First TrueNAS Build: Price/Scalability Focused, Have I Overlooked Anything??

Joined
Nov 28, 2020
Messages
3
Hi,

I'm hoping for some knowledgeable eyes to look over the hardware I have picked out list about building a TrueNAS box, my use case is:
  1. NAS for documents, music, videos etc.
  2. Media Server (Jellyfin)
  3. Virtualisation/Homelab
And my key criteria are:
  1. Cost
  2. Scalability
  3. Space
I've had a look at the plethora of guides on the forum and around the net for TrueNAS, and taking that information onboard, along with UK availability and pricing:

Initial Build:
PartProductWatt Estimate (W)Price (GBP)
CaseAzza Hurrican 200000
CPU2 x E5-2600 Quad/Hex Cores?16020
MotherboardSuperMicro X9DR3-LN4F+25
150
Memory4 x 16GB ECC RDIMM DDR324120
StorageAlready have:
1x Toshiba N300 8TB
1x WD My Book 10TB

Going to add drives to create 2 pools:
Pool 1: (Bulk Storage, mainly videos)
1x RAID Z1 vDev: 3x 10TB
Pool 2: (Block Storage for VM's)
1x Mirror vDev: 2x 8TB
165450
Boot Drive16GB SuperMicro Sata DoM136
HBABuilt in to MoBo100
GPU?Possibly wanted for transcoding (Jellyfin)25?50?
FansBunch of fans2050
PSU850W-850100
Total430976
  • Case - I already have this, and it has 6 3.5" hot swap bays in the front, so despite the looks makes a good chassis for storage, and the yuge fans in the side panel are great for airflow around the PCI-e cards.
  • CPU's - Unsure of the exact model, the quad/hex cores are almost being given away, leaves plenty of room to scale to the 8/10/12 cores when I need more horsepower. Leaning towards the v2 Ivy Bridge CPU's as there's a fair bit of power saving at idle and load, they don't appear to be more expensive either.
  • Mobo - The SuperMicro X9 series boards seem to be where the value spot is at the moment in the UK, wouldn't have thought to look at dual socket boards were it not for the hardware guide, they are priced lower than the single sockets! This particular model has a quad NIC, Onboard SAS controller
  • RAM - Little unsure about the best way to jump on this, can go 4x16GB or 8x8GB for quad channel, there doesn't appear to be much in it price wise, thought that 4x16GB is a little easier to add to bump up the capacity.
  • Storage - Already have the 2 mentioned, looking to turn them into mirrors/Z1 with identical drives. Was considering more drives at lower capacity but the sweet spot for pricing appears to be up at 8-10TB at the moment.
  • Boot - I was going to use mirrored USB drives, but the guide now counsels against this. Went with this since the motherboardf supports it, same price as devoting a cheap SSD to it anyway, and far more convienient.
  • PSU - Used the guide to size up, obviously oversized for the initial build but I want to have the power there when I am adding more drives/RAM/thirstier CPU's.
I am in the UK so bear that in mind for parts availability and pricing, it's definitely slimmer pickings. I have mainly looked at ebay/Amazon, if you know any other good places for cheap server hardware in the UK please let me know!

Below is a table of the potential upgrades:
PartProductWatt Estimate (W)Price (GBP)
CaseAzza Hurrican 200000
CPU2 x E5-2600 8/10/12 Cores?260180
Memory16 x 16GB ECC RDIMM DDR396???
StoragePool 1: (Bulk Storage, mainly videos)
2x RAID Z1 vDev: 3x ?TB

Pool 2: (Block Storage for VM's)
3x Mirror vDev: 2x ?TB

Pool 3: (Faster VM Storage)
?x ?TB Sata SSD's
350???
Extra Drive Bays3x 5.25" to 5x 3.5" Hot Swap bay5?100
HBAAdditional PCI-e one for extra drives1040
Networking10G NIC1040
GPU?Possibly wanted for transcoding (Jellyfin)25?50?
PSU850W?-850100
Total780

So, are there any:
  • Things I have overlooked?
  • Is the pricing reasonable or are there better deals out there?
  • Any other suggestions?
Thanks for reading!

P.S. Are the miners back again, now that I look all the high wattage PSU's seem to be out of stock?!
 

ThreeDee

Guru
Joined
Jun 13, 2013
Messages
698
I'd go with the cheap SSD's for booting .. even if you went with a USB to SATA adapter to run them

 
Joined
Jul 2, 2019
Messages
648
Joined
Nov 28, 2020
Messages
3
I'd go with the cheap SSD's for booting .. even if you went with a USB to SATA adapter to run them
You can get a couple of Kingston A400 120 GB SSDs for about US$20.

