First Home NAS Build - A bit indecisive right now and could use some help

[YaBoiHuni]

Hey folks,
Looking at a beginners home NAS solution for home media using Jellyfin, Backups of 2 Mac Laptops and 2 PC's. I have about 5TB of data right now and would like to have breathing room for future expansion as I obtain more data whilst building the home media library.

I have been strongly considering the following:
Synology DS923+/DS920+ (Diskless) - $600+/-

QNAP TS-464-8G (Diskless) - $600 +/-

DIY TrueNAS Scale (Diskless) - $600 +/-
PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 3.9 GHz 6-Core Processor ($128.97 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock B550M Steel Legend Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($154.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($84.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Patriot P300 256 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($19.98 @ Amazon)
Case: Fractal Design Node 804 MicroATX Mid Tower Case ($142.07 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: MSI MPG A650GF 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($109.99 @ Amazon)
Custom: Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache for RAID Network Attached Storage – Frustration Free Packaging (ST8000VN004) (ST8000VNZ04/N004) ($159.99 @ Amazon)
Custom: Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache for RAID Network Attached Storage – Frustration Free Packaging (ST8000VN004) (ST8000VNZ04/N004) ($159.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $960.97 (With Disks)

I'm looking for advice about my build choice and if the community has any recommendations towards certain components vs the ones I have selected or if I would be better off with a prebuilt SOHO unit.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Cheers

 

[Davvo]

Welcome!

Before we start delving, please read the following resources in order to gain a basic understanding of ZFS and TrueNAS.

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

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

Then the following regarding hardware:

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

In the last year or two, we've had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use port multipliers, and use cheap SATA controllers only after extensive research. SATA controllers and SATA...

www.truenas.com

Is my Realtek ethernet really that bad?

One of the longest running issues faced here in the forums may be people who come to these forums, wanting to recycle an old PC into a NAS. In general, this is a bad idea because typical PC hardware isn't optimized towards the task. However...

www.truenas.com

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

You can save money buying used server-grade hardware (that's also the kind of hardware TrueNAS prefers), you only want to buy a new PSU and new drives.
Please read the following resources for a few tips regarding the used market:

Hardware Buying Guide - some tips for not getting ripped off

I've been giving this information out piecemeal for years, and should maybe have it summarized in one place. There's been a lot of people who are wary of secondary market sources for hardware, such as eBay, due to bad experiences with other...

www.truenas.com

Fake server cards

Some time ago, forum frequenter @artlessknave kindly sent me a pair of LSI HBA cards that had failed to work out in a FreeNAS build. Having suspected that these were fakes, I asked for them to be shipped here for comparison. However, COVID...

www.truenas.com

Do note that iX Systems sells its own hardware and it might be appealing to you, take a look.

About your picks:
- Going with a non-pro Ryzen G CPU means you won't be able to use ECC RAM, which is bad.
- Your motherboard of choice uses a 2.5Gbps Realtek NIC, which is horrible.
- You want a pair of SSDs to mirror in a separate pool for your apps and VMs.
- Do note that your drives are 7200 RPM, which means that they get hotter and noisier than 5900 RPM ones; consider lower RPM alternatives if existing.
- You don't want anything than can't have at least 16GB of RAM; seriously consider ECC.
- I would suggest a more reliable PSU manufacturer.

Beyond the resources I linked you can look for more in my signature or directly in the resource section of the forum.

 

[kd4xr]

I'm also new to TrueNAS and have been experimenting with TN Core and Scale. I'm still not sure the server I bought is going to work well but here's an example of what you can get on the used market. For $100.00

My server - Dell PowerEdge T410 Server (diskless) with 2 Xeon CPU, 32GB RAM, dual 1GB NIC's, dual 580w PSU, 6 SATA ports, and an H700 SAS card. The chassis has room for 8 drives. The H700 is hardware RAID and therefore not useful for ZFS.

I plan to install 4x4TB in RaidZ1 which should result in 12TB total capacity and 9.6TB useful (80%) ZFS capacity.

Jerry

 

[Davvo]

I plan to install 4x4TB in RaidZ1

As long as you understand what using RAIDZ1 implies and are fine with the risks you are good to go.
Edit: RAID5 is the hardware raid equivalent of RAIDZ1

 

[kd4xr]

As long as you understand what using RAIDZ1 implies and are fine with the risks you are good to go.
Edit: RAID5 is the hardware raid equivalent of RAIDZ1

I have a 4x4TB constraint. What configuration do you recommend for home photos, videos, TimeMachine and PC backups. Maybe 2 mirror vDev's??

