Help Choosing hardware for TrueNAS

[windtorm]

Hi everyone.
I am happy to be part of your community

I am new and want to build new TrueNAS Scale for home use.
*Low energy consumption (if possible)

My use will be

• Media storage
• Pc & Smartphones Backup
• Cloud Backup
• Linux VM
• Torrent
• Storge
• home assistant
• plex

Hardware

• Case: Fractal Node 804
• HDDs: 40T

Thanks for your help I really appreciate it

 

[Davvo]

Welcome to TrueNAS!
To start I suggest you reading the following resources in order to gain a basic understanding about how ZFS works.

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

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

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, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

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 I suggest you to look at the Hardware Reccomendation Guide:

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

Now, it is my opinion that given your needs it will be hard to build a system around low power consumption since:
A) given your listed uses, it will be hard to reach deep C states;
B) given the amount of space you listed (40TB) you will have quite a few drives.

Now, I would really like to specify what do you mean by that HDDs: 40TB. Please specify how many HDDs you have, their model and their sizes.

You will need at least a pair of SSDs for your Apps and VM pool alongside your storage pool.
Without knowing how many HDDs you have it will be difficult to suggest you a motherboard since you want to use its sata ports and not use an HBA (since afaik they don't like to go to deep C states).

 

[windtorm]

Welcome to TrueNAS!
To start I suggest you reading the following resources in order to gain a basic understanding about how ZFS works.

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

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

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, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

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 I suggest you to look at the Hardware Reccomendation Guide:

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

Now, it is my opinion that given your needs it will be hard to build a system around low power consumption since:
A) given your listed uses, it will be hard to reach deep C states;
B) given the amount of space you listed (40TB) you will have quite a few drives.

Now, I would really like to specify what do you mean by that HDDs: 40TB. Please specify how many HDDs you have, their model and their sizes.

You will need at least a pair of SSDs for your Apps and VM pool alongside your storage pool.
Without knowing how many HDDs you have it will be difficult to suggest you a motherboard since you want to use its sata ports and not use an HBA (since afaik they don't like to go to deep C states).

thank you for your replay

Low energy consumption is optional so I can build without

HDDs: 6 X 10T = 4 storge +2 backup
SSDs: 2

 

[Davvo]

You need 6 (HDDs) + 2 (SSDs) + 1 (boot SSD) at the very least. You will need an hba, so pleas read the following resource (as well as the second I linked you in my previous post).

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

www.truenas.com

An used X11SSL-F could do the job, probably with an i3 and at least 32GB of ECC memory.
If you need to transcode with plex things might be different though. I am no expert for that.

EDIT:
A 6 wide RAIDZ2 is a good option for your storage (HDDs) pool layout, and you should go with mirror for the apps/vm one.
You also want to make sure you have a proper PSU, see the resource below.

Proper Power Supply Sizing Guidance

I've seen about 1,000 threads like this one where people decide that they can power a dozen hard drives off a 360 watt supply. DO NOT DO THIS. I've seen another 1,000 threads where people decide to buy the cheapest power supply that they can...

www.truenas.com

Make sure your hard drives are not SMR but CMR. You want CMR. Also, try to use lower RPM ones if you can.

 

[windtorm]

You need 6 (HDDs) + 2 (SSDs) + 1 (boot SSD) at the very least. You will need an hba, so pleas read the following resource (as well as the second I linked you in my previous post).

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

www.truenas.com

An used X11SSL-F could do the job, probably with an i3 and at least 32GB of ECC memory.

thank you for your replay

 

[Davvo]

As a side note, 6x10TB in RAIDZ2 will give you 30.96 TB of usable space (80% of total space). For reference, I used this calculator.

 

[Davvo]

With a X11SSH-F you wouldn't need the HBA since you would have 8 SATA ports (6 HDDs + 2 SDDs) and a M2 slot for the boot pool. This should help you to save more energy.