!

Is there any motherboards that are better for multiple disks? Ie if I was going to aim for 20 disks in end state, would there be any limits I'd hit? (I like to plan for expansion!)

Good point re unraid, I keep hearing about this - not precious about TrueNAS, so might have a look - sounds like it's a stronger design!
 
trentlad said:
Not criticizing, just curious, how is TrueNAS an upgrade over a Synology NAS?

I figured they were some of the best around.
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Used Synology for about 15 years, but getting a little irked by some of their cynical policy shifts - eg acceleration of EoL support for NAS models which forces upgrades to the whole unit sooner, their recent debacle about only allowing their own hard disks to be used in their latest NAS. They backtracked although still put annoying warnings on the control panel, hence looking around at alternative approaches....!
 
I've used both TrueNAS and Synology. I wouldn't go back to TrueNAS if I'm honest.

If you are adamant on TrueNAS, go for an Intel CPU, AMD builds have some quirkiness.
 
katie279 said:
Great to have some experience! Have you used Unraid?
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No, I haven't. I hear good things, if you use it for Plex as an example it only spins up the HDD where the file is stored, this can result in significant power savings. Apart from that, I don't know a huge amount about it but I rarely see bad things being said. For my use case, I needed something with higher performance and I really like Synology DSM.

I found the TrueNAS to be quite complicated and I always had minor issues with it (and I'm supposedly an IT professional). It's fantastic for enterprises and people who know Linux very well, but I would find it difficult to recommend for a regular user.
 
Really useful insight! I agree I really have been happy with Synology, just totally put off by their recent moves - to be fair they've backed down a bit on the initial blocking of non-synology hard disks in their kit, but it does show an underlying poor culture that's started to emerge...

I've also heard good things about Unraid. I might spin up a test server or something and have a play and see what I think before I plunge in!
 
I'm shopping for a similar thing @katie279 and I'm 90% set on unraid as the software.

I'm looking for a motherboard with as many sata ports as possible for as many HDDs as possible, an nvme slot (I've a random nvme drive I want to use as cache in unraid ) and a socket for an Intel CPU capable of "quick sync" but I'm out of date ok hardware at this point!!!

I don't mean to take over/trash the thread but perhaps any recommendations would be interesting to both of us
 
@steinooo you could also consider a PCI card for extra SATA ports. You don't need the latest and greatest CPU, Intel 9th gen onwards are very good for Quicksync and will do 4k transcodes, generally the newer gens will be a bit better in terms of power consumption and you may find boards with 2.5 GbE NICs, but check for compatibility with your chosen OS. Also the newer Intel with P and E cores, check the hypervisor for support, you may have to disable the E cores in the BIOS.
 
ChrisD. said:
@steinooo you could also consider a PCI card for extra SATA ports. You don't need the latest and greatest CPU, Intel 9th gen onwards are very good for Quicksync and will do 4k transcodes, generally the newer gens will be a bit better in terms of power consumption and you may find boards with 2.5 GbE NICs, but check for compatibility with your chosen OS. Also the newer Intel with P and E cores, check the hypervisor for support, you may have to disable the E cores in the BIOS.
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PCI card is a good shout for extra sata and I'm 100% not after a recent Intel CPU. The cheaper the better for me. I just am so out of the loop with hardware I don't know which socket is which. Ideally I could find a used PSU/CPU/mobo bundle
 
I managed to find an i7-9700 (non-K), 16GB RAM, board, and PSU for a few hundred a year or so ago, so bargains are to be had. I still use it today to run a few VMs, including my Plex Server with the iGPU passed through.
 
Depends on what you want to spend, the amount of storage and how much performance is required.

CPU
Ryzen 4650
Xeon E3 1260L v5

Motherboard
B550
C236

128gb of RAM

12x 10tb drives

118gb Optane cache
Intel 300gb~ SSD scratch drive

5-10 gigabit NIC.
 
Here's what I'm running in my Unraid box:

ASRock B450M Pro4
Ryzen 1600AF
32GB DDR4 ECC RAM
Dell PERC H310 - Gives me 8 extra SATA ports
Fractal Node 804 case
4x 4TB HDD
2x 1TB HDD
2x 512GB SSD

A couple of benefits with Unraid is that disks spin down when not in use so helps cut down the noise and power usage. Plus it only spins up the disk containing the data you're reading from and not the whole array. Also it's easy to add and remove disks without having to wipe the array and start again.
 
I have a TrueNAS box. 5x 20 TB in RAIDZ2 so 60 TB usable. I have 64 GB RAM, a 250 GB boot drive, a 1 TB NVME cache drive, and a SLOG SSD. I use AMD for the ECC support. I intend running some VMs but have yet to do so. If I had a motley assembly of HDDs, I might well go for Unraid. My box just sits there and works.
 
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