First Time TrueNAS build

[Diceman38087]

I'm moving from a recently deceased QNAP TS-453Pro, and looking at building a TrueNAS system. It will be used mostly for general storage, PLEX, and maybe playing around with some iSCSI VMs. Was looking at building a system, but with the availability of some of the cases I like, i started looking at used servers and a local company has Dell R720XD 12x3.5 drives for $425.

Base build is 2xhexacore e5-2520 2GHZ, 16GB, PERCh310, Broadcom 5720 Quad Gbe....

Would this be a decent system to look at?

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

2GHz will be very limiting for performance.

16GB is far short of the 64GB we usually recommend as a starting point for block storage. Expect extremely poor performance.

The Broadcom ethernets are garbage and often don't work well. Chelsio and Intel are the two commonly recommended.

See

The path to success for block storage

It seems like I haven't written a sticky for awhile, but just in the last week I've had to cover this topic several times. ZFS does two different things very well. One is storage of large sequentially-written files, such as archives, logs, or data files, where the file does not have the middle...

www.truenas.com

 

[Diceman38087]

I'll increase the memory. As to the processor, generally speed over # cores? Can do dual quad core 3.3 fairly cheap.

 

[Samuel Tai]

It depends on your use case. For general storage (SMB shares) and Plex, my home system runs 16 GB RAM and a Xeon e3-1230L v3 1.8 GHz CPU, and I'm very happy with the performance, even CPU-based transcoding. I run a single very lightweight VM over iSCSI, and don't have any complaints.

 

[rvassar]

I can't find a Xeon E5-2520. There's a Sandy Bridge-EN E5-2420 6 cores @1.9Ghz. That's pretty slow, but individual cores can speed up to 2.5 Ghz "Turbo" mode, limited by the 95 watt TDP limit. But consider, the "2" in R720xd stands for 12th generation, which makes this a circa 2012 - roughly 10 year old server. Parts chain is going to be thin, and taper to "relic / antique" status in the next couple years. The Sandy Bridge-EN Xeon's were plentiful, but kind of power hungry and not very fast. If I had cheap electricity I'd give it some consideration, but the fan noise from the rackmount chassis would be intolerable in a home environment. I'll suggest maybe look for a T630 or T640 with a 3.5" BP cage. Better CPU selection and likely much quieter.

 

[NugentS]

I'll increase the memory. As to the processor, generally speed over # cores? Can do dual quad core 3.3 fairly cheap.

Dual Quad@3.3 is good.

 

[Diceman38087]

I've been looking and thinking, and have come across Supermicro X11SSH-F. Thinking of pairing it with a Xeon E3-1245v5 in a node 804 case that i have purchased along with 4x4tb wd red and 4x10tb n300 Toshiba drives.... thoughts on that?

 

[demon]

I've been looking and thinking, and have come across Supermicro X11SSH-F. Thinking of pairing it with a Xeon E3-1245v5 in a node 804 case that i have purchased along with 4x4tb wd red and 4x10tb n300 Toshiba drives.... thoughts on that?

Other than the Toshiba drives, which I'm not familiar with, all the rest seems like a solid combination.