Advice for TrueNAS?

[Modey2222]

Hello TrueNAS community

i was wondering if i can make a small NAS system in my home for 3 or 4 PCs at home they will not use the NAS system at the same time at maximum 2 PCs will and the others will not

i have an old PC that maybe can handle that and i was thinking if TrueNAS will be compatible with these hardware or not



MB: Gigabyte G1 Sniper 5

CPU: Intel i7 4770K

Ram: 4x4GB thinking of upgrading to 4x8GB in the near future

Networkport: 1GB will probably be good for my HOME usage thinking of upgrading to 2.5GB port

and for my storage

TrueNAS will have its own 256GB of SATA SSD

i will probably buy 3 EXOS 18TB for now and create RAID-Z2 IF i can't afford 3 of them will probably get 2 and use mirrored or get 3 EXOS 12TB to save cost

and i already own 3 Seagate 4tB and make another RAID-Z2 with these 3

thinking of using NVME cache and not mirrored only one and upgrade in the future to mirrored cache might be a bad idea to use cache since it is not a big NAS system

i might buy this to expand HDDs in the future because of resources issues i can't replace old HDDS with bigger HDDs so it will be sufficient for me to use what my money can get: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083WF95Q...olid=1JM8B0YMNRKX8&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

this setup will be there to help others reach the content of my PC instead of moving them to Flash drives i want everyone in my home to be able to access it at any time without them disturbing me while i'm working

one more reason is that becuase i have 6 HDDs in one PC it slows my PC every now and then and gives me BSOD from time to time i know one of my HDDs is failing and i want to make the burden on my main PC less than that and more faster with NVME





i have some other questions but for now i want your help and opinions from veterans of TrueNAS

is this setup good or bad or what can i change to make it better and will any of these have compatibility issues feel free to type what you want just bear in mind i don't have infinite resources your help is so much appreciated

 

[Evertb1]

MB: Gigabyte G1 Sniper 5

CPU: Intel i7 4770K

Ram: 4x4GB thinking of upgrading to 4x8GB in the near future

None of this hardware is very well suited for FreeNAS. See the Core hardware guide.

create RAID-Z2

The economy of a 3 disk RAIDZ2 vdev is terrible and not advisable at all. It's is possible to buy more smaller drives for about the same amount of money and ending up with more usable storage space. Of course I know nothing about the prices in your country but let me give you an example. Prices are in euro's. I used this caluclator to calaculate the storage space. I also took some so called "slop space" in the calculation and 20 % free space limit (ZFS needs that to keep working correctly).

Example 1: 3 x Iron Wolf 12 TB. Price here at my favorite shop is 359 euro a piece giving a total of 1077 euro.
A RAIDZ2 vdev with those 3 disks would give me a ZFS usable storage capacity of 10.494 TIB ( 11.539 TB). That is 32.05 % of the raw space.

Example2: 6 x Iron Wolf 6 TB. Price here at my favorite shop is 180 euro a piece giving a total of 1080 euro.
A RAIDZ2 vdev with those 6 disks would give me a ZFS usable storage capacity of 20.989 TIB ( 23.078 TB). That is 64.11 % of the raw space.

So buying the bigger more expensive disks would be very expensive indead.To me 6 drives is the minimum for a RAIDZ2 vdev with a decent balance between raw capacity and usable capacity.

 

[Modey2222]

None of this hardware is very well suited for FreeNAS. See the Core hardware guide.

The economy of a 3 disk RAIDZ2 vdev is terrible and not advisable at all. It's is possible to buy more smaller drives for about the same amount of money and ending up with more usable storage space. Of course I know nothing about the prices in your country but let me give you an example. Prices are in euro's. I used this caluclator to calaculate the storage space. I also took some so called "slop space" in the calculation and 20 % free space limit (ZFS needs that to keep working correctly).

Example 1: 3 x Iron Wolf 12 TB. Price here at my favorite shop is 359 euro a piece giving a total of 1077 euro.
A RAIDZ2 vdev with those 3 disks would give me a ZFS usable storage capacity of 10.494 TIB ( 11.539 TB). That is 32.05 % of the raw space.

Example2: 6 x Iron Wolf 6 TB. Price here at my favorite shop is 180 euro a piece giving a total of 1080 euro.
A RAIDZ2 vdev with those 6 disks would give me a ZFS usable storage capacity of 20.989 TIB ( 23.078 TB). That is 64.11 % of the raw space.

