Considering moving from xPenology to FreeNAS/TruNAS .... some advice please

[Rhubarb]

My current xpenology system running DSM 6.2.3-25426 Update 3 comprises the following:
Case: Fractal Design Node 803 (Case HDD cages are fully occupied, very little room for addition HDDs inside the case)
M'brd: Supermicro X11SSL-CF with Single socket H4 (LGA 1151) with Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1240 v6 @ 3.7GHz
32GB Unbuffered ECC UDIMM DDR4 2400MHz; 4 DIMM slots (2 x 8GB@2667MHz; 2 x 8GB@2133MHz)@2133MHz
8 x SAS3 (12Gbps) via Broadcom® 3008 SW controller; RAID 0, 1, 10 (occupied by 8 x 16TB Seagate SATA HDDs in Synology SHR-2 config; fully populating the SAS controller (2 x Ironwolf; 6 x Exos 16). Storage is currently about 49% full.
6 x SATA3 (6Gbps) via C232; RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 (No drives on SATA ports)
Dual GbE LAN with Intel® i210-AT
I/O: 1 VGA, 2 COM, TPM header
2 SuperDOM with built-in power
5 USB 3.0 (2 rear, 2 via header(s), 1 Type A),
6 USB 2.0 (2 rear, 4 via header(s))
Expansion slots: 1 PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16),
1 PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8),
1 PCI-E 3.0 x1
Synology's SHR-2 is roughly equivalent to RAID 6 (2 disk redundancy), giving me a Storage Pool of 87.29 TB, and a formatted Volume of 83.8 TB.
I am using the system for backup of PCs (onsite) and to provide remote backup of for my son's NAS via a 6.5 Km WiFi link. Also running a Plex server on this NAS. I will need to establish a replacement for Synology Active Backup (what backup solutions from TrueNAS are a suitable/better replacement?
I am unsure about FreeNAS storage config that would best be applied to this H/W config. Any Gotchas I need be aware of?
Also looking for any suggestions on how I could add additional storage in a separately attached storage device.
Thanks, Rod.

 

[mjt5282]

Rod, your hardware spec seems like it would run TrueNAS core fine. A caveat: Plex Media Server running in a freebsd jail (container) would not have access to the GPU for transcoding. You also would not be able to run Docker. Both of those things can probably be run in the new TrueNas Scale, which is going beta in a couple of weeks. Scaling up the hardware can be done with a storage shelf and a Broadcom card that has both an external connector and an internal one (several of the systems in my hardware signature have an example card that does that. Or perhaps using another PCI-E slot and buying a Broadcom card that has 2 external connectors.
i think the maximum amount of RAM your CPU/motherboard can support is 64 GB. of course, performance with ZFS largely means putting data into the ARC (RAM), so if you need more ARC, be prepared to buy more RAM.
Don't run zpool upgrade until you are sure you are sticking with TrueNas Core or TrueNas Scale. Buy a couple more Sata-DOMs so you can swap OS fairly easily. I don't think TrueNas can read SHR-2 data, so you will have to copy it off to externals or a second networked temp server to copy it back into TrueNas. I don't know if Synology can do snapshots, learn about them and implement them so you have a way to recover accidentally deleted data.

 

[Rhubarb]

Thanks so much for your insightful advice mjt5282 - much appreciated. From reading your reply I realise that I'm lacking so much information on the ins and outs of TrueNAS; it's much too early for me to make any premature decision at this stage. I have never been a fan of Docker with my current system (I very much prefer baremetal), and the thought of jail containers is a bit intimidating too. The coming TrueNas Scale does sound more appealing.
Yes, 64 GB RAM is my M'brds limit. I'll do a bit more reading re ARC (RAM) - terminology I'm not familiar with.
I've been looking at converting from SHR-2 to RAID 6, that can go onto the backburner for now; if I do go with Scale, I'll have to save off the data, rebuild arrays, and copy data back in any case.
Yes, Synology can do snapshots - I guess I should play around with that too in the interim.
Once again. Thank you so much for your reply; it's very much appreciated.
Rod.

 

[mjt5282]

Rod, while the concepts are similar, don't confuse raid6 with raidz2 . Good luck with the testing of TrueNas Core/TrueNas Scale.
BSD jails (containers) are also very useful to learn, they isolate apps into their own jail, making them easy to install, upgrade, somewhat stateless when done right. In the Resources section on this forum, there is an excellent post that gives recipes for installing jails with popular apps to follow, including Plex Media Server.
Finally, ARC is the RAM cache that ZFS caches most frequently used data, defaults (I think) to 50% of total system RAM. Quite often my system reads from ARC (RAM) instead of doing disk I/O, which is obviously many times faster. So, the easiest optimization for a ZFS system is adding more RAM for ARC.