Building my first TrueNAS system...

[strauss2]

I am also looking at building an am5 system as well. Have you had a chance to test if the GPU in the 7900 is working in truenas scale? I am hoping to use it for jellyfin transcodes. I know that on the x570d4u and the 5650G pro CPU, hardware transcoding works, but I have not seen many other am5 builds yet on the forum. Thanks!

 

[jorisvervuurt]

I am also looking at building an am5 system as well. Have you had a chance to test if the GPU in the 7900 is working in truenas scale? I am hoping to use it for jellyfin transcodes. I know that on the x570d4u and the 5650G pro CPU, hardware transcoding works, but I have not seen many other am5 builds yet on the forum. Thanks!

I don’t personally use transcoding, but I did see the AMD iGPU in the dropdown for isolated GPU (not sure what that means / how that works; I’m new to TrueNAS). If you tell me how, I’ll test it for you. ;-)

For the other people: the UPS implementation works great; the Back-UPS Pro USB option is listed in the UPS service configuration and everything works great.

 

[wdp]

Ran some initial tests with the UPS under Ubuntu; it was detected immediately without any changes to the system, so I’m hopeful it’ll work out of the box. :) The system idles at 40W power consumption, full load (using the `stress` tool) it peaks at 141W. The old Synology NAS idled at 30W, so it’s not even that much more. :)

Any update on your build? I have been eyeing a 7900 for some time. Hoping some alternate motherboard skus come to surface.

 

[jorisvervuurt]

Still very happy with the build. TrueNAS Scale has been running great without any issues.

I did change two things:
- Replaced the network card with an LR-Link LRES1016PF-SFP+ PCIe 2.0 x4 10Gb network card with a single SFP+ port (Intel 82599 chipset) since I wanted to connect it using a DAC cable for reduced power consumption and latency compared to RJ45
- Added an off-brand PCIe 3.0 x1 card with ASMedia ASM3142 chip and internal 10 Gbps USB Type E connector (limited to 8 Gbps due to PCIe 3.0 x1 bandwidth, but this card allows me to use the USB-C front panel connector since the motherboard itself doesn't have a USB Type E connector)

Other than that, I haven't touched the hardware. See my signature for the current setup.

The ASRock B650D4U motherboard has been working fine too, though I did upgrade the BIOS and IPMI firmware. In order for TrueNAS Scale to show the memory as ECC, I did have to change some BIOS settings. ECC was set to Auto, but I had to set it to Enabled to get TrueNAS to actually show it as being ECC.

 

[Constantin]

WD Red SATA 2.5” drives

Trigger warning, those are likely SMR drives. Check Yoricks resource re SMR drives before even thinking about using anything WD in your system that doesn’t explicitly guarantee that it’s a CMR/PMR drive.

SMR drives might be ok to boot from but for any other kind of NAS use they are really bad news, especially with TrueNAS.

 

[jorisvervuurt]

Trigger warning, those are likely SMR drives. Check Yoricks resource re SMR drives before even thinking about using anything WD in your system that doesn’t explicitly guarantee that it’s a CMR/PMR drive.

SMR drives might be ok to boot from but for any other kind of NAS use they are really bad news, especially with TrueNAS.

In the post you replied to, I meant SATA SSDs, not HDDs. I've just updated that post. ;-)
In the end though, I went with NVMe SSDs; see my signature for the final (current) setup.

Thanks for the tip anyway!

 

[Constantin]

Sorry, it wasn’t apparent and it really ate my lunch when WD quietly switched a bunch of their Red, allegedly “NAS” drives from CMR to SMR without informing customers and then acting all surprised once the customer base got really riled up as resilvers went from 1 hour to 17 or failed altogether.

WD continue this charade to this day, so only red plus and red pro HDD drives might be safe for TrueNAS data pool use. With WD, I’d verify by SKU that the drive is CMR/PMR as the packaging or general sales information is forevermore suspect. I’ve lost all trust in the company even as I continue to use their drives because the alternatives are not better.

The “Red” HDD “NAS” drives in question are device managed SMR, or DMSMR drives. They pretend to be CMR drives but only have a small CMR cache that then gets flushed into SMR sectors on occasion - but without telling the OS, which then freaks out because the whole pool is held hostage while the flush completes. Some SSDs do the same thing with fast flash up front flushing into slower flash in the back. All that might work in light use but craters under heavy workloads.

Even more galling is one of their HGST-subsidiary employees admitting at a ZFS conference that DMSMR drives are incompatible with ZFS - five years before WD decided to screw over their customers by shipping a drive that is marginally cheaper to make at the same price point, with the same packing, etc as CMR drives that are actually compatible.

As you can probably tell, I’m still pretty mad about all this.

 

[jorisvervuurt]

I totally understand what you mean. Their Red NVMe drives seem to work fine, though. ;-)