New Build Preparation/Enquiry

[Ryuo]

Hello,

First time builder and pretty new to networking including the TrueNas community.

Before proceeding, I wanted to post about my build and if there are any issues or concerns prior to commencing to minimise any problems that may arise.

Also what upgrades or recommendations more experienced members might use a system like this for comparative to my needs below.

Present:
I currently have the workstation running on windows 10 in Raid 10 with 4x 10TB (mirrored 20TB available). I now have all of my data sitting on my spare 1x 12TB drive & 1x 4TB drive. Will be doing a clean install of TrueNas as recommended by most on the interwebs.

Sever Build:
HP Z440 Workstation

• Motherboard: HP 212B PCIE 3.0
• CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1650 V3 @ 3.50GHz
• RAM: HP/Samsung PC4-2133P ECC 4x 8GB DDR4 (32GB)
• SSD: SKhyine SC300 250GB (Boot Drive)
• Hard drives: 6x Ironwolf Pro 10TB
• Hard disk controllers: LSI 9200-8I + 2x SFF-8087 Sata
• GPU: Nvidia Quadro M4000
• Network Speed: 1000/40

Installation:
- TrueNas Scale (I hear this is better for virtual machines? Scale > Core? Linux > FreeBSD?)
- RAID-Z2 (40TB + 20TB redundant - 4+2)
- 1x Ironwolf 12TB hot spare (may have to purchase another its just what I'm using to hold all my data temporarily until the system is up and running)

Intentions:
- Plex Media Server
- File storage/back up (Nextcloud)
- Photo/Video storage/backup (Photoprism)
- Virtual Machine (Windows) for secondary computing while recording or streaming content (VMWare)
- Cloud Secure Backup (Backblaze)
- Remote desktop through Cloudflare

Future:
I will be using this build long term for me and my family. In the future would love to upgrade to rack build in home lab without reinstalling, migrating data etc. I gather they way ZFS is that I could create another pool of data when increasing drive capacity though I cannot add to the existing pool like Raid 10 on windows. I read this may change in the future as there are ongoing developments.

If all goes well, I doubt I would need to fiddle much with the server running headless unless replacing the drives. I am not familiar with maintenance on server systems unless there is also things I maybe required to do to ensure longevity of the system and setup.

Any an all input and feedback is greatly appreciated. This is uncharted territory for me going from normal computer builds to server system. I was over the moon to final get remote access to work with plex after years of back and forth with that project and to now being able to transition from Windows 10 Raid 10 to TrueNas Raid-Z2 will be an exciting one.

 

[Arwen]

There are 2 ways to expand a ZFS pool. Both can be done live, no reboot needed. (Assuming your hardware supports hot swap disks.)

• Replace all the existing drives in a vDev, (Virtual Device), with larger ones.
• Add another vDev of similar configuration to other vDevs in the Pool.

In the first case, you would have to replace all 6 of the 10TB drives with larger ones. You won't see any increase until all 6 drives are replaced.

For the second case, you add more hard drives in a similar configuration. Since you have 6 drives in a RAID-Z2, another 4-6 drives in a RAID-Z2 is appropriate.

Note that any loss of a vDev in a pool, tends to loose the entire pool. So it it highly recommended that pools retain similar configuration for their vDevs. In your case, RAID-Z2.


On the subject of your hardware, looks okay, though we tend to suggest server grade system boards. For the software, I will let others speak, as I don't use any of those items.