Hello Everyone,
Good to be here – finally. I have been reading the forums and guidance docs for a good while now. I think I know where I am and where I would like to be with my build of my zfs Truenas machine, and am open to the collective experience and insight. It would be my first time building a nas – up until this point I have been using Qnap and Seagate nas devices as I have never had the capacity to build one.
I am setting up a new machine – it is to replace the separate nas machines I currently have in use. It is for the purpose of my own data, and valuable data, and as a result I want to be able to rely on the setup and machine fully.
My primary, and virtually only, purpose with the machine is static storage, and backups of my other machines. The most critical of data on my Truenas pools will be backed up (via rsync I believe would be the appropriate mechanism?) to another machine (I may set up a mirrored qnap offsite for such backups). I incidentally would stream content from the Truenas server, but this is so infrequent and insignificant that I do not even calculate that into any facets here.
I will be using Truenas Core, I don’t believe that I would require more than its functionality. I will be using the latest build unless there is a reason for me not to.
I have the following hardware:
All the unused (5-year-old) SAS drives that I obtained (8tb and 6tb drives) came with 520-byte logical sector emulation, but they are 4224-byte physical sector drives. The 8tb drives I have reformatted to 4096. The 6tb drives I am struggling with, but they are already convertible to 512 bytes logical. And I am speaking to the OEM in terms of conversion to 4096, so hopefully I can get them converted too. Once done I can do a burn-in on all the drives, which I will do, including the cold spares.
The Dell Poweredge T340 motherboard cannot deal with rdimms. Thus, it is udimm memory in use (but it is ecc). My understanding is that this is reliable and safe, and that most here use udimms (but ecc). I am now able to obtain memory and am mulling the difference between adding 32 or 16 gb (for a total of respectively 40gb or 24gb memory). It is 16gb modules (the motherboard has 4 memory slots). I don’t see a reason to not use the 8gb module currently in the machine, although I prefer multiples of doubled memory. But ecc udimms are pricey, so I can get over that!
Also, the T340 has only 2 onboard (gb) network ports at present, so there is a quad port Intel network card on the way too (the exact chip I do not know yet). But I can swap from another machine too if push comes to shove. I know I will not saturate this many gbe ports, but for the sake of overnight backups it won’t hurt.
Thermals should be good seeing as it is a Dell designed server (albeit a simplistic entry level server). I don’t seem to pick up any excessive heat on either the HBA or the drives up to this point, and I will monitor before I put the machine in use.
I can add in a redundant PSU, but I believe I will do so later. The machine is brand new and is being put through its paces as to burn-in already. Further, there is double power backup availability (I run an enterprise UPS and the space that we are in run a battery backup system, which backs up my UPS – seeing as we have what is called here “loadshedding”!). I love South Africa (and no, I am not being facetious).
TLDR, please give me guidance on the hardware that I am setting up.
I would appreciate your guidance on the following, please:
a) Generally the hardware compatibility with Truenas.
b) Would the PERC H330 (now a HBA330) work appropriately here? Is there consideration to be had for the version of firmware for the HBA330 (SAS3008)? If so, which version should I flash it with? I believe I read that there were concerns with a specific version on the SAS2008 hba’s but I have not been able to pick anything up on the SAS3008s?
c) I considered mirroring the boot drive, but a short downtime would not bother me sufficiently to warrant that. Instead, I have a ssd in wait (and will automate configuration backups if possible).
e) Should I stay with 24gb of ram? Or just set it up with 40gb from the get-go? I understand that there are no absolute answers here, and that it is dictated fundamentally by my use of the server. Your experienced thoughts appreciated.
f) I understand that using 4096-byte drives and 512-byte drives in the same machine would not be a concern, so long as they are not in the same pool. Is my interpretation correct? It seems logical to me too, but what do I know.
g) I want to use the storage the way I described above so that I have more redundant and less redundant storage for different purposes – 3 drives mirrored for the most valuable data, 2 mirrored for somewhat less valuable data, etc. Does setting it up like this above make sense, or are there other suggestions for such a setup? Or am I going to lose way too much storage space versus the benefit of mirroring vs striped storage?
h) From my reading the Xeon E-2224 seem up to the job. Any thoughts appreciated.
j) Any other thoughts that may add to this build? Missed anything?
Thank you in advance, sincerely appreciate all the guidance provided on this platform.
Good to be here – finally. I have been reading the forums and guidance docs for a good while now. I think I know where I am and where I would like to be with my build of my zfs Truenas machine, and am open to the collective experience and insight. It would be my first time building a nas – up until this point I have been using Qnap and Seagate nas devices as I have never had the capacity to build one.
I am setting up a new machine – it is to replace the separate nas machines I currently have in use. It is for the purpose of my own data, and valuable data, and as a result I want to be able to rely on the setup and machine fully.
