Dell T340 8-10 x 8TB drives

[Julianh]

Hi all,

A bit of a weird one, I'm not sure if TruNas is over the top.

I have 60TB of media, accessed by an dedicated physical Emby server running on Ubuntu. My existing solution is multiple servers offering SMB shares. I'm experiencing disk performace bottlenecks, but it doesn't suprise me as it just a set of JBOD arrays per server, so I'm looking at a Dell T340 with 8x 8TB disks in the bays, and using the 3 bays above (DVD etc) for expansion.

I'll use a PCI-e card and NVME to boot from.

I have a totally seperate solution for backing up, it runs like a dog, but it works fine, so I don't need any resiliance in my main storage solution. So I was thinking about a raid 0 array for speed. If it fails, I can live with the downtime, and the 4 days it takes to copy the data back !

The Emby server has about 5-10 simultaneous users.

I've read the note about flashing the controller here https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/dell-t340-h330-flashing.92183/ so that's one step I need to do.

I've setup TrueNas for my hoome business San, and am very impressed with it, but I'm concerned about the memory I would need for this, as I read it's 1GB per TB, so I'm looking a 64 GB, very expensive.

I was also thinking of adding a 10 GB network card to both the EMby and TruNas boxes and simply cabling them directly.

What guidance could you offer me.

Thanks and have a giid day as they say

Julian

 

[Samuel Tai]

The 1GB RAM/1TB storage rule of thumb is just that, a rule of thumb. For a better recommendation, we'd need to know your specific use cases.

• Any iSCSI? This tends to require a lot more RAM
• Deduplication (typically in an iSCSI situation serving multiple VMs based on the same OS, e.g., Windows virtual desktops)? Way, way, more RAM.
• VMs/jails on board? VMs need dedicated RAM, as TrueNAS doesn't implement the VirtIO memory balloon driver, so more RAM in this case

If you're only serving SMB/NFS, and the share access is intermittent, you might be able to get away with 32 GB.

 

[Julianh]

Hi Samuel,

Thank you for replying so quickly.

The box is just a SMB share, nothing else. no iSCSI, no Deduplication, no VMs etc. All I want it to do is serve 2 SMB shares.

Thanks

Julian

 

[Samuel Tai]

How many concurrent SMB sessions?

 

[Julianh]

Hi Samuel,
There will jus be the Emby server permanently and a nvidea shield at evenings.

Thanks

 

[Julianh]

2 Smb sessions

 

[Samuel Tai]

For such minimal SMB usage, you could probably get away with the minimum recommended of 16 GB, but 24 GB or more would be better, and would provide more RAM for ARC caching.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Why did you decide to go for TrueNAS, if you are not concerned about data safety?

 

[Julianh]

Hi Chris,

I like TrueNas, and find it very reliable, that's all.

 

[Julianh]

This is What I've just been quoted, instead of the t340, which was too expensive.

Dell PowerEdge R530 Rack Chassis 8bay x 3.5in
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 CPU Processor 10 Core 2.20GHZ 25MB L3 Cache 85W SR2R7
64GB RAM ( 4 x 16GB PC4-2133P RDIMMS )
Dell Perc H730 1GB Mini Mono Raid Controller
8 x Dell 13th Gen Caddies
IDRAC8 Enterprise License
1 x Dell 750W PSU

Will it do the job?

Thanks

 

[Samuel Tai]

Try to get a non-RAID HBA; otherwise, you'll have problems with the H730.

 

[HoneyBadger]

2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 CPU Processor 10 Core 2.20GHZ 25MB L3 Cache 85W SR2R7

For just serving a pair of SMB sessions this will be an enormous amount of overkill. Single processor is more than enough.

Dell Perc H730 1GB Mini Mono Raid Controller

Will be a problem as @Samuel Tai pointed out - there is no way to flash this to an HBA either. Look for the H330 or HBA330 if you need to go this route.

With all of that said, you can get a much, much cheaper solution that this; you don't need a v4 Xeon and gobs of RAM just to serve home media (unless that Emby server is going to be serving a dozen clients remotely) - something like a single-socket E3 Xeon is likely more than enough here.

 

[ChrisRJ]

For just serving a pair of SMB sessions this will be an enormous amount of overkill. Single processor is more than enough.

For comparison: I run a single E5-1620 (v1) with 4 cores and that is still plenty.