Rebuilding my old X99 workstation/gaming system into a NAS/VM/Plex server

[Abaddon]

Hello all,

I am building my first NAS/VM/Plex server using an old workstation/gaming PC with the following system specifications:

• Motherboard: Asus x99 deluxe
• CPU: Intel Core i7-5930K
• RAM: 64 GB (unknown speed)
• GPU: EVGA 1660TI
• SSD: 500 GB Samsung Evo
• HDD: 1 TB Western Digital Blue

I am planning to replace the hard drive with four 10 TB Western Digital Red Pro drives, with one set aside for redundancy in a RAIDZ1 configuration. The 500 GB Samsung Evo SSD will be used as the operating system drive. I am also considering using the Asus HYPER M.2 X16 CARD V2 with four Crucial P3 1 TB Gen3 M.2 SSDs in a mirrored configuration, giving me 2 TB of usable space and 2 TB of redundancy. This setup will be used as a NAS/Plex server with the ability to run some VMs and Docker containers. Do you have any recommendations or changes you would suggest for this setup?

Thanks for any insight!

 

[dxun]

A few thoughts off-the-cuff:

• if this is going to be a 24/7 system, ECC RAM is a must
  • even if it won't be expected to be up 24/7, there will always be a chance of subtle failures creeping by as scrub won't be able to detect RAM errors
  • if you choose to go with ECC, it will mean a different CPU (E5-16xx/E5-26xx v3/v4) and new RAM (it doesn't have to be faster than DDR4-2400, though)
    • both of these are relatively cheap - on fleaBay, the CPU for this configuration is going to be in the range 20-150 USD and 64 GB of DDR4-2400 RAM can be found for 50-150 USD (depending on the RAM type and seller)
    • check motherboard compabitility with these CPUs
• for HDDs you might want to consider looking for a SAS2008 or 2308 HBA controller (TrueNAS should work ok with Wellsburg PCH but I don't have hard data to support this expectation)
• RAID-Z1 level of redundancy is no longer recommended, especially with 10 TB drives and doubly so with non-enterprise HDDs (check the WD Red Pro spec and its BER [bit error rate] rating - anything below 1-in-10^15 means a fairly high chance of read errors during re-silvers with such high-capacity hard drives)
  • suggest trying to aim for RAID-Z2
  • for filer duties and sequential reads/writes, RAID-Zx are fine, but don't run any IOPS-intensive workloads against it (i.e. random read/writes)
• you'll probably want a mirrored boot SSDs
• the Hyper card ought to work fine, providing the board does the bifurcation correctly

Question: you mention running VMs and Docker containers - I assume you will be running these on TrueNAS Scale?
Also, make sure the motherboard implements the Intel VT-d correctly as without it, virtualisation performance will be poor at best (or VMs won't be able to run, at worst).
Additionally, make sure motherboard implements SR-IOV correctly if you're considering GPU passthrough to a Docker container or VM (e.g. for transcoding purposes).

EDIT: attached WD's spec - if you're running RAID-Z1 with these drives (and if the data can't be reconstructed easily), I'd make sure I have a very good backup/restore strategy.