Hardware Sanity Check Request

[Phil Williams]

Hello all, first post so please be gentle ;)

I'm going to be building my own TrueNAS server (likely to use Scale rather than Core) and I'm going to be requisitioning some bits from an old desktop I have. This is the "shopping list" so far:

Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 R2 Motherboard
Can't remember the processor on this board but I believe it is an AMD (PSU is currently dead so can't check)
2x Kingston Technology KVR16E11/8 RAM 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 ECC CL11 DIMM, 240-Pin
Something like this for the SATA card: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LSI-6Gbp...-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID-2x-8087-SATA/153774548691
8x WD Red 1TB drives
Fractal Node 804 case

Now the driver for building the NAS is to support a Frigate NVR that I'll either add to my existing Intel NUC or a spare. I'll also be using the NAS for a Plex server in the future.

Any comments/thoughts/abuse would be more than welcome :)

 

[joeschmuck]

Hello all, first post so please be gentle ;)

LOL, Nope, not here but first I'll say "Welcome to the Forums".

Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3

2x Kingston Technology KVR16E11/8 RAM 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 ECC CL11 DIMM, 240-Pin

This motherboard does not appear to support ECC RAM.

8x WD Red 1TB drives
Fractal Node 804 case

This case will hold 8 3.5" HDD's but the cooling isn't the best. Whatever drive you select do not pick a high RPM drive. 7200 RPM drives create more heat and you will have cooling issues in this case. Best to use 5200-5400 RPM drives.

I would recommend you do more research on the parts before purchasing something. Download the user manual and read it. Find out what parts will work with the other parts. Here I mean the motherboard specifically, no ECC support. The RAM "might" (that is a big might) work in the motherboard but I would never recommend doing that.

I wasn't too hard on you, this time

 

[Whattteva]

I have doubts that board supports ECC RAM, but I could be wrong.

 

[c77dk]

Besides the possible issue mentioned by others with ECC, the board also has a Realtek NIC, which doesn't have a great track record in TrueNAS

The LSI card looks ok, but beware there are reports of fake cards - if I remember correctly there's some threads inhere discussing that topic.

 

[Phil Williams]

Right so the board is going in the bin then :) Nothing purchased as of yet so no harm...

I did have a good scour of the hardware requirements but failed to spot that the board didn't support ECC so my fail.

I am keen on the Fractal case I must admit, I can chuck extra fans in there and was planning on using lower-speed drives. I'll go back to the mother-drawing board for now.

Thanks all :)

 

[Phil Williams]

Edit: Just found this: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/download so I'll be devouring that shortly.

 

[joeschmuck]

Also, you can buy a motherboard with 8 SATA ports, there is no need for an LSI card unless you just want to spend more money and use more electricity.

Some other advice, if you are buying the WD 1TB Red drives new, I'd recommend a different path. Figure out how much storage you want today. Let's call it 5.0 TB (based on eight 1TB drives in a RAID-Z2 configuration). Now these drives will typically last 5 years even though the warranty would be for 3 years. So plan your future storage at the 5 year point. I like to tell people to double the amount you have now. So you are now looking at 10TB of usable RAID-Z2 space.

How can you get 10TB of usable space? Four 6TB drives would give you slightly over 10TB. This also allows you to space out the drives and keep things cooler, uses less power. It's a good place to be. Or you could have the same capacity with five 4TB drives.

My point is, there is no need to buy eight drives unless you have a need for the pool design, and some people do think about the pool design.

Best of luck to you.

 

[Whattteva]

Why exactly do you want 8x 1 TB drives vs say 2x 4 TB drives? It's just more clutter, more heat, more power consumption, and more noise.

 

[Phil Williams]

Why exactly do you want 8x 1 TB drives vs say 2x 4 TB drives? It's just more clutter, more heat, more power consumption, and more noise.

Well my thinking was along the lines of redundancy. If I went Z1 then I could lose one drive so a 1 in 8 chance of failure and Z2 would give me a 1 in 4. However now I think it through that may not be the best principle...

 

[ChrisRJ]

I am keen on the Fractal case I must admit, I can chuck extra fans in there

Be prepared that you need to put in fans with high static pressure, as opposed to arbitrary silent fans. This will depend on details, like the drive RPM. But if you do need high pressure fans, those will be loud. Just that you are prepared ...

 

[Phil Williams]

Be prepared that you need to put in fans with high static pressure, as opposed to arbitrary silent fans. This will depend on details, like the drive RPM. But if you do need high pressure fans, those will be loud. Just that you are prepared ...

Hmm more fan noise is not what I need really. My TP-Link PoE switch already operates at an annoying level...

 

[Whattteva]

Well my thinking was along the lines of redundancy. If I went Z1 then I could lose one drive so a 1 in 8 chance of failure and Z2 would give me a 1 in 4. However now I think it through that may not be the best principle...

It isn't quite that simple. Sure you have more disks you could afford to lose, but you also now have MORE chance of any disk failing since you now also have more disks. Not to mention that the risk of your individual disks failing are also now increased because they are possibly running in a hotter environment because they are in close proximity to one another in that small case and may or may not be getting enough air flow.

