Low Power DIY TrueNAS Build

[oi5w3s]

Hello together,

I registered here as a new TrueNAS user, at home I currently have a Synology NAS, but it is deprecated and will not get any (security)-updates any more, so thats why I plan to migrate to a DIY low power TrueNAS

The main use cases are to share movies/pictures on TV, and mainly for data storage.

For the new TrueNAS I have this storage chassis with 16x 3,5 Hot-Swappable drives:
https://www.logic-case.com/products...ve-bays-6gbs-minisas-+-2-x-525-bays-sc-4316s/

I will use at first 6 disks with RAIDZ2, but maybe in future to create another bigger VDEV to migrate from old pool.

My question is more about, hardware recommendations for building a DIY NAS

Requirements:
=============
- Not too high power consumption max ~40 Watt, maybe a Mainboard with CPU (SoC)
-- Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-4C-HLN4F
-- 16 Watt, not enough SATA Ports for 16 bay?
-- Supermicro A2SDi-8C-HLN4F: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-8C-HLN4F
-- 25 Watt, not enough SATA Ports for 16 bay?
- 10Gb NIC LAN
- RAM 16-32GB
- Should the NAS / Board have a graphic card ?

- The Synology is most of the time in standby / sleep, is it possible the same with TrueNAS (power consumption), is it a kind of Wake-on-Lan, what kind of options are there?

I think the most is here described, some special case I don´t know how to realize many up to 16 SATA ports with the boards, always read about HBA cards, what are these, should I buy one, because the most mainboards have "not enough" SATA slots?

Any points maybe I forget?

Best regards,
peter

 

[Alecmascot]

Did you read the Hardware 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...

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[danb35]

- Not too high power consumption max ~40 Watt, maybe a Mainboard with CPU (SoC)

With 16 bays? Get real. That won't even idle 16 drives, much less power the motherboard--especially when you're going to need a HBA (expect 10W) for your 16 bays, and when you're talking about 10 GbE.

 

[oi5w3s]

Ok maybe it will consume more power ok, how about the listed hardware, these boards are from 2017, I looked some newer once from Supermicro, but these have 12+ cores and a higher TDP. My existing HDD 6x WD Red 4TB (WD40EFRX) + 1x HotSpare HDD will I take from Synology into this setup. Alternative for board could be a Xeon L version...

Has TrueNAS a Idle/supsend function, when no data are requested, or is it still running when nothing happens?

 

[Etorix]

If you want 10 GbE, pick up a board with onboard 10 GbE such as the A2SDi-H-TF (any Supermicro board with a "T" in the last part of the product name). Then, for more drives, just add a LSI 2008 or 3008 (flashed to IT mode) in the PCIe slot—but do not expect to fit >10 drives, 10 GbE NIC and LSI HBA (10 W each) in a power budget of 40 W idle.
An alternative would be the X10SDV Xeon-D boards, if you can find a suitable one for a fair price (second-hand). Most are mini-ITX like the A2SDi; some X10SDV in Flex-ATX form factor (fits. in micro-ATX cases) have a LSI HBA onboard. A NAS does not need the latest and greatest (I suppose the newer boards you looked at were X11SDV).

A NAS need no graphic card. The BMC on all the above Supermicro boards (final "F" in product name) provides basic video output through the VGA port, and also allows to setup remotely from a web browser (A2SDi) or Java console (X10SDV) on a remote computer.

Beware that you cannot (yet?) add drives to a RAIDZ2 vdev like you would add drives to a Synology RAID. Increasing a RAIDZ2 pool involves adding further vdevs (preferably same type and width as the previous vdev) and/or replacing all drives in a vdev by larger drives.

To reduce power, use less drives but bigger drives. About spinning down, see here:

Power Management of Disks

Hey all, Do you all keep all your disks in a constant state of spinning, or do you let them spin down after a period of time? I'm looking at HDD standby and Advanced Power Management of discs in general. I would think for a frequently accessed machine, always up would be ideal. But if something...

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[oi5w3s]

Hi Etorix

Ah great, your mentioned the board "A2SDi-H-TF" looks good with 2x 10 GbE (SoC), is this an Intel NIC ? Good one?

The configurations could look like:

Mainboard + CPU: SuperMicro A2SDi-H-TF (Atom C3758 | 2x 10 GbE (SoC) | 25W TDP)
RAM: 32GB ECC RAM (must look for some compatible (PC4-19200R/DDR4-2400) -> Dual Channel 2x16GB
Disks: 6x WD Red 4TB (WD40EFRX) as RAIDZ2 + in the case I will put a hot spare disk (same disk type)
PSU: I would take a 80+ Titanium as ATX no loud server PSU, which one could you recommend?
Chassis: https://www.logic-case.com/products...ve-bays-6gbs-minisas-+-2-x-525-bays-sc-4316s/

I still think this setup looks good with 10Gb LAN and the onboard 8x SATA via SFF-8643/U.2/Mini-SAS should be enough for my current 6 disks.
The server case with 16 hot swap bays, have enough space for future expansion, when it comes, I need an LSI/HBA card, right? For now it should be enough

 

[Etorix]

It's an Intel NIC, as it comes from the C3750 SoC.
Any PSU which fits in your case and provides enough power should do.

