New home lab NAS system

[espenfjo]

Hi Guys

Im planning to upgrade an old Synology installation I have going to a fresh TrueNAS Scale installation, but I am a bit at a loss to hardware combinations.

What I am looking at now, after having read a lot of posts and discarded several hardware options.

Right now Im thinking about this setup:
Chassis: Unknown
Motherboard: Supermicro X9DR3-F
CPU: Dual Xeon E5-2660 (SR0KK) (V1 maybe?)
Mem: 14x16GB Samsung DDR3 M393B2G70BH0-CK0 PC3-12800 DDR3-1600MHz ECC Registered CL11
Disks: 5x6TB HDD + 5x4TB HDD

The Mobo, cpu and ram is available to me for about €$520

The primary usage for this would be Plex 1080p/4k, a couple or ten VMs sitting around and probably not doing much with regards to disk (dedup or compression would be great to keep these VMs smaller) or CPU, some docker containers as well as archival of family photographs/movies/documents/whatnot. I.e. Plex would probably be the most CPU intensive task this system would see.

My main concern is how old the CPU is, and whether it would keep up with transcoding 4k, its passmark scores and low core speed is a bit dubious.
Do you guys believe this cpu/mem/mobo combination is a good fit? There are very few used Supermicro/Xeon combinations available in my country, and buying new components is prohibitively expensive. Due to taxes and shipping costs buying from US/EU ebay sellers would probably double the cost.

 

[NugentS]

I would look at using a GPU rather than Xeon's (of that age) to transcode. This opens up a whole world of different CPU's like the E3's (still using ECC) in what I call a workstation board. You are proposing Scale - so GPU transcoding is practical
More modern kit will likley be cheaper to run too and you won't need dual CPU's, just a single reasonably fast one - just watch out for PCIe Lanes if adding an HBA and a GPU.

 

[espenfjo]

Thank you. Then I will probably need to forgo supermicro and ipmi as nothing newer is readily available at an affordable price. I may be able to find an x99/i7-6600k combo at a semi-affordable price. I would have to triple check lane usage, but it should be a good start.

 

[ChrisRJ]

(dedup or compression would be great to keep these VMs smaller)

Please check the forum for dedup posts. It comes with some caveats and is usually not recommended. Whether or not it makes sense for you I cannot say right now. But it is certainly not a trivial decision

 

[NugentS]

A NAS generally does not require much in the way of CPU for NAS type functions - its when you add extra stuff that the CPU requirement edges up. Plex is one of the worst cases if hardware transcoding a lot. 10 VM's may push you down more CPU required though depending on what they do.

I suggested I3 because some of them use ECC (I think not the latest *) and have an iGPU, which (AIUI) if the motherboard has IPMI providing graphics for the OS, then you can use the iGPU for transcoding. i5 and i7/i9 do not support ECC that I am aware of

* Apparently alder lake supports ECC - but then TrueNAS support for Alder lake is somewhat lacking apart from I3 which lack the efficiency cores.

Its all a balancing act, iGPU, ECC, IPMI, GPU HBA & Motherboard, oh and budget of course etc
A proper HBA is normally an 8 lane card. GPU is 16 lanes but will work well in 8 (lane speed depending of course). You have 10 disks - so will need 10 SATA Ports + enough for the boot pool so will likley need an HBA (do not be tempted by a nasty PCIeX1 to SATA expansion card - these generally will cost you your data)

As for dedupe - as @ChrisRJ says - its non trivial using dedupe. Its comes with a fairly expensive set of hardware requirements without which your NAS will grind to a stop.

 

[espenfjo]

If I were to find a Supermicro board on eBay that is not hideously expensive, which ones would you recommend?
I would believe that something that supports Alder Lake would be expensive with regards to both the mobo and CPU?

I do probably have an old GPU somewhere, or would be able to find one that should be "good enough" for my Plex needs relatively cheap, so an iGPU is probably less of an issue as long as the OS is happy with the IPMI/KVM from Supermicro.

 

[NugentS]

The OS will be fine with the IPMI GPU on SMC boards
I use an eGPU for Plex (Nvidia P2000) and the KVM for the OS. I have never tried the iGPU but am assuming it works - others may know for definate. I don't in fact have an iGPU as I am using Xeons