My primary, and virtually only, purpose with the machine is static storage, and backups of my other machines. The most critical of data on my Truenas pools will be backed up (via rsync I believe would be the appropriate mechanism?) to another machine (I may set up a mirrored qnap offsite for such backups). I incidentally would stream content from the Truenas server, but this is so infrequent and insignificant that I do not even calculate that into any facets here.
I will be using Truenas Core, I don’t believe that I would require more than its functionality. I will be using the latest build unless there is a reason for me not to.
I have the following hardware:
Dell T340 (new machine) | ||
Xeon E-2224 3.4GHz, 8M c ache, 4C/4T | ||
Other than the Dell code for the motherboard I cannot find any details | DK9CR or R171RR1 or 17086-1 | one of these should be the code |
8gb Udimm ECC memory (this post to address this in tldr) | ||
PERC H330 (backplane on the machine chassis for 8 hotswap hdd) – flashed to a HBA | ||
PERC H200 card to connect the cache drive (will crossflash to HBA) | ||
3 x 8tb SAS drives (Mirrored 3 way) | HGST -- HUH728080AL5204 | 8tb total in storage (24tb raw) |
4 x 6tb SAS drives (Mirrored 2 way each set) | Seagate -- ST6000NM0034 | 12tb storage (24tb raw) |
1 x 2tb SAS drive | Seagate – ST2000NM013A | 2tb storage (2tb raw) |
2 x 8tb drives as cold spares | HGST -- HUH728080AL5204 | |
1 x 120gb enterprise sata ssd (boot drive) | WD 120gb Ultrastar DC SA210 | |
1 x 200gb enterprise sas2 (6gb/s) ssd (cache) | Sandisk LB206M |
All the unused (5-year-old) SAS drives that I obtained (8tb and 6tb drives) came with 520-byte logical sector emulation, but they are 4224-byte physical sector drives. The 8tb drives I have reformatted to 4096. The 6tb drives I am struggling with, but they are already convertible to 512 bytes logical. And I am speaking to the OEM in terms of conversion to 4096, so hopefully I can get them converted too. Once done I can do a burn-in on all the drives, which I will do, including the cold spares.
The Dell Poweredge T340 motherboard cannot deal with rdimms. Thus, it is udimm memory in use (but it is ecc). My understanding is that this is reliable and safe, and that most here use udimms (but ecc). I am now able to obtain memory and am mulling the difference between adding 32 or 16 gb (for a total of respectively 40gb or 24gb memory). It is 16gb modules (the motherboard has 4 memory slots). I don’t see a reason to not use the 8gb module currently in the machine, although I prefer multiples of doubled memory. But ecc udimms are pricey, so I can get over that!
Also, the T340 has only 2 onboard (gb) network ports at present, so there is a quad port Intel network card on the way too (the exact chip I do not know yet). But I can swap from another machine too if push comes to shove. I know I will not saturate this many gbe ports, but for the sake of overnight backups it won’t hurt.
Thermals should be good seeing as it is a Dell designed server (albeit a simplistic entry level server). I don’t seem to pick up any excessive heat on either the HBA or the drives up to this point, and I will monitor before I put the machine in use.
I can add in a redundant PSU, but I believe I will do so later. The machine is brand new and is being put through its paces as to burn-in already. Further, there is double power backup availability (I run an enterprise UPS and the space that we are in run a battery backup system, which backs up my UPS – seeing as we have what is called here “loadshedding”!). I love South Africa (and no, I am not being facetious).
TLDR, please give me guidance on the hardware that I am setting up.
I would appreciate your guidance on the following, please:
a) Generally the hardware compatibility with Truenas.
b) Would the PERC H330 (now a HBA330) work appropriately here? Is there consideration to be had for the version of firmware for the HBA330 (SAS3008)? If so, which version should I flash it with? I believe I read that there were concerns with a specific version on the SAS2008 hba’s but I have not been able to pick anything up on the SAS3008s?
c) I considered mirroring the boot drive, but a short downtime would not bother me sufficiently to warrant that. Instead, I have a ssd in wait (and will automate configuration backups if possible).
e) Should I stay with 24gb of ram? Or just set it up with 40gb from the get-go? I understand that there are no absolute answers here, and that it is dictated fundamentally by my use of the server. Your experienced thoughts appreciated.
f) I understand that using 4096-byte drives and 512-byte drives in the same machine would not be a concern, so long as they are not in the same pool. Is my interpretation correct? It seems logical to me too, but what do I know.
g) I want to use the storage the way I described above so that I have more redundant and less redundant storage for different purposes – 3 drives mirrored for the most valuable data, 2 mirrored for somewhat less valuable data, etc. Does setting it up like this above make sense, or are there other suggestions for such a setup? Or am I going to lose way too much storage space versus the benefit of mirroring vs striped storage?
h) From my reading the Xeon E-2224 seem up to the job. Any thoughts appreciated.
j) Any other thoughts that may add to this build? Missed anything?
Thank you in advance, sincerely appreciate all the guidance provided on this platform.