Before I buy

[NervousPanda]

Hi guys,

I'm not, by far, an experienced server builder and I would like to get your opinions before I make my next purchase.
I currently have a home server running Ubuntu server which has adguard, plex, rutorrent, sonarr and radarr. This server is quite old hardware and lately it has been giving me some issues (it was a test setup but it has been running for the past 3 years). We're talking about a AMD Sempron 3850 APU with 2 external HDDs and a internal 128GB SSD so you can see why I'm looking into building a more permanent solution.

I'm looking to build it as affordable as possible, with low power consumption but with possibility to expand and to hold my phone backup, media share etc, no transcoding should be required as my TV playsback most of the formats.
After some research, I was looking into buying the following components:

Motherboard + CPU:
https://pt.aliexpress.com/item/1005004752259038.html which includes a N5105 CPU. According to the official intel specs it only allows for a total of 16GB of RAM but seems it can handle 32GB like a champ.

PSU:
A semi-modular corsair CX550 which is currently installed on my gaming PC (will have to upgrade as I'm upgrading the GPU).

RAM:
G.Skill 16GBx2

HDDs:
Found a deal online for WD purple 8TB drives with less than a year of usage cheaper than WD Red 4TB (if bought in bulk), was looking to buy 3x8TB for a z1 array (sorry if misused, still learning TrueNAS filesystem). A 4TB drive will be used purely for photo backup as this will be the only critical data in the server.

SSDs:
1x 128GB from my current server for boot and a 500GB for cache

Can you please share your input and improvements? Please take into consideration that I'm from Portugal and the portuguese market can be different (usually more expensive when buying used parts).

Many thanks !

 

[sretalla]

and a 500GB for cache

Don't use it for that.

Use it as an apps pool instead (make sure you replicate it daily to your HDD pool to make up for lack of redundancy).

3x8TB for a z1 array

Frowned upon due to disks over 2TB in RAIDZ1... takes too long to resilver and you're out of luck if a second drive fails during that.

Better if you do mirrors or RAIDZ2 if you can find your way to a 4th disk.

I do have a pool of exactly that layout in a "test" server... with data I can live without on it (but might be a little annoyed to lose as it will take some time to put it back together from other sources... I know what I'm getting into though and can only blame myself if it's eventually lost).

 

[NervousPanda]

Thank you very much for your reply. Regarding the z1, is there any way to later add another 8Tb drive as parity converting into a z2? If not, maybe creating as a z2 from scratch (using a different size drive to create it) and removing that Said drive once its created. Would this be an option?

 

[sretalla]

Regarding the z1, is there any way to later add another 8Tb drive as parity converting into a z2?

Not easily... backup, destroy pool, recreate pool with extra disk as RAIDZ2, restore data.

If not, maybe creating as a z2 from scratch (using a different size drive to create it) and removing that Said drive once its created. Would this be an option?

Sort-of... do you really plan to run with a degraded pool until you get the additional disk? Not a great idea IMO... also potentially bad performance.

 

[Fleshmauler]

You mentioned that

A 4TB drive will be used purely for photo backup as this will be the only critical data in the server.

So wait... are you saying that you'll have a single 4TB drive will be used for the ONLY CRITICAL DATA? I could be crazy, but it'd make a lot more sense to me to put 'the only critical data' onto the array, regardless if you end up with z1 or z2, sounds much safer to me than single disk yolo.

 

[artlessknave]

I.......would not trust that board. does it have to be itx? could you instead do a x9scm/e3-1230v2/16-32GB ECC RAM combo?