Initial Home NAS Build

[Bdsankey]

Hello all, been building PCs for awhile but this will be my first NAS. I am aiming to repurpose quite a bit of hardware from my old PC that is certainly dated but has been working flawlessly for quite some time. I did have a few questions which I will add after my hardware list.

My planned files would mainly be family pictures, movies/tv shows (I'd add Plex, that's why I'm leaning toward having a GPU), family recipes, as well as important documents (tax info, titles, birth certs etc). The documents would get backed up to google drive (or similar) but we have too many pictures for me to justify paying a monthly google drive/icloud subscription any longer. I would rather drop capacity and gain redundancy VS a "balls out" performance setup. I may also "offload" steam games from my C drive that I don't play all that often to it as well, I am undecided on that.

Mobo: Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe (Link)
CPU: Intel i7-3770k
Ram: 32gb of Corsair Dominator Platinum, CL9, I forget the speed
PSU: EVGA Supernova 650w w/hybrid fan
GPU: EVGA GTX1050 or 1080, I have both laying around
HDDs: Undecided, likely 4-6tb WD Reds
Boot: I was going to use a cheap SSD hooked up to one of the internal 6gb ports (there are 4)
Caching: I was going to use smaller SSDs for this, sub 500gb hooked up to the internal 6gb sata ports (there are 4)
HBA(s): This I don't know on. I will likely run an 8 port LSI HBA but I don't know what brand to get. Would it be better to put the caching drive(s) on the HBA or on the mobo?


I really have 2 main questions:
1) If I have a mobo/cpu failure, how difficult is it to replace those components and get the system back up and running? I would imagine it is a pretty simple but this is all new to me.

2) Is this file system expandable? IE lets say I run 6 drives now in Z3, am I able to say increase that to 10 drives by adding the new drives to the existing pool or does it need to be scrapped and start fresh?

 

[elorimer]

Way overkill and way underkill at the same time, for a home lab, I think in my highly inexpert limited experience. You should start off thinking about ECC memory, and you don't want those SMR WD Reds. You should also think about the cost of running this 24/7, and you should also think about how you are backing up what you are storing in, what, 6TB of used space.

A great advantage of TrueNAS is that you can import the storage pool into a brand new server, so a failure of the hardware isn't as much a problem, assuming it doesn't corrupt your data. That's where snapshots and replication to a backup server come in.

There are lots of posts here on the limitations of expanding a pool. Assume you can't or won't want to. Every time I've reconfigured, I've had to restore the data from backup.

As a suggestion, if you have spare parts around, you might build something first to fool with.

 

[Bdsankey]

Way overkill and way underkill at the same time, for a home lab, I think in my highly inexpert limited experience. You should start off thinking about ECC memory, and you don't want those SMR WD Reds. You should also think about the cost of running this 24/7, and you should also think about how you are backing up what you are storing in, what, 6TB of used space.

I have thought of this, for now I won't have a backup (I know, not ideal) until maybe next summer when I build another system to store offsite at my parent's place of business.

Appologies for my ignorance, can you explain what you mean by "SMR WD Reds"? What drive would you recommend at that point? Rough math with Z3 and 6tb drives (total of 5 drives) gets me in the ~10.5TiB range which is just about where I want to be on this iteration. It's taken me years to fill up even my 2tb on my desktop but that is mainly used for games right now and photos. Realistically 10TiB, at this rate, will last me a decade or so.

A great advantage of TrueNAS is that you can import the storage pool into a brand new server, so a failure of the hardware isn't as much a problem, assuming it doesn't corrupt your data. That's where snapshots and replication to a backup server come in.

Is this as simple as putting all the new hardware into the system (mobo/cpu/ram) and doing a simple "import"? If so that's pretty darn easy.

There are lots of posts here on the limitations of expanding a pool. Assume you can't or won't want to. Every time I've reconfigured, I've had to restore the data from backup.

That's what I'm gathering, 10TiB is pretty decent in terms of storage and should last quite some time. I won't be the only user, my entire family would be backing up all their digital photos to it etc as nobody has a good way (in my family) to do it other than apps like google photos/icloud etc. I want to get away from relying on the "cloud" to handle all my data.

As a suggestion, if you have spare parts around, you might build something first to fool with.

I have the system complete here and it does have 2x 2tb WD drives in it. I could certainly play around with that for now but to put any actual data on it would be unwise as one of the HDDs is getting quite old and has given some errors which prompted the new build I have as a daily driver desktop.

Eventually when I upgrade my desktop, my i5-10600k will be used in my next NAS as I feel it is a better use than trying to sell them on the internet.

After doing some more reading I would be adding a 120gb-ish SSD for caching and adding 2x 40-120gb SSDs in mirror for ZIL/SLOG. What SSDs would be recommended in this case? I would prefer to stay SATA for now as this P8Z77-V Deluxe mobo doesn't have NVME. Being cache and ZIL/SLOG I believe these are extremely easy to replace in the event of a mobo/cpu failure that would necessitate a hardware change.
It seems that a high quality SLC drive would be my best bet as they're the most redundant. It appears WD sells a 240gb sata drive for ~$60, is there a downside of having a 240gb ZIL/SLOG drive?

Also, I do not need more than 1gbe at this time as that is all my home network/router will support. This NAS will be intended to also only live the next 2-5 years until I build my new home which will have a small server rack/network enclosure and will get a brand new complete system at that time. Extended transfer times, at this moment, aren't a big deal to me as it is not used for anything but storage. I do not have any intentions of doing any work to the files that are on that system.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Please read the first 6 documents linked in the "Recommended readings" in my signature. That will allow you to make a much more informed decision.

 

[Bdsankey]

Please read the first 6 documents linked in the "Recommended readings" in my signature. That will allow you to make a much more informed decision.

Thank you, that explained honestly just about everything. ECC would certainly be an awesome (and certainly will on the next iteration) but this current combo does not support ECC memory. I certainly could get an ATX board with a Zeon/ECC, I will certainly check the used market CPU wise as they seem to rarely fail.


At the moment I still have all of the crucial information backed up onto my desktop PC so it wouldn't be an "OMG my data is gone forever" type situation. I think for an initial NAS this old hardware still is sufficient other than being non-ECC.


As for SMR drives, I checked the list and the WD60EFZX is not on that list, it is specifically labeled a CMR drive. If that is accurate, they're a great drive for my usage and budget.

I had already planned to go with one of the LSI HBAs, I just don't know if one model is better for my needs or not. Regardless, the LSI 9207-8i, LSI 9211-8i, and LSI 9300-8i are the three I had in consideration.