Rebuilding my Home NAS, seeking fresh hardware & zpool design advice

[pioto]

I'm looking to replace my circa-2015 TrueNAS box with some fresher technology. My current use cases:

• Backup storage (2.46TB currently hoarded accumulated since ~2009, figure that'll grow to at least 4TB over the life of this system, some blend of rsync pull tasks, plus external systems pushing via SMB or duplicity+ssh)
• Plugins / Apps
  • Plex (total media library ~750GB, expect that would grow to 1.5-2TB over the life of this system) - typically only 1-2 active streams at most, most video is only 480p, some 1080p, but maybe some 4k content over the overall life of this system). So supporting hardware transcoding is something I'm considering (my current build is AMD w/ no discrete GPU so it's not supported), but probably not a deal breaker.
  • Syncthing (main share a single KeePass file, but also to backup photos from my phone, so practically "nothingburger" territory)
• A FreeBSD VM (pretty much just to keep IRSSI idling in)

I'm leaning towards SCALE for the new build (something new to play with), and would probably lean in hard on running more Kubernetes apps so would want to plan for that in the RAM/CPU part of the build, but can't see needing more than 32 GB RAM over the lifetime of the system.

I'm also open to revisiting my zpool strategy, which over my last few FreeNAS iterations boils down to "2x xTB disks as a mirror, grow by swapping with yTB one at a time, or adding another 2 xTB later". I see there's a newer draid option, and for my use case raidz may also make more sense (but my historical impression was that it was harder to grow over time, and required at more drives up-front). My initial thoughts would be to get a pair of 8+TB WD Reds, and maybe add another pair if my usage grows faster than planned.

Final "nice to have" would be external hot-swappable drive bays and a quiet, relatively low-profile & power efficient chassis. This system will be behind me in my home office every day while I'm on conference calls and the like, so it can't sound like a jet plane taking off like the Proliant I used to use!

---

Initial Shopping Cart

Here's what I've put together so far from Newegg:

• Case + PSU: Supermicro SuperChassis CSE-721TQ-350B2 Mini ITX Mini Tower, 4 x 3.5" Hotswap Bays
• Motherboard + CPU: SUPERMICRO MBD-M11SDV-4CT-LN4F-O Mini ITX Server Motherboard
• RAM: Crucial 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Server Memory Model CT2K16G4RFD4213
• Boot Disk: Transcend MTS800 M.2 2280 32GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TS32GMTS800
• Storage Disks (2x): WD Red Plus 8TB CMR NAS Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 128MB Cache, 3.5" - WD80EFZZ - OEM

---

Edit: reading around I came across someone else asking my pool question right before my post (sorry). So that makes me consider the alternative of 4x 4TB drives in a raidz2, for the same raw storage capacity, but the capability to withstand 2 drive failures... on Newegg looks like that only costs $10 more to do, but then I'm committed to buying 4x 6/8/... TB drives all at once if I need more capacity...

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

For power efficiency, speed an reliability go for 2x4TB SSD - mirrored.

System should be very low power with „just“ 3 SSDs…

 

[blanchet]

If you need only 4 disks slots, HPE Microserver Gen10 Plus is also a very good choice.

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Review This is Super

In our HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus, we go in-depth into the hardware, software, management, and performance of this super edge server

www.servethehome.com

 

[pioto]

@DigitalMinimalist - 2x4 TB mirrored won't be enough capacity for me (that'd already be right up at 80% full with my current data). Current pool:

Code:

% zpool list -v tank
NAME                                             SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
tank                                            5.44T  3.48T  1.96T        -         -    33%    64%  1.00x    ONLINE  /mnt
  mirror-0                                      2.72T  2.28T   454G        -         -    41%  83.7%      -    ONLINE
    gptid/6b4d3dcc-59ae-434d-88c8-5f1629dbedbe      -      -      -        -         -      -      -      -    ONLINE
    gptid/9f72c1bf-01b4-7744-96fb-2a0b6fa4c820      -      -      -        -         -      -      -      -    ONLINE
  mirror-1                                      2.72T  1.20T  1.51T        -         -    26%  44.3%      -    ONLINE
    gptid/07c6677f-0e9d-11e7-a7a0-10c37b689eac      -      -      -        -         -      -      -      -    ONLINE
    gptid/eaae3d6f-4579-11eb-9900-10c37b689eac      -      -      -        -         -      -      -      -    ONLINE

---

@blanchet, the HPE looks interesting, but building a similarly speced system (4x 4TB drives, etc) comes in at nearly twice the price as the supermicro build I did on Newegg above. Also doesn't seem like it has an m.2 slot so I'd have to sacrifice one of the 4 drive bays for a boot disk or boot from usb (which I know was discouraged years ago for FreeNAS and may not even be supported for SCALE?)

---

 

[blanchet]

To boot with the HPE Microserver Gen10 plus , you have to use a USB-to-SATA disk and a SSD to avoid sacrificing a drive bay.

But anyways, you are right: I had not yet realized that the price of the HPE Microserver Gen10plus has dramatically increased ( x2 ) since 2020. So building your own server is probably the best solution.