First home build for photos, video, and music production

[lynchseattle]

Hi all,

I'm planning my first TrueNAS server and I really wanted to just double check that I'm not missing anything major in my assumptions and research.

Goal: The server is a home build and will be used for three primary purposes:

1. Photos. After a photo outing, sync my Lightroom catalogs on a thunderbolt drive I take with me on trips to a primary Lightroom catalog and photo repository where I may finish edits (and of course have my photos safely backed up).
2. Videos. Light video production archival. I do photos much more, but there are some. I'd love to be able to edit from the server directly in Premiere Pro/After Effects.
3. Music Production. I make music using Ableton with a multitrack recording setup. So this would be storing all of my music production samples, songs, and assets. The important part of this one is I occasionally multitrack write high res audio and then read back many tracks simultaneously.

Components: Here is what I am planning as of right now:

• Motherboard: AsRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T mATX (w/2x Intel X550-AT2 10Gbe which I will be using for network)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5700X
• RAM: 2x 32GB Kingston Server Premier 3200MHz DDR4 ECC DIMM
• Boot Drive: Samsung 980 PRO SSD 500GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2
• Storage: 8x 16TB Seagate IronWolf
• Power Supply: Corsair RM850x 850W
• Case: Fractal Design Node 804

Questions/Assumptions:

1. RAIDZ2 Drive Configuration: I was thinking RAIDZ2 would give most comfort and reliability while also performing well on speed.
2. Core vs Scale: I am planning to run TrueNAS Core. I don't really have any use cases for apps/VMs. I do have a Homebridge server for my house for automation, but I'm fine running that on a separate machine. I also am primarily focused on file speeds for the above uses cases and it seems Scale might inadvertantly interfere with my recording/reading. Maybe I'm incorrect on this.
3. Boot Drive: Should I get a second Samsung for backup? Is this easy to do later or should I do from the start?
4. Cache: Am I missing something around cache here given my use cases?
5. Anything else missing?

Thanks all!

 

[artlessknave]

I was thinking RAIDZ2 would give most comfort and reliability while also performing well on speed.

raidz2 sacrifices speed for that "comfort". you will not really be doing live video editing from it. you will get approx the performace of the slowest disk in the pool. you will get high streaming speeds, but that will not apply to live video editing, and will not apply if the pool is serving basically more than 1 request, as it will have the IOPS of 1 HDD at best.

also, as raid(z) is not a backup, this is rather misdirected comfort.

Cache: Am I missing something around cache here given my use cases?

nope. ZFS "Cache" is constructed differently than most "Cache" implementations and there are neverending questions about how to use it in ways that are invalid for zfs. zfs cache is the ARC in RAM. all read/write goes though the ARC.
you dont have enough RAM to consider l2arc (read cache), and there IS no disk write cache. SLOG (often confused with write cache) will do nothing for you as its not a cache.

Boot Drive: Samsung 980 PRO SSD 500GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2

utter overkill. truenas will use maybe 20GB of that 500GB disk, and maybe 1% of the speed of NVME a few times a day at the most (boot up, shutdown, logs, setting changes). get a PCIe HBA, 2 120GB SSDs, tape them to the side of the chassis, and use your NVME for video editing.

the board you have chosen has a poor pcie layout. if that pciex1 was at least open ended, you could put an HBA or SSD there just for boot.
3 pciex8 would have been far more useful, even GPUs barely use the speed of x16.