Looking for recommendations

[clogan]

A couple questions I've run across as I've done my first build of Truenas ever.

My WD 10TB RED Pro drives tend to reach about 50c, Thats within the operating temp according to WD what does everyone else see as normal operating temp for spinning hard drives? Is 50c too high?

I've also got myself a M2 drive which I bought with the intention of running as a write cache drive but in reading about ZIL, SLOG and so on it seems that it won't be of good use as I'm not running a database, I'm not sure I can return it so I've been thinking of reinstalling Truenas from scratch and running the OS from the M2 drive instead of a 2.5 WD Blue SSD. This would free up one SATA connector for me for expansion later.

Also in general what is a good transfer speed? Is it all subjective I noticed in basic testing I was able to copy about 160GB in two hours the other day, that was improvement from 3 hours once I added a wired cable to my mac to make the link between my mac to NAS 100% wired.

So the recommendations were clear to post hardware so here's my build
Motherboard: Asrock B550M Pro4
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Memory: 2x 16GB Kingston ECC modules
Hard Drives 3x 10 TB WD Red Pro
Hard Drive: Western Digital WD BLACK SN850 NVMe M.2 2280 500GB PCI-Express 4.0 x4 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) WDS500G1X0E
Hard Drive: WD Blue 250GB SSD
Video: MSI GeForce GT 1030
NIC: Intel i350-T2(Not installed yet, running realtek from MOBO until intel arrives)

 

[ChrisRJ]

My personal limit is about 40 degrees Celsius. There is a paper from Google or Rackspace, which shows that above roughly this temperature the risk of drive failure after about 3(?) years increases drastically.

 

[pschatz100]

You didn't say what your case is, but I think you should be able to get the drives down to 40 °C or better with some careful planning and proper use of fans. Think about your airflow through the case.

Booting from an M.2 device will not help system performance - and it would not make much use of a 500Gb drive. Very small SSD's are suited well for the boot device.

 

[clogan]

Two new fans arrived today in the mail the temp after a couple hours is down to 40-45 range so that’s good.

Case is Fractal Node 804.

I am also getting a new Intel NIC from amazon today so I'm excited to see how that impacts my performance.

I know I won't see a gain in performance, but what good is my M2 going to do me otherwise? Again using the M2 for the OS gives me back a SATA port. If I can use it for performance gains great but as I mentioned from what I've read the M2 doesn't help me with SLOG or ZIL. So why not? Am I missing something?

 

[pschatz100]

No. You've got it right. There is nothing to prevent you from using a 500GB SSD as a boot device - it's just that you will never use more than about 10 - 12GB of its capacity.

 

[clogan]

Thanks everyone for the replies, I did add a couple fans, and a new intel NIC. I was kinda shocked at the performance gain of intel over reltek, makes me wonder if I would do things differently next time. As for my heat issues I was able to get the temp down below 40c actually around 38-40 depending on work load. Over all I'm happy and its time to start working on nextcloud. Thank you everyone for the responces.