The way you minimize risk is not by increasing your total number of drives, but by increasing the number of disks dedicated for parity. That's done either by increasing your RAIDZ level or by having more mirrors.

 

[Phil Williams]

It isn't quite that simple. Sure you have more disks you could afford to lose, but you also now have MORE chance of any disk failing since you now also have more disks. The way you minimize risk is not by increasing your total number of drives, but by increasing the number of disks dedicated for parity. That's done either by increasing your RAIDZ level or by having more mirrors.

A fair point well made. It does all tie in with the earlier point about not planning storage requirements for ego and more for actual need.

 

[joeschmuck]

Before you spend a dime on any hardware, sit down and write down exactly what you want of the NAS. What capacity, what services do you want such as Plex, will Plex need to transcode or just serve up the video content as-is? Where will the NAS be located, will it bee cool enough, will it be quiet enough. How important is your data? This project isn't cheap, although compared to a prebuilt NAS it's a very good price for what you get.

Once you figure out what you want your NAS to do, then figure out how you will meet the capacity requirements. Then the computing requirements, (CPU/RAM), any add-on cards (Not likely in your situation), power supply, and lastly the case you will fit it all into. You get the point. Write it down. Do not cut corners because you will pay for it, trust me and it will cost you time and more money to correct it.

Good hunting for parts.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Once you figure out what you want your NAS to do, then figure out how you will meet the capacity requirements.

In addition there is also the performance side. RAIDZx is good in terms of space efficiency, but not so much for IOPS. So if you want to edit videos off of the NAS a RAIDZx pool is not suitable. For consuming videos, on the other hand, it usually is (unless we are talking many parallel streams).

 

[Phil Williams]

Thanks everyone for the much-appreciated and valuable advice. I do tend to plow into these things like a bull in a china shop so appreciate you putting the brakes on somewhat!

The primary purpose of the NAS will be to store video clips and recordings. The processing of the video, as well as image analysis, is offloaded to a separate NUC using Frigate so the NAS will be pure storage and later access. I will have a single camera at first but this will be expanded to three over the next few months assuming the initial tests work out.

The NAS will also be utilised as a media server in the future (3-6 months) and will serve content to 2 maybe 3 areas in the house. I'd like to in the future look at speakers embedded in the ceilings for audio but for now, it will be primarily streaming and saved video.

Calculating storage will be tricky as there are quite a few unknowns at this point so I may be incorrectly assuming that over estimating storage was a better idea.

I'm gonna spend some time estimating the storage and then work back from there. Thanks again :)

 

[joeschmuck]

It's not as straight forward as many people think. Take some time and put your requirements on paper, it will help you figure out what you really need. And like I said before double the capacity you think you will need because I rarely hear of someone not running out of storage within a few years of building a NAS. They say "I had no idea it would fill up that quickly", and they are buying larger hard drives.

One thing I didn't mention was "snapshots" and if you plan to use them, add more space. Read up on snapshots.

 

[ChrisRJ]

It's not as straight forward as many people think. Take some time and put your requirements on paper, it will help you figure out what you really need.

When I built my 3rd ZFS-based NAS in September 2020, the planning phase had lasted about 3 months. It was spent on thinking about what I really wanted/needed, and on determining the hardware to go with. No time was spent on learning about ZFS and/or TrueNAS. Plus I have more than 25 years of experience with building such machines (going back to Novell NetWare 3.12 in 1996). Just to illustrate what time frames we are talking about ... So, as an example, 2 weeks is really not a long time but instead pretty/too short.

At least that is how I see it.

 

[Phil Williams]

So after spending (considerably more) time working out exactly what I want this NAS to do I've put together a "shopping list" of parts. The server may well be overkill for now but I'm planning for the future. Use case:

• Media storage for Plex server (transcoding offloading to separate machine)
• Camera storage (28 day retention on 1 camera at first but will be expanding to 3)
• Backups for home PCs/laptops etc

It will be a traditional NAS in that I'll not be running VMs etc from it and I'll offload heavy lifting. Any thoughts?

CPU: Intel Core i3-8100 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor (£165.00 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12A chromax.black 60.09 CFM CPU Cooler (£119.95 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Supermicro X11SCL-LN4F Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£456.00 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston Server Premier 32 GB (1 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL22 Memory (£86.98 @ MoreCoCo)
Memory: Kingston Server Premier 32 GB (1 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL22 Memory (£86.98 @ MoreCoCo)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£38.86 @ BT Shop) - boot
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400 RPM Internal Hard Drive (£86.82 @ BT Shop) x8 for storage (Raid Z2)
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: be quiet! Straight Power 11 650W 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£106.31 @ Box Limited)
Wired Network Adapter: Intel EXPI9402PTG2P20 2 x Gigabit Ethernet PCIe x4 Network Adapter (£40.00 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £1621.00

 

[ChrisRJ]

Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400 RPM Internal Hard Drive (£86.82 @ BT Shop) x8 for storage (Raid Z2)

You must make sure that those are not SMR drives. These days "plain" WD Red (i.e. neiter Plus nor Pro version) with relatively low capacity tend to be SMR drives. The 4 TB model likely falls into this bucket. Again, SMR is an absolute no-go with ZFS.

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

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