SOLVED Building a home NAS and 2022 shortages - Hardware advice needed

[Etorix]

The Nanoxia cages create some obstruction, but the plastic trays cover very little of the bottom and decouple the drives to reduce vibration noise. I haven't stressed cooling performance though, because my ambient temperatures tend to be on the cool side.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Six 5400 rpm drive should be easier to manage. I have already bought 2 Seagate IronWolf and they require less power than power than Exos 16 (of course).
Also, the Nanoxia DS8P seems to have more space between HDD racks than in the Define R6.

As well the way Truenas works, the added heat and noise from 7200 RPM drives, isnt really worth the slight improvement you may get in the end.

 

[Torrone]

As well the way Truenas works, the added heat and noise from 7200 RPM drives, isnt really worth the slight improvement you may get in the end.

Good thing. I took the opportunity of Black Friday to buy some Seagate IronWolf 6Tb 5400rpm at a good price.
I already received two of them that I tested in my gaming PC and the other ones will arrive in December.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Good thing. I took the opportunity of Black Friday to buy some Seagate IronWolf 6Tb 5400rpm at a good price.
I already received two of them that I tested in my gaming PC and the other ones will arrive in December.

Nice,

It was a thread I think on TrueNAS somewhere in all my reading where it was discussed about 5400 vs 7200 and the benefits were not as great as some might expect pending on your needs, with RAM always being #1 to put money into for pure performance.

 

[joeschmuck]

I tested in my gaming PC

What does that mean exactly? Did you do a burn-in test of some sort? A SMART Long/Extended Test least? I personally like running a SMART Long test first followed by badblocks to test my hard drives when I first get them, before putting data on them. Badblocks is a very time consuming test to run one complete pass (5 test patterns).

 

[Torrone]

What does that mean exactly? Did you do a burn-in test of some sort? A SMART Long/Extended Test least? I personally like running a SMART Long test first followed by badblocks to test my hard drives when I first get them, before putting data on them. Badblocks is a very time consuming test to run one complete pass (5 test patterns).

I only do SMART test (conveyance and Long/Estended) and read/ write preformance on random location for the moment. I will do burn-in / badblocks test later in the NAS case.

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm not telling you that you have to do this, just that it's best to do something to ensure the drives are working as expected. Nothing is more frustrating than moving all your data to a new pool and then watching a drive die. It sucks.

 

[Torrone]

Yes, I understand. I've read this guide and I'll see how I can adapt it to my own situation : https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.38/

Also, I scared myself on the SMART test by seeing a phenomenal number of errors. These explanations may help new Seagate disk users:

Reading SMART Data on Seagate Drives - sdx1.net

Lenovo's Corporate Discount, which currently uses the code NJ*PERKSEPP, offers a significant discount on expensive ThinkPads.

sdx1.net

 

[joeschmuck]

Yup, Seagate does it's own thing. Not to peddle software in your direction but the little script called Multi-Report does take that into account and will automatically do the conversion for you and send you a nice little email with all the details and if there are any alerts, it tells you in the subject line so you can scan your emails and if you see "Warning" or "Critical" and don't see the word "All Good" then you know there is a problem you should be looking at. I find this script very valuable, you might too, or might not. I leave that up to you.

 

[Davvo]

That's a great script.

 

[MrGuvernment]

I'm not telling you that you have to do this, just that it's best to do something to ensure the drives are working as expected. Nothing is more frustrating than moving all your data to a new pool and then watching a drive die. It sucks.

This actually just happened to me on my TrueNAS, had 2 x 6TB Seagate Ent. drives I have used for a while in my QNAP - SMART health with long tests came back clean in QNAP and fine in TrueNAS initially, after 2 days in my TrueNAS - started getting reported back block and unrecoverable sectors, 32...

 

[joeschmuck]

This actually just happened to me on my TrueNAS, had 2 x 6TB Seagate Ent. drives I have used for a while in my QNAP - SMART health with long tests came back clean in QNAP and fine in TrueNAS initially, after 2 days in my TrueNAS - started getting reported back block and unrecoverable sectors, 32...

