DigitalMetal