Ready to click purchase (Dell R730-XD system), just need a sanity check!

[TechSupportJosh]

Hi everyone,

We're looking to build out a NAS for internal work resources and we've specced a system which I think meets all our requirements, but I'd appreciate a sanity check in our hardware choices.

Our main requirement is roughly 15TB~ of storage for on-site backups, very rarely read from so does not need to be massively performant. We already have a server rack and our room has AC running 24/7. The data will also need to be encrypted at rest and as far as I can tell, this shouldn't be a problem with TrueNAS as long as the CPU has AES-NI support (which it does).

The main server itself is from here:

Code:

1 x Dell PowerEdge R730 XD 2U 12x 3.5" (LFF) 2x 2.5" (SFF) - 3x PCIe-x16 LP, 4x PCIe-x16 FH
1 x Intel Xeon E5-2667 V4 - 8-Core 16-Threads 3.20GHz (3.60GHz Boost, 25MB Cache, 135W TDP)
1 x Dell PowerEdge Heatsink
2 x 16GB - DDR4 2666MHz (PC4-21300, 2Rx4)
1 x H330 (SAS/SATA) RAID Kit - 0/1/5/6/10/50/60/Non-RAID
12 x Dell 3.5" (LFF) Hot-Swap Caddy
2 x Dell 2.5" (SFF) Hot-Swap Caddy
1 x Dell PowerEdge 'Platinum' Hot-Swap PSU 750W
1 x Dell PowerEdge B4 Ready Rail Kit
1 x UK Plug to C13 (Kettle Lead) Power Cable

And for drives / boot drive, we've gone for these:

Code:

5 x Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Hard Drive 3.5" 5400RPM
1 x 240GB Cruical MX500

Something I am already aware of is the H330 RAID card. My understanding is that this will require a firmware flash as detailed in this post to put it into IT mode (which I believe makes it act like a HBA card) but a sanity check would be appreciated on the rest of the hardware too.

In terms of upgrading down the line, it should be possible to just add extra drives later on and expand the TrueNAS pool?

Otherwise, I believe this spec should give us roughly 15TB of space with RAIDz2 which offers a nice level of redundancy versus useable storage.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hello @TechSupportJosh

Generally speaking, the R730XD is a strong base for a TrueNAS system. You've already identified the need to flash the H330 with the HBA330 firmware, and since you aren't planning to load the system up with PCIe cards the single CPU likely won't limit your expansion choices there.

For the expansion, while there is a project underway to expand RAIDZ vdev, at the moment it isn't possible to expand the vdev itself - so you couldn't, for example, add a single 6TB drive and turn your 5-wide RAIDZ2 into a 6-wide RAIDZ2. You would need to add an additional, identical number of drives (eg: five) to make a second vdev. My suggestion here would be to start with a 6-wide RAIDZ2 (6x6TB, yielding ~21TB of space) leaving you with an easy path to another 6-wide RAIDZ2 as an expansion option. You can use the rear-mounted 2.5" bays for your boot device.

The Crucial MX500 (and I believe the BX500 as well) have a firmware bug that causes them to falsely report a "pending sector for rewriting" which might be aggravating if it's going to constantly fire false-positive alerts on its drive health. Something like a Samsung 860 EVO would be fine, or you can find a used Intel DC series SSD (DC S3500, S3510, and S3520 are good options) for dirt cheap secondhand with lots of write endurance remaining.

And since you're talking about encrypted data at rest, make sure to pay attention to the prompts in the UI for backing up your encryption and recovery keys. ZFS can recover from a lot of situations that might cause data loss on other filesystems, but "lost encryption keys" is not one of them.

 

[Daisuke]

@TechSupportJosh I would recommend to look into HGST Ultrastar He8 Helium (HUH728080ALE601) disks, they sell renewed with 5years warranty for approx. $69. For this price, get 12 disks, look at my R720xd setup for more details. I personally decided to go for the R720xd, for substantial savings.

 

[Maralc]

Hi John

Did you buy build the server?

Can you share some details about noise and power consumption?

Cheers