Thanks guys,

In the UK these are £18.50 ($25) a pop, plus the USB adapters are £8 ($11) each. Coming in at £49 ($72), I was thinking the SATA DoM was a better option, as it also saves on having drives dangling out the back.

Those Kingston drives have a bit of a rep, I've witnessed 3/5 die, are there any more reliable drives that are still cheap?
 

ChrisRJ

Wizard
Joined
Oct 23, 2020
Messages
1,909
I don't follow on the USB adapter topic. This board has 14 SATA ports and they don't seem to be used up. Or did I misunderstand something?

The two CPUs are usually overkill for pure NAS use, unless there is something like Plex in the game. I have a single-socket X9SRi-F with a 4core E5 1620 (3.6 GHz) and have never seen it above 30%. But I guess it all depends on the details here ..
 

ThreeDee

Guru
Joined
Jun 13, 2013
Messages
698
I don't follow on the USB adapter topic. This board has 14 SATA ports and they don't seem to be used up. Or did I misunderstand something?
IF ... all SATA ports are taken up ... OR .. you don't want to dedicate a SATA port to your boot drive .. many users (myself included on my previous build) have used the USB to SATA adapter cable that will power a 120'ishGB drive just fine via the power supplied over/through the USB port.. without issue.

It's an option if needed/wanted is all.
 
Joined
Nov 28, 2020
Messages
3
I don't follow on the USB adapter topic. This board has 14 SATA ports and they don't seem to be used up. Or did I misunderstand something?

Yeah, there's no reason to not use the SATA ports, hence why I was leaning towards the SATA DoM. I could see myself populating all the ports on the board, but there's plenty of PCI-e for a HBA when that happens.

The two CPUs are usually overkill for pure NAS use, unless there is something like Plex in the game. I have a single-socket X9SRi-F with a 4core E5 1620 (3.6 GHz) and have never seen it above 30%. But I guess it all depends on the details here ..

Plex (or Jellyfin in this case) is in the game ;)
... my use case is:
  1. NAS for documents, music, videos etc.
  2. Media Server (Jellyfin)
  3. Virtualisation/Homelab
Additionally, I used to use my workstation for doing tasks like batch compression, torrents etc. during the day while I was at work, but now I'm working from home for the forseeable future I want to offload it to a box I'm not using all the time.

Plus, there seems to be the strange situation that dual socket boards seem to be more readily available and sometimes cheaper than single socket versions, and since I've got a fat enough case to handle them, why not? It gives me much more room to scale out if I want to.

I've bought the gear now, I ended up getting a deal on a X10DRi-T4+ which changed things somewhat, the only thing that got a chunk more expensive was the move to DDR4 RAM. The plus side is a quad port 10Gb NIC built in, and more headroom on the processor upgrade path.

Couldn't find a good 850-1000w PSU at the moment, only the dregs in stock and restocking dates on the good models being quoted as April next year (?!?) and this 750w was a higher price than it should be, but it's a quality unit and will do for now.

So this is what I'm rolling with for now:
PartProductWatt Estimate (W)Price (GBP)
CaseAzza Hurrican 200000
CPU2 x E5-2620v3 (Hexa cores)16050
MotherboardSuperMicro X10DRi-T4+25180
Memory4 x 16GB ECC RDIMM DDR424140
StorageAlready have:
1x Toshiba N300 8TB
1x WD My Book 10TB
2x Seagate 16TB

Going to add drives to create 2 pools:
Pool 1:
1x Mirror vDev: 2x 16TB
165500
Boot Drive64GB SuperMicro Sata DoM120
NICQuad port 10Gb NIC built in to MoBo100
GPU?Possibly wanted for transcoding (Jellyfin)25?50?
FansBunch of fans2050
PSUSeaSonic Focus+ Gold 750w-750120
Total3951040
 

Inxsible

Guru
Joined
Aug 14, 2017
Messages
1,123
his board has 14 SATA ports and they don't seem to be used up.
Even if all ports are used up -- it would still be beneficial to go with an HBA -- to handle the data drives and use the motherboard SATA ports for the boot SSD.

I would however suggest that you install Proxmox on bare metal and virtualize FreeNAS using a passthrough for the disks. Proxmox is much better suited for VMs and Containers than FreeNAS/Bhyve at the moment. I like to keep my data storage safe in a separate environment and use the VMs/CTs etc in a different environment.

Something to think about....
 
Top