That is a terrible story, the fact that it was running fine and then started failing. Did the drives have a lot of hours on them?

That is why I like to run badblocks, it gives the drives a workout. There are other drive tests you can run I've been fortunate to not have any bad drives for the FreeNAS/TrueNAS project. I've had other bad drives in the past and there was no redundancy, not a good feeling.

There is another good tool listed below to test the crap out of the drives.

solnet-array-test

Back in the late '90's, I was managing a bunch of large whitebox storage servers. For the largest of these, I had the pleasure of building and deploying a massive storage server, 8 shelves of 9 drives each, Seagate ST173404LW 73GB drives, a...

www.truenas.com

 

[MrGuvernment]

Ya, they had A LOT of hours on them! So i was not completely surprised! They had been sitting in my QNAP for...3 years? 24/7 running and I had them from before that even! :) They were solid drives, but they certainly did not owe me anything (and I have backups from my QNAP so never worried about any drives dying)

I am def going to be running through the solnet tests on these new Toshiba N300 drives i got now that they are all here.

 

[Torrone]

I have an old M2-2280 B & M Key SATA SSD that I was planning to use as a boot drive.
But we agree that the M2 port on the X12STL-F motherboard does not actually support this type of card? I have to find a B-key SSD?

I'm not sure I understand the documentation: https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/X12/MNL-2353.pdf

 

[jgreco]

Forget the confusing old NGFF "key" malarkey and focus on what the manual says. It says PCIe, i.e. NVMe. A SATA SSD is not NVMe and therefore will not work. Most SSD brands these days offer an M.2 NVMe variant. These should all work in that slot.

 

[Torrone]

Okay, thanks.
Since I was using it on a motherboard that had both PCIE and SATA interface on the same port, I didn't realize it was SATA.

 

[Torrone]

I received the CPU today and was able to assemble the system. I'm still waiting for 3 hard drives out of the 6 to finalize everything.

I put some pictures here for those who would like to buy the same components. Don't hesitate to ask me for more if needed.

Globally, the Nanoxia case is of good quality, but not as good as a Fractal Design (non-captive screws, not very precise tapping, no side panel guides, less precise adjustment...). The chassis is very heavy ! I read in a test that it was because of the inner lining but I don't think so. It's the steel sheets that look excessively thick.

Bad point: the fans are 3 pin only, no control possible with my motherboard. The whole thing is noisy, even after adjusting the CPU fan.
I think I'll buy PMW fans, but it increases the price of the case part quite a bit.

On the other hand, the rack for the hard disks are really good! I just hope I won't break one of the 4 pins that hold the drives when I have to take them out of their drawer.

To cool the CPU, I found an Arctic i13 CO (for Continuous Operation) for only 11,50 € with shipping, much cheaper than the Supermicro model discussed above (~65€). On the other hand, it doesn't leave much room for the nearest RAM module.

I have installed TrueNAS SCALE for the moment. I'm testing the hard drives (long SMART to start with) and VM on the SSD.

 

[Davvo]

Make sure to run a conveyance smart test as well.

 

[Torrone]

@Davvo Yes, it's the first test I have done.

Now, I'm running bablocks read-write destructive test.

I'm not sure I will run the NAS on SCALE. I have already had several bugs / problems

• The "Your NAS time does not match your computer time", solved by manually setting UTC time into BIOS
• impossible to make Transmission works, most resources are for TrueNAS CORE
• the stuck job alerts.process_alerts, solved with service middlewared restart
• Heavy charge on CPU caused by Kube-Bridge constantly switching states, solved by shutting down the VM vol
• "number of Error Log entries increased" on the boot NVME, I have disabled SMART on this SSD

 

[Davvo]

Disabling SMART is never a good idea, but if you have backup config could be a way to evade the issue.
Never used SCALE, can't help you.