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 find. DO NOT DO THIS. Your NAS lives or dies by...

www.truenas.com

But you potentially have an issue with wiring drives. The MiniSAS-HD connectors on the A2SDi-H-TF strictly provide 2*4 SATA ports, there is no SAS controller. If your case has a SAS backplane and expects to be plugged to a SAS HBA, it won't work.
With such a case you're not limited to mini-ITX.
You may look for a Flex-ATX X10SDV board with an on-board SAS HBA, or go modular with, say, a X11SSH-F with Core i3-9100(F) (ECC UDIMM but not RDIMM), and two add-on cards with Intel/Chelsio 10 GbE NIC and SAS HBA.

 

[Constantin]

For your use case and goals I’d consider a smaller case and a plan for upgrading from a VDEV system with six 4TB drives to larger capacity drives in the future instead of more drives.

The 4TB drives are likely reaching EOL and you are better off with a smaller number of drives with a higher capacity when energy conservation comes into play.

my 8-drive rig consumes about 106W under most conditions. That is helped via the use of helium-filled drives - those are typically not available new at low capacities.

Installing multiple VDEVs only makes sense if you either have a lot of data to store or need the IOPS performance of multiple VDEVs. For simple movie storage, a single VDEV works just fine.

 

[oi5w3s]

Any PSU which fits in your case and provides enough power should do.

That´s why I concentratet on a case with enough height for a standard ATX PSU, the case is 4U height, I have to look for enough maybe modular connections.

If your case has a SAS backplane and expects to be plugged to a SAS HBA, it won't work.

In the specs of the case:

Hot-Swap Backplane:

Four SFF-8087 connectors support up to sixteen 6Gb/s 3.5" or 2.5" SATA (II or III) or SAS hard drives or SSD's

In short, that means the wiring is the current problem?

 

[Constantin]

I’d argue that a proliferation of drives is at odds with your stated goals of a low-power NAS. Unless you have plans to seriously grow your data needs, a six-drive NAS with 12+TB drives in a z2 VDEV is a better bet than adding more drives to an existing pool with old 4TB drives.

the other advantage is being able to keep the old drives in a working NAS until you have stood up and qualified the new drives, arranged them into a VDEV and set up everything else associated with a TrueNAS.

 

[danb35]

you cannot (yet?) add drives to a RAIDZ2 vdev

It's Coming Soon™.

Hot-Swap Backplane:Four SFF-8087 connectors support up to sixteen 6Gb/s 3.5" or 2.5" SATA (II or III) or SAS hard drives or SSD's

That indicates it isn't a SAS expander backplane. One SFF-8087 connector carries four "lanes" of SAS data, and would handle four drives. But whether it would work with onboard SATA and a reverse breakout cable is something you'd need to check the docs or ask the manufacturer about.

 

[Constantin]

It's Coming Soon™.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

But even if that becomes a feature, other forum usershave pointed out the associated loss of capacity until the gastrointestinal issues associated with adding a drive to a existing VDEV are resolved. From a capacity-maximizing POV, getting the drive quantity per VDEV right up front is still better than adding drives later.

 

[oi5w3s]

I would like to show how a "maximum" storage build with the 16 hot swap case could look like, see attachement.
Pool 1 is the primary pool with different DataSets, the space should be enough, but I would like to have an "option" to add another data pool in the future like Pool 2 for other stuff, at the moment it is not clear, maybe a backup pool, but these makes no sense on same hardware.
I would like to connect/wire most of the HDD/backplanes depends on the mainboard with available ports, when I backup with an extra disk, I can put to an empty HotSwap slot, process the backup and take the disk out

I think the board with 10Gb LAN sounds fine, but maybe the wiring problem like Etorix mentioned could be a problem.

If your case has a SAS backplane and expects to be plugged to a SAS HBA, it won't work.

Mainboard + CPU: SuperMicro A2SDi-H-TF (Atom C3758 | 2x 10 GbE (SoC) | 25W TDP)
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-TF

What would you do, buy an additional LSI/HBA card which handles all/partial of the disks?

 

[Heracles]

I would like to have an "option" to add another data pool

There are not that many reasons to justify multiple pools... The only good one is when your need different pool-level options for different data usage. What you described here requires different datasets, not different pools.

maybe a backup pool

That would be closer to an illusion than an actual backup. Being in the same server, it will fail to the same physical incident (fire, flood, ...) or the same logical incident (intrusion, human error, ... ). Because the 2 will fail to the same incident, one can not be considered as a backup for the other. See my signature for a complete backup strategy.

but these makes no sense on same hardware.

Exactly

when I backup with an extra disk, I can put to an empty HotSwap slot, process the backup and take the disk out

That would be the equivalent of copy No3 : Offline backup. Just be careful here because done this way, this copy will have no redundancy by itself and will be pretty fragile. Also, to move, plug / unplug drives all the time increases the risk of mechanical failure. Better than nothing and important to have at least that, but not the strongest one either.

In all cases, good thing that you think about backup now instead of after loosing it all like so many others.

 

[NugentS]

I like a large server case with lots of drive bays. Why?
1. They don't all need to be populated to start with, but can be later on - so lots of expansion possibilities, even if unrealised.
2. A Large case uses no more power than a small case - by itself
3. Easier to work on
4. More options with motherboards of different sizes

 

[Constantin]

Just remember to equalize the air flow through all HDD slots, if possible. An open HDD bay can allow a lot of air to bypass the “tighter” ones filled with HDD drives, reducing the cooling your HDD stack gets.

Some cage designs are better at this than others.