So buying the bigger more expensive disks would be very expensive indead.To me 6 drives is the minimum for a RAIDZ2 vdev with a decent balance between raw capacity and usable capacity.

so what if i only used the mirrored option i just need the drive and a backup drive i thought that raidz2 will give me more storage space than that
and what of compatibility for the hard drives
and also can mirror option apply to different hard disk sizes and different brands at the same time cause i will probably move all of my hdds from my main PC and use it in the NAS system

 

[NugentS]

"thinking of using NVME cache and not mirrored only one and upgrade in the future to mirrored cache might be a bad idea to use cache since it is not a big NAS system"

Don't - cache isn't what you think it is and doesn't do what you think it does. Also you don't have enough memory to run L2ARC

 

[Modey2222]

"thinking of using NVME cache and not mirrored only one and upgrade in the future to mirrored cache might be a bad idea to use cache since it is not a big NAS system"

Don't - cache isn't what you think it is and doesn't do what you think it does. Also you don't have enough memory to run L2ARC

so you are advising me to not use NVME
what if i upgraded to 32GB of ram that is the maximum of DDR3 will that be enough without NVME
and is SSD cache enough for my tasks it is not heavy as i said maybe browsing pictures or watching some old school movies

 

[ChrisRJ]

so you are advising me to not use NVME

No, the advice is to not go for a cache drive (an L2ARC in ZFS terms) with this system. The primary cache for ZFS is RAM. Please read up on L2ARC for more details. The bottom line is, that due its enterprise origin, ZFS handles various things differently than you might expect. And caching (read and write) is probably one of the more prominent ones.

 

[Evertb1]

mirrored option i just need the drive and a backup drive

A mirrored vdev is in no shape or form a backup. Redundancy in vdevs never is. It's about keeping your data available while you are suffering a failing disk in your vdev or if you need to replace it. Read up about backup strategies. There are good posts to find on this forum.

I don't want to sound patronizing but you really should do some reading before you do anything else. It's true that you can download TrueNAS for free but that does not mean that using TrueNAS is cheap. You will need to invest in knowledge first and then in hardware second.

There are a lot of resources available for the novice TrueNAS user (see the documentation and Resources on the top of the page). Take advantage of them. Then make a sound plan based on your needs. I am sure that you will be able to come up with better questions as soon as you have done your homework

and is SSD cache enough for my tasks it is not heavy as i said

What is it in your workload that makes you think that you need an SSD cache?

 

[Modey2222]

A mirrored vdev is in no shape or form a backup. Redundancy in vdevs never is. It's about keeping your data available while you are suffering a failing disk in your vdev or if you need to replace it. Read up about backup strategies. There are good posts to find on this forum.

I don't want to sound patronizing but you really should do some reading before you do anything else. It's true that you can download TrueNAS for free but that does not mean that using TrueNAS is cheap. You will need to invest in knowledge first and then in hardware second.

There are a lot of resources available for the novice TrueNAS user (see the documentation and Resources on the top of the page). Take advantage of them. Then make a sound plan based on your needs. I am sure that you will be able to come up with better questions as soon as you have done your homework


What is it in your workload that makes you think that you need an SSD cache?

i read alot of documentation and stuff that i don't understand and tons of videos to try to understand about TrueNAS
in no way am i gonna spend a fortune on my NAS i might expand it later that is why i will use mirrored for the time being and use what i have in mirrored vdev that is my only option ATM i want a drive and a mirror of it until i'm able to expand it later if i can

that is why i came here to ask about compatibility and stuff i was afraid to buy 2 EXOS and fine out that they are not compatible with my system and still no one answered that question if my system is compatible on not but still i will go with this
buy 2 EXOS 18TB Mirrored
and the 4 other 4tb seagate in my main PC will go in as 2 more vdev mirrored
that is a total of 3 vdevs

and the link above from amazon will be my upgrade if i needed it in the future

these are my options if you have better settings for me please share if not then thanks for your help i will go with these settings of 3 vdevs

 

[Modey2222]

What is it in your workload that makes you think that you need an SSD cache?

alot of album pictures and some video editing that my brother does in his work and most of the time he leave his videos on my PC since most of what he edits is on my harddrives i just want to make his experience better since i have the better PC i don't want him to feel like a downgrade since i read that ZFS eats alot of memory to make it snappy i was hoping that SSD cache will make me get away with it without upgrading the memory

and by SSD i mean the OS i read that TrueNAS leaves a bit of the SSD for cache and the rest for the system

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You must have a separate boot device.
Using an SSD for that is actually a good idea.

and by SSD i mean the OS i read that TrueNAS leaves a bit of the SSD for cache and the rest for the system

But this is just plain wrong. Install TrueNAS on that SSD, create your mirror pool on the Exos drives. Get as much RAM as you can afford. Be happy.
I wonder where you read that. Definitely not in the TrueNAS documentation.

 

[Modey2222]

You must have a separate boot device.
Using an SSD for that is actually a good idea.

But this is just plain wrong. Install TrueNAS on that SSD, create your mirror pool on the Exos drives. Get as much RAM as you can afford. Be happy.
I wonder where you read that. Definitely not in the TrueNAS documentation.

its in the first post i said TrueNAS will have its own 256GB SSD

and for that particular info i read it somewhere on reddit i might be wrong of course you can't expect me to be able to understand everything from the get go i need experience with this but unfortunately this OS specialize in HDDs that mean a life time of content in there i just don't want to miss it up and do something wrong so asking for help was the best i could think off
thanks again good sir and everyone else for these info much appreciated

 

[ChrisRJ]

@Modey2222 , would you mind using proper punctuation? It makes things a lot more readable.