DIY TruNAS Scale for $1000 - Any recommendations?

[TrueNaut]

I've long wanted to transition from my current QNAP to a NAS system using TrueNAS Scale. With a budget of $1000-$1200 (excluding HDD costs), I plan to run Portainer with 10-15 containers and require around 20TB storage for media, photos, and documents. Can you recommend an optimal setup within this budget?

 

[Etorix]

The hardware recommendation list is your friend:

Hardware Recommendations Guide

This is the latest edition of the FreeNAS Community hardware recommendations guide. The current major version is R2, dated January 2021, with the last minor update on 2021-01-24. The format has moved away from the forum post form factor, to...

www.truenas.com

Yes, it's old but it still current and newer hardware (e.g. Alder/Raptor Lake) is not recommended.

Your budget looks ample enough, so you need to narrow down on your requirements.
How many cores, CPU power and RAM for all these containers?
Socketed CPU, or would an embedded server board do?
Any requirement for network speed?
What geometry for the pool, and therefore how many drives? (For "media, photos, and documents", raidz2 would seem adequate.)
Where will the containers live?
Then you can look for a suitable (server) motherboard with enough ports and slots.

 

[TrueNaut]

Thanks Etorix for your response! I would go over the guide

Here are my responses to your questions:

How many cores, CPU power, and RAM for all these containers?

• For running my 10-15 containers, I am thinking a 8 or 16 core CPU should be good enough. As for RAM, I would like to start with 32GB RAM with a potential to upgrade to 64GB.

Socketed CPU, or would an embedded server board do?

• I prefer a socketed CPU as it would offer more flexibility for future upgrades. However, if the embedded server board meets my current requirements and has a good reputation for reliability, I'd consider it to save on costs.

Any requirement for network speed?

• Gigabit Ethernet should suffice for my needs. However, if there's a setup that supports 10GbE comes within the budget, I'd be interested, considering future-proofing.

What geometry for the pool, and therefore how many drives?

• I'm leaning towards a raidz2 setup for redundancy. Considering my 20TB storage requirement, I'd be looking at using 4TB drives, so I'd need a minimum of 7 drives (5 active + 2 parity) to achieve this. If there's a recommendation for better efficiency or performance, I'm open to suggestions. Plus having 7 drives can give me an opportunity for upgrades if needed.

Where will the containers live?

• I'd prefer the containers to reside on an SSD for faster read/write operations. This would be separate from the main storage pool, ensuring smoother container operations.

I'd appreciate recommendations on motherboards and other options that could meet the above specifications and are known for their reliability and longevity. If you've recently built a similar setup, could you please share what influenced your decisions?

 

[danb35]

Do you have a particular form factor in mind? And do you really want/need to build this yourself, or would something pre-built be OK if it were within budget?

Edit: and why are you planning on using such small disks? Larger disks are much better in terms of $/TB.

 

[Etorix]

Frankly I'm flabbergasted that 4 TB HDDs are still to be found new on the market. These should have gone the way of 5.25" floppies by now…
4-5 much larger drives in raidz2 will serve you better—and if you end up with more than 20 TB while staying within budget, it's all the better.

I'd appreciate recommendations on motherboards and other options that could meet the above specifications and are known for their reliability and longevity. If you've recently built a similar setup, could you please share what influenced your decisions?

The standard answer to that are server boards from Supermicro (largest range), AsRockRack (honorable runner-up), or server boards from Gigabyte/Asus/whatever if you can find them at retail.
For 8-16 cores, that would be a C2x6 board, typically in micro-ATX size and with 8 SATA ports, and a matching Xeon E-2000. Price and availability allowing…
Embedded options would be Atom C3000 (expensive new, and possibly underwhelming for your containers at 8 cores/threads for a C3758), Xeon-D (D-1500 is old, but available second-hand) or embedded EPYC (may go over budget). Minus: Clocked at about 2 GHz (enough?). Plus: Takes RDIMM for lots of cheap yummy RAM. Can be as small as mini-ITX for a small but capable build.
Alternatively, it may be worth looking at 1st/2nd generation Xeon Scalable (second-hand Silver/Gold reportedly go for cheap now) with a X11SPM board.
And, of course, a complete refurbished system may come cheaper than building from refurbished parts.

My NAS are strictly for storage (no jail/VM) and were build for low power, so may not match your requirements (though the 8C/16T D-1541 could make it for you).

 

[danb35]

And, of course, a complete refurbished system may come cheaper than building from refurbished parts.

