Intro and New Build Review Request

[GRYBD1]

Hi, my name is Jerry and I am retired from a nearly 50 year IT career that involved doing a wide variety of things. Last 20 years was largely specialized in security. Wrote my first computer program in 1967.

So much for the elevator talk. My current project is to replace an aging Windows, hardware based RAID6 array. Set a hardware budget of about $1k plus storage devices. Started out looking at a new hardware RAID6 array, then commercial NAS boxes and finally ended up going with a DIY TrueNAS build. Surfing the Black Friday deals, here is what I ended up with.

Intel i9-12900K
ASUS Z790-V Prime
64GB DDR5
3 x 500GB NVMe
11 x 18TB WD Red Pro drives (now wish I had 5400 RPM drives but got these when I was still thinking hardware RAID)
4 x LSI 9207-8i HBAs (2 spares on the shelf, they were cheap)
Reusing an old case with 15 drive bays and 750w power supply

TrueNAS Scale is up and running with some old hard drives just to get some hands-on experience. I have spent hours reading articles and forum posts to get everything working and successfully running PLEX with hardware transcoding. Here is what I am thinking as a final drive configuration.

2 mirrored 500GB NVMe boot pool. Yes, I know the size is way over kill but it is hard to find smaller fast NVMe drives these days.

1 zpool
vdev with 8 WD drives in raidz2 to be used for mostly write once files. Photos, video, music.
vdev with 2 WD drives mirrored to be used for everything else including photo and video processing work flows.
500GB NVMe l2arc
1 WD hot spare

As an alternative I could do 2 zpools. One for the 8 drive raidz2 array and one for the 2 drive mirror with the l2arc. It is my understanding (could be wrong) that l2arc is specific to a zpool so this config would isolate it from the finished video, photo, and music files. Down side is that with this pool configuration the spare drive would sit on the shelf. That way it could be used for a failure in either of the two zpools.

Thoughts? Recommendations? Much easier to change now than after the pools are built. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and for any feedback.

 

[somethingweird]

Jerry. Just wondering what using for NIC?

 

[GRYBD1]

Jerry. Just wondering what using for NIC?

Motherboard 1GB. All my switches are 1GB. Not going to direct connect my daily use computer to the NAS so until I upgrade my switche(s) there is no need to add a higher speed NIC to the NAS.

 

[GRYBD1]

Hi, my name is Jerry and I am retired from a nearly 50 year IT career that involved doing a wide variety of things. Last 20 years was largely specialized in security. Wrote my first computer program in 1967.

So much for the elevator talk. My current project is to replace an aging Windows, hardware based RAID6 array. Set a hardware budget of about $1k plus storage devices. Started out looking at a new hardware RAID6 array, then commercial NAS boxes and finally ended up going with a DIY TrueNAS build. Surfing the Black Friday deals, here is what I ended up with.

Intel i9-12900K
ASUS Z790-V Prime
64GB DDR5
3 x 500GB NVMe
11 x 18TB WD Red Pro drives (now wish I had 5400 RPM drives but got these when I was still thinking hardware RAID)
4 x LSI 9207-8i HBAs (2 spares on the shelf, they were cheap)
Reusing an old case with 15 drive bays and 750w power supply

TrueNAS Scale is up and running with some old hard drives just to get some hands-on experience. I have spent hours reading articles and forum posts to get everything working and successfully running PLEX with hardware transcoding. Here is what I am thinking as a final drive configuration.

2 mirrored 500GB NVMe boot pool. Yes, I know the size is way over kill but it is hard to find smaller fast NVMe drives these days.

1 zpool
vdev with 8 WD drives in raidz2 to be used for mostly write once files. Photos, video, music.
vdev with 2 WD drives mirrored to be used for everything else including photo and video processing work flows.
500GB NVMe l2arc
1 WD hot spare

As an alternative I could do 2 zpools. One for the 8 drive raidz2 array and one for the 2 drive mirror with the l2arc. It is my understanding (could be wrong) that l2arc is specific to a zpool so this config would isolate it from the finished video, photo, and music files. Down side is that with this pool configuration the spare drive would sit on the shelf. That way it could be used for a failure in either of the two zpools.

Thoughts? Recommendations? Much easier to change now than after the pools are built. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and for any feedback.

Well, I was just now watching another video on zfs and it is abundantly clear that one pool with a mirror and raidz2 array is a really bad thing to do. I need to take the two pool approach. One of those aha moments is that datasets are assigned to pools, not zdevs but everyone else already knows that.

 

[Arwen]

...
1 zpool
vdev with 8 WD drives in raidz2 to be used for mostly write once files. Photos, video, music.
vdev with 2 WD drives mirrored to be used for everything else including photo and video processing work flows.
500GB NVMe l2arc
1 WD hot spare

As an alternative I could do 2 zpools. One for the 8 drive raidz2 array and one for the 2 drive mirror with the l2arc. It is my understanding (could be wrong) that l2arc is specific to a zpool so this config would isolate it from the finished video, photo, and music files. Down side is that with this pool configuration the spare drive would sit on the shelf. That way it could be used for a failure in either of the two zpools.

Thoughts? Recommendations? Much easier to change now than after the pools are built. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and for any feedback.

Welcome to TrueNAS and the forums!

Your specification for a single pool with 2 mis-matched vDevs for different purposes, is not how ZFS works. You could have something like this;

Pool 1:
vDev with 8 WD drives in RAID-Z2

Pool 2:
vDev with 2 WD drives in a Mirror

Or you could simply put all 10 WD drives in a single RAID-Z2 vDev. But, trying to dedicate a data vDev to a specific purpose is not possible. Their are specialized vDevs, like the L2ARC you mention, as well as Special Metadata & Small File vDevs. But, they are not general purpose storage.

It is helpful to know about the limitations of pool & vDev layout options, as well as how to use datasets & snapshots. We have lots of Resources, (top of any forum page), that cover a very wide range of topics. I would suggest looking for the Terminology Primer, as well as ZFS layout guides.

@somethingweird has a point. A quick check of that system board shows this for the built in NIC;

1 x Realtek 1Gb Ethernet

Realtek tend to be lower performing, and sometimes have actual bugs preventing smooth 24x365 operation for TrueNAS.

And if you were getting the WiFi model of that system board, in general WiFi is not supported by TrueNAS. Of course TrueNAS will wire up to a router with WiFi, or WiFi access point for clients. But, the underlying OS for TrueNAS has been customized for server use, so WiFi is not really a builtin option.

 

[GRYBD1]

Thank you @somethingweird and @Arwen for pointing out that the motherboard Realtek NIC is problematic. I ordered an Intel Pro 1000 expansion card.