Just picked up a Dell PowerEdge T630 server for Truenas Scale. Hardware questions

[aeubank]

Hello all,

I have just picked up a Dell PowerEdge T630 to run Scale on in my homelab. It currently has 64gb of ram, dual power supplies, H730 card (in HBA mode on the firmware).
My questions are as follows:

1. I currently have the 18 bay model and my plans are to populate 8 of those bays with 14tb drives in a Z2 configuration. That will leave an 84tb pool, is this too big?
2. Is there an alternative for Plex that works better for streaming? This computer is going to be used for storage, streaming and some development.
3. What types of boot drives would you recommend?
4. I am planning to get an expansion card to house the boot and cache drives. Will this card work with Truenas and what sizes/types of drives should I purchase?

Thanks in advance for your comments, I'm new to the Truenas world but an old hat at IT stuff.

aeubank

 

[Jessep]

8 wide Z2 is fine, with the drive sizes consider Z3
T630 does not support slot bifurcation, that card will only see one drive
H730 is not an appropriate card, you will need to replace with Dell HBA330 (or H330 and reflash to HBA330)

 

[aeubank]

Thanks for your reply @Jessep . I picked up a HBA330 card off of ebay. I am still looking for good recommendations for the OS and cache drives. I might just get 2 256 gb flash drives and mirror for the OS and a 1 tb NVME for the cache. Is this optimal?

 

[jgreco]

H730 card (in HBA mode on the firmware).

Replace this as previously noted.

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

1 tb NVME for the cach

64gb of ram,

This is way oversized. We normally recommend a ratio of about 5:1 for L2ARC to RAM, not more than 10:1, so you really want 256-512GB NVMe for your L2ARC.

8 of those bays with 14tb drives in a Z2 configuration. That will leave an 84tb pool, is this too big?

That's actually a 112TB pool. That is sufficiently large that, when considered with the L2ARC issue, you might actually do better to see if you can swing another 32-64GB of RAM for your system.