Hardware Check Please? (for a newbie)

[Trevor68]

Hi all,

After a month or so of reading I have settled on Scale for my first attempt at a home NAS/Media/Lab box. Please be gentle, I do work in IT albeit at a lower level than most here I suspect.

I'm off to MSY to pickup my 4th Seagate Iron Wolf drive just now so though I best see if there is anything else I need to grab while shopping. Here is what I have.

Core I5-3570K, 16gig DDR3 RAM, Gigabyte Z-77P a 120gig Sata SSD to install Scale on plus 4x 4tb Iron Wolf Drives to setup initially, I would like to add 2 more the same down the track.

This will be initially for Windows network shares of media (movies/tv seasons) to an existing Emby Server. Eventually i want to add Truecharts apps for Emby, Radarr, Sonarr etc to have an all in one box, but no rush on that. I'm really just trying to get all the hardware together for the initial media pool currently, hopefully just in time to play with RC1.

My biq question on that is should I grab another 256Gig SSD for the Apps to run on?

Also how many, what type of pools should I add on startup for the main media (movie/tv series) and any tips on getting the shares working for a windows LAN would be awesome.

 

[Trevor68]

Whoops on closer inspection I now realise the M/B only has 5xSata ports. It does however have a mSata port, so new plan I have ordered a 180Gig Intel mSata to install Scale on.

I will use the 4x4Tb disk as a pool for my data, probably mirrored for redundancy I guess? This will mean 8Tb of storage I think?

I am now unsure what to do with the remaining 120Gig Sata SSD, maybe use it for Apps? if so, what raid should I use on it, given it is only a single disk?

 

[NugentS]

You can't RAID a single disk.
Well actually you might be able to through the commandline - but don't go there - there be dragons

 

[Trevor68]

My bad, what would you recommend for the 120G SSD, maybe just use as cache?

I want to use the 4x4 TB for Movies/Television and Apps, I guess I should create 2 pools, 1 for Media, the other for Apps?

 

[NugentS]

A "cache" won't help you as thats not how ZFS works (simplistically) and adding a cache will likely slow the whole thing down as you don't have enough memory (ARC) to service the L2ARC that you might use it for. Just put the SSD to one side for the moment

No need for two pools - just have different datasets on the single pool. You can adjust record size etc as required at the dataset level - or just leave at defaults.

Given what you mention as drives - you are correct start with 2 mirrored vdevs and you can add a third vdev later on (although as you only have 5 SATA ports - the 6th drive might be difficult). Do not be tempted by SATA expansion cards - there may be good ones out there - but they are almost universally either not supported or crap. If you want to expand the proposed bool then get an HBA in ITMode (or flash it yourself) and some sort of SAS shelf.

You are using consumer grade gear - gamer motherboard, Non ECC memory. The CPU for your use case seems fine unless you want to transcode a lot of video files. Can you not find a better main board, with more SATA ports? Or are you re-using old stock?

 

[Trevor68]

I am repurposing my old Win7 HTPC. It has been my main Emby plus Torrent server Since MB3 days. This is the case which fits nicely under our TV.
Silverstone HTPC
I have moved the Emby server of to a Win10 Intel Nuc for the time being, so I can just set this all up as windows network shares initially. Then the plan is to add TrueCharts Apps until the NUC is no longer required.

Thanks muchly for the info, it is super helpful. I can purchase 32Gig (4x8) RAM if you think that would help?

 

[NugentS]

Stick with the existing memory (16GB) for now - you can decide based on how you use it to upgrade if necessary. Emby/Plex does not demand a lot of memory - more CPU depending on transcoding or not. What GPU do you have as you might be able to use that to transcode in Scale (I do not know a lot about that yet)

Given the specs - where are you going to fit the 4 drives?
"

3.5" x 2 , 2.5" x 1 / 3.5" x 1 , 2.5" x 2

"
I can see room for 3 * 3.5 unless you repurpose the external 5.25. That will give you 4 drives - where do you plan on fitting the extra 2 you mentioned as expansion (clue - do NOT mention USB)

 

[Trevor68]

Oh sorry, that is not exactly my case, they look identical externally, but mine pre-dates it by many years, so has 2x 3 drive cages. I have decided to only use the 4x4Tb drives now though, because of the limited sata ports.
GPU is a very old Radeon 5570, so perhaps worthwhile updating at some point.

 

[Trevor68]

A happy quirk of fate means my Intel 180G Msata drive arrived just in time for RC1! The install went smooth as silk, even managed to save 100gig of that drive for some future purpose currently unknown. I put the 120Gig SSD to use for Apps and the 4x4Tb made a nice 10Tb pool in RAIDZ1.

Currently off to deep dive some light reading for numpties while data copies over.