DIY first NAS

[ultraviolet74]

Hi all, I would like some help to build my first NAS.
I've read an absurd amount of articles and watched a lot of videos, I have pretty clear ideas but I wanted advice from experts on the subject. I am a linux system administrator, let's say not an inexperienced or newbie...
The use I should make of it is at home with a not excessive amount of data, in the order of 8TB max to start with. I would also use it as a media station, download station, container and the possibility of having one or 2 vm without great demands in terms of performance.
Anyway I was oriented on an itx motherboard with jonsbo n2 case. However, I don't know which motherboard to choose and even less which processor, I don't need ECC memory and I would still prefer double m2 for system disk and cache.
Also better truenas core with vm or truenas scale with apps and containers?
Thank you in advance

 

[Arwen]

There are a lot of Resources forum members have written, see top of forum pages for link. Unless you are familiar with ZFS, I'd suggest starting with these;

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

Welcome to TrueNAS SCALE - Beginners Intro

Since mid 2021 we have had many new users of TrueNAS wanting to try SCALE. Here are some things that are helpful for new TrueNAS SCALE users to know; SCALE is a specialized & targeted OS based on a Linux distro. However, SCALE is NOT a Linux distro, and updates are by full replacement with a...

www.truenas.com

Hard Drive Burn-in Testing

@jgreco did a nice system build/test/burn-in guide here, but I (and many others) found the details a bit lacking in the hard drive section. He mentions S.M.A.R.T. tests, but doesn't go over how to run them, or how to view the results, etc. and...

www.truenas.com

We have some suggested hardware as well as some not recommended hardware, (like Realtek network interfaces).

Sorry to saddle you with more reading, but you did not specify if you read up on ZFS and TrueNAS in particular.

You mention "double m2 for system disk and cache". Unless you know you need a L2ARC Cache device, the recommendation is to wait and see if it will help your workload. Further, maxing out your RAM is always suggested before adding a L2ARC Cache device.

Next, you mention system disk next to cache. Hoping you understand this;

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what...

www.truenas.com

As for which is "better", CORE or SCALE, that is still very debatable. Some believe that SCALE is the future. Except that CORE has more than 10 years of work behind it, and is still heavily in use by Enterprise customers. Further, it may always be likely that the FreeBSD kernel used in CORE is more stable that the Linux kernel used in SCALE. Just the way Linux is developed, (Linux kernel developers want something new, so what if it breaks backward compatibility!).