 

[danb35]

I don't fully endorse this piece or its conclusions, but he makes some good points:

ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ. – JRS Systems: the blog

 

[danb35]

But to OP's question, if you want to build a server, you'd be better off with server gear. The main vendors are going to be Lenovo, Dell, and HPE, and often they have small servers at quite reasonable prices with a decent assortment of bells and whistles, and they do server-y things like remote management and supporting ECC RAM, both of which are generally considered a Good Thing™ for TrueNAS (whether CORE or SCALE).

If that blows your budget, look at used hardware. I'm a fan of the HPE Microservers; a Gen8 unit with a Xeon can be had used under US$400 shipped from eBay, and it gives you four bays for spinners, an internal USB port for a boot device (a small m.2 SSD on a USB adapter works well), remote management (another $10-15 for a license key to fully enable that), ECC support, decent onboard NICs, and generally all you'd need for a reasonable home NAS. That's what I used to build my parents' NAS. It's fairly compact, quiet, and it doesn't burn too many watts.

 

[Davvo]

I have a 4x4TB constraint. What configuration do you recommend for home photos, videos, TimeMachine and PC backups. Maybe 2 mirror vDev's??

RAIDZ1 is not bad per se and is still valid for 4 disks if you care about them and frequently monitor them (which proper smart tests scheduling plus the multi_report script do) and if you buy the disks from different vendors you have a good chance of getting different batches, which lowers the chance of multiple failures; it's the highest risk option.
RAIDZ2 in this case can bring you more peace of mind since you can lose up to 2 disk/sectors and still have a working pool.
2x2-way mirrors in this case offer you less resiliency compared to RAIDZ2 since they can only withstand a single failure per vdev (which means that 2 failures in the same vdev result in a pool loss), and as such suffer from the same trouble of RAIDZ1; they have the advantage of being way more flexible (can be expanded and reduced) and having better read performances (but worse write).

Show : Graph

If you expect to expand your system in the next 5-6 years (and I don't mean just the disk sizes but also disk numbers, hardware upgrade or different use) I would say go for the mirrors; otherwise go RAIDZ2 or 1 depending on your storage needs, time (dedicated to check and maintain the system) and money (you could buy a new disk in 2 years and swap with one of the original ones to both reduce the risk and have a cold spare at hand) availability as well as willingness to restore from backups.

Whatever you choose, you want to have a backup: no parity will protect from disasters or your own stupidity.

 

[danb35]

as such suffer from the same trouble of RAIDZ1;

Kind of, but to a lesser degree:

• there's only one other disk in the vdev, so whatever probability you assume for the failure of any given disk, the risk of fatal disk failure while resilvering (or even waiting for a replacement) is half (or less) that of a RAIDZ1 vdev
• Since the resilver is a straight data copy from the good disk to the new one, it's going to be faster than with a RAIDZn vdev, thus reducing the window for a fatal disk failure to occur.

I don't buy the "resilver is so stressful" argument, but still, the faster it's finished, the sooner redundancy is restored.

 

[Davvo]

• there's only one other disk in the vdev, so whatever probability you assume for the failure of any given disk, the risk of fatal disk failure while resilvering (or even waiting for a replacement) is half (or less) that of a RAIDZ1 vdev

I agree, I was referring in comparison with 4 disks in RAIDZ2 (basically meant they are inferior to RAIDZ2 since they don't have the ability to withstand 2 faults in the same vdev).

• Since the resilver is a straight data copy from the good disk to the new one, it's going to be faster than with a RAIDZn vdev, thus reducing the window for a fatal disk failure to occur.

True, but imho better having more parity than less resilver time for this number and size of drives.

 

[danb35]

I agree, I was referring in comparison with 4 disks in RAIDZ2 (basically meant they are inferior to RAIDZ2 since they don't have the ability to withstand 2 faults in the same vdev).

Right. 2x mirrors is safer than 4-way RAIDZ1 (though with less capacity), not so much so as RAIDZ2. Whether the expandability and speed of resilver outweigh this is an individual decision. Like I said, I don't really agree with that article's conclusions (particularly when presented as an absolute), but the points are nonetheless valid.