Building my first home NAS with Scale - advice any additional hardware?

azhomelab

Cadet
Joined
Oct 6, 2022
Messages
3
Hello TrueNAS experts/enthusiasts, I've used FreeNAS in the past but only for iSCSI block storage that I never really had to mess with as it ran solid for years. After deciding to build a NAS solution for home, I decided to go with TrueNAS Scale because it seems like the best solution for what I'm looking to do.

Intended use:
- NVR storage via NFS: I'd like to have 30 days worth of events/motion stored, but if I lose it, it's not the end of the world. (estimate ~2TB)
- Plex Library/App including transcoding no more than 4/5 streams at time and rarely would any be 4k at this point (estimate ~6TB)
- Home Video/Photo backup + time machine + other app/config server backups from various other systems I have (estimate ~5TB) (+replication to cloud)
- Various other docker apps (qbtvpn,mqtt,home assistant addon etc) (estimate <1TB)

Hardware I have:
  • Chassis: Supermicro CSE-826 2U
  • CPU: Dual Xeon E5-2630v2 - 6 core / 12 threads @ 2.4Ghz
  • Motherboard: Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F
  • RAM: 128GB (16x8) DDR3 ECC
  • Network: 4x 1GB ethernet ports
  • Hard drives 12x Hitachi/HGST 7.2k 3TB drives + 1 500G SATA SSD
  • PCIe 8x 3.0 slots: 6 open
I've done some research and installed Scale with the bootpool on the 500G SSD drive and chose to create a raidz2 out of the 12 3TB disks. In the process of creating that pool, one of the disks had partitions leftover and while troubleshooting that I came across a few posts that gave me some pause on my decision.

What would be the best way to configure the pool or pools for this type of use? Should I be using mirrored boot devices? Should I be using the PCIe slots for SSD's or NVMe's for the apps or possibly adding SLOG/ZIL pools now or in the future? I've read some documents on this forum about SLOG/ZIL but still don't fully understand if there is any reason or benefit for the type of workload I'm doing. Thanks for any advice!
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
There's no such thing as a "SLOG/ZIL" pool.

Every ZFS system includes an in-pool ZIL for sync write data. Writes that are sync are always staged to the ZIL so that the pool is always consistent. Because this is a slow process, if you need a high volume of sync write capability, this can be augmented by a separate log ("SLOG") dedicated device that needs special properties to maintain integrity. This is mostly used for virtual machine storage, databases, logging systems, and anywhere else where data loss of sync writes would be a big issue.

 

azhomelab

Cadet
Joined
Oct 6, 2022
Messages
3
There's no such thing as a "SLOG/ZIL" pool.

Every ZFS system includes an in-pool ZIL for sync write data. Writes that are sync are always staged to the ZIL so that the pool is always consistent. Because this is a slow process, if you need a high volume of sync write capability, this can be augmented by a separate log ("SLOG") dedicated device that needs special properties to maintain integrity. This is mostly used for virtual machine storage, databases, logging systems, and anywhere else where data loss of sync writes would be a big issue.

Ok great, that helps me understand it a lot better. Doesn't seem I need to be concerned with that for now.
 

artlessknave

Wizard
Joined
Oct 29, 2016
Messages
1,506
one of the disks had partitions leftover
this needs elaboration. what are you trying to say? TrueNAS will use the whole disk to make a zfs partition and a swap partition.
 
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