Kind of my thought. A Dell PowerEdge T430 looks like it would fit the bill nicely--up to 8 3.5" drive bays, plenty of cores, plenty of RAM, in what used to be called a mid-tower chassis. Still getting firmware updates, decent (albeit kind of slow) remote management, plenty of PCIe slots for expansion if needed, redundant PSUs, etc. All decent server-grade hardware, even if not the latest generation--but still recent enough to support PCIe bifurcation. It's not going to be super low-power--2x Xeon E5s will do that--but plenty of capacity to do what OP needs, and within budget. US$453 here, including a pair of E5-2620s and 32GB of RAM--no drives, but drive trays for all eight bays:

Dell PowerEdge T430 Tower Server

www.theserverstore.com

I'd probably bump up both the CPUs and the RAM, but it's a starting point.

Edit: Really, you could get this server and a pair of Exos 20 TB disks for under $1200--a little over the stated budget, yes, but that includes the storage. And there's still room for six more disks in the server. Mirrors aren't the most space-efficient way to set up storage, but they do make expansion easier.

 

[TrueNaut]

Kind of my thought. A Dell PowerEdge T430 looks like it would fit the bill nicely--up to 8 3.5" drive bays, plenty of cores, plenty of RAM, in what used to be called a mid-tower chassis. Still getting firmware updates, decent (albeit kind of slow) remote management, plenty of PCIe slots for expansion if needed, redundant PSUs, etc. All decent server-grade hardware, even if not the latest generation--but still recent enough to support PCIe bifurcation. It's not going to be super low-power--2x Xeon E5s will do that--but plenty of capacity to do what OP needs, and within budget. US$453 here, including a pair of E5-2620s and 32GB of RAM--no drives, but drive trays for all eight bays:

Dell PowerEdge T430 Tower Server

www.theserverstore.com

I'd probably bump up both the CPUs and the RAM, but it's a starting point.

Edit: Really, you could get this server and a pair of Exos 20 TB disks for under $1200--a little over the stated budget, yes, but that includes the storage. And there's still room for six more disks in the server. Mirrors aren't the most space-efficient way to set up storage, but they do make expansion easier.

Thank you, this will work for me!

 

[danb35]

This playlist is about the R430, not the T430, but most of it should apply:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbNp7AIu8VYy_qQNVvJXI6oGQsZG384lQ

 

[oguruma]

Kind of my thought. A Dell PowerEdge T430 looks like it would fit the bill nicely--up to 8 3.5" drive bays, plenty of cores, plenty of RAM, in what used to be called a mid-tower chassis.

I'll throw in that I once bought a Dell Poweredge, and it had what looked like a standard ATX PSU, but in fact was proprietary. So, when it blew after a few years, I was SOL until I could get a new one or just build a new box (which is what I did).

This was a handful of years ago, so I don't know if that's the case with the newer ones or not, but if it were me, I'd opt for something with a standard ATX power supply (if you're getting a tower server that will fit one) so that way I can easily replace it if it fails, since your PSU is one of those items that is more likely to fail before the hardware is obsolete.

 

[danb35]

It's true this doesn't have a standard ATX PSU--but the PSUs are redundant (and hot-swappable), so if one dies, it will continue to run on the other until you replace it. If you're concerned about it, a spare is $25 or less. IMO, redundant and hot-swappable is better than "standard"--it'd be nice to have both, but I don't believe that's possible.

I'm not aware of anything in the "prebuilt server" market that uses ATX PSUs, with the possible exception of the very bottom of the range. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist (as I'm not on top of all the ins and outs of that market), but I haven't seen it.

 

[wfmarcum]

I was looking at the T430, after finding this post. It says the internal storage capacity is 64TB on most resources. Is this if you use the hardware raid controller only?

I was looking into purchasing one, but with the availability of inexpensive 20 TB hard drives, I think I would blow by that pretty quick with 8 hard drives, even if I was fully mirrored. Not being familiar enough with server hardware, I don't understand where that limitation would be from.

 

[wdp]

At $1000 you could probably build out an AM4 box on an asrock rack board.

 

[danb35]

It says the internal storage capacity is 64TB on most resources. Is this if you use the hardware raid controller only?

It may be a limitation of the internal RAID controller, or it may just have to do with the drive sizes readily available when it was released. There isn't going to be any limitation on the system itself.

 

[NugentS]

Thank you, this will work for me!

Make sure that if you do buy this - you get the correct disk controller. The 330 is I believe the corect one. Although what the difference is between the first and second option - I have no idea. Based on my limited knowledge - the second option would probably be correct

 

[danb35]

Yes, good point. You'd want the HBA330 controller, not any of the RAID controllers.

 

[wfmarcum]

It may be a limitation of the internal RAID controller, or it may just have to do with the drive sizes readily available when it was released. There isn't going to be any limitation on the system itself.

Thanks for replying, this is what I assumed.

Yes, good point. You'd want the HBA330 controller, not any of the RAID controllers.

Make sure that if you do buy this - you get the correct disk controller. The 330 is I believe the corect one. Although what the difference is between the first and second option - I have no idea. Based on my limited knowledge - the second option would probably be correct

Thanks for that, that will probably save a lot of headaches.