AMD Ryzen 3700X + X570 Build - does that make sense?

[Luke82]

Hello together,

as my current Synology NAS with just 2 bays is getting older i'm looking towards an DIY TrueNas build!

My main purpose is to store self made pictures and videos and the most space will be used by my large (uhhd) blu-ray collection. I'm getting used to stream them from my nas rather than having to put the disc everytime in a not so silent blu-ray player!

So my suggestion would be to use one of Asrock Racks x570 Boards with a BMC, put as much ECC ram in it as possible (128GB), stick a decent 3700x 8-core cpu on it and of course a Broadcom SAS HBA with 8 oder 16 internal SAS ports. As hdds i would go with SAS 14 oder 16TB devices and put them into a raidZ2. A decent 19" case with a SAS backplane and a good PSU is also on my list. Two cheap SATA ssds would serve as boot devices.

The following questions came to my mind:

1) Is an L2ARC oder ZIL ssd-caching needed or suggested?

2) Will my 8 oder 16 discs always be spinning while watching a movie or does TrueNas load the blu-ray image (for example 80GB) to my main memory at once and sends the 8 oder 16 discs to sleep again?

3) With my synology I synchronise my documents folder of each PC an family member to the NAS. Would that be possible with TrueNas also and is a dedicated pair of mirrored SSDs possible for these small files, for example those new hybrid pools?

Thanks for your help and comments in advance!
Luke82

 

[joeschmuck]

1) Is an L2ARC oder ZIL ssd-caching needed or suggested?

No, these will not improve performance of a NAS basically serving up random content. The amount of RAM is more important.

2) Will my 8 oder 16 discs always be spinning while watching a movie or does TrueNas load the blu-ray image (for example 80GB) to my main memory at once and sends the 8 oder 16 discs to sleep again?

In a properly configured system the goal is to have the drives spinning constantly. Repeated spinning up/down causes premature wear/death of a hard drive. However with the proper configuration you can force your hard drives to sleep, I and many others would advice against it strictly from a life expectancy perspective.

3) With my synology I synchronise my documents folder of each PC an family member to the NAS. Would that be possible with TrueNas also and is a dedicated pair of mirrored SSDs possible for these small files, for example those new hybrid pools?

Yes, you can do that, just have one large pool (could be one VDEV or maybe two VDEVs) and then create datasets for each person, even assign storage limits if you desire.

Just a few questions which should lead you into looking for more information...
1) Are you looking to Plex to handle transcoding 4K content for one of more TV's? Transcoding 4K content is Very CPU intensive. Read the Plex Forums before buying your system or you may be unhappy. I think they recommend a minimum passmark score of 16000 to transcode 4K content, but check out the Plex Forums, many people there know what works and what doesn't.
2) Are you sure you want to create a huge capacity storage mainly for video content? It's very expensive and the hard drives need to be kept cool. A compact case means lots of loud fans for good airflow. A large high airflow case could be much quieter.
3) Are you aware that with a ZFS system, you cannot just add a hard drive to expand your capacity? It's never that easy.

Remember that when you are building a NAS, the long life components are typically everything except the hard drives, the Hard Drives are considered disposable and generally will need to be replaced between 3 to 5 years, and the bulk of your money will be in hard drive costs for this size system. With that said, buy very good quality parts that you would expect to last at least 10 years, quite possibly much longer.

As a suggestion, I don't know what you have for a computer right now but if you could run a VM of TrueNAS on it (maybe via VMWare Workstation Player or VirtualBox) then you could test out TrueNAS and maybe even Plex if you have enough RAM and CPU horsepower. It's just for testing, no major storage capacity.

 

[Constantin]

1) Is an L2ARC oder ZIL ssd-caching needed or suggested?

Hi Luke, welcome to the community.

I found a meta-data L2ARC very useful for rsync backups of server data. For whatever reason, rsync really seems to hammer the directory data a lot, so having the metadata handy on a SSD really sped up as the L2ARC cache got hot. There is no risk re: adding a L2ARC SSD since the data in it is a copy of the data in the pool - the L2ARC SSD can die and there is no lasting impact on the data in the pool.

Just as with the L2ARC, the use case for a SLOG matters. For example, is your use case built on sync=on or can you do without? I'd read up on the SLOG for a bit and then (very importantly!) determine what kind of SLOG is right for your use case. Not every SSD will do and SLOG SSDs that crater will take pool data with them. ServeTheHome has a nice list of suggested SLOGs, and another page with a primer but I'd read up on SLOGs in the iXSystsms documentation first (to SLOG or not to SLOG, demystifying SLOGS, etc.). You need to understand that tool before implementing it.

2) Will my 8 oder 16 discs always be spinning while watching a movie or does TrueNas load the blu-ray image (for example 80GB) to my main memory at once and sends the 8 oder 16 discs to sleep again?

As shipped, TrueNAS will keep those disks spinning. There are scripts that folk here have developed to allow disks to spin down & save power. However, that benefit has to be considered in context with the strain that spin-ups place on the mechanicals.

The forum consensus seems to be that leaving the disks spinning idly will allow them to live longer than if they spin up and down (use case matters!). Perhaps a remote server that is only accessed weekly is a candidate? Perhaps you can limit TrueNAS from playing with the pool the rest of the time (scrubs and so on)?. You should directly inquire with the folk writing those scripts re: best use case and experiences.

In general, I'd focus on minimizing the power consumption overall by buying fewer but higher capacity helium-filled HDDs. Helium -filled HDDs idle at 2W less than their air-filled cousins and likely will last longer too. The price premium can be negligible. These days, new helium drives are available at around 10TB and up. Inexpensive 14TB helium drives can be shucked from EasyStore and like external enclosures. Just avoid any and all SMR-based drives.

I'd also have a burned-in, cold spare on hand for any failures and consider your backup strategy too. For example, I normed my backups around the same capacity HDDs as my main server to allow spare drives to be used in either enclosure.

3) With my synology I synchronise my documents folder of each PC an family member to the NAS. Would that be possible with TrueNas also and is a dedicated pair of mirrored SSDs possible for these small files, for example those new hybrid pools?

I'm somewhat unconvinced that dedicating SSDs to this task is necessary unless you're dealing with databases, have a 10GbE network, and need high speed. Many backup programs (like Time Machine on Apple computers) intentionally throttle throughput to limit any impacts on the user experience. Time Machine limits itself to between 25-50MB/s in my experience, even if it's dealing with a 10GbE connection and nothing else is going on.

I doubt your users will notice or object if you simply use a standard HDD-based pool for backups. TrueNAS 12 does offer the possibility of creating SSD pools for metadata and small files using something called special VDEVs (sVDEV), but that is territory I would not get into unless you know exactly what you're doing.

For example, this spring I plan on upgrading my FreeNAS 11.3 server to TrueNAS 12 and as part of that incorporate separate 3-way SSD mirrors for metadata and small files, respectively. I've researched it a lot but to get the full benefit it will also require me to nuke my pool and start over, so a lot of preparation is going into it (making multiple backups, consolidating small files into larger disk images, if warranted, etc.).

Additionally, consider that if any sVDEVs fail completely that your pool is toast too. So where data retention or high uptime is important, only use enterprise SSDs for sVDEVs, burn them in, mirror them extensively, and carry at least one qualified cold spare in case there is even a hint of a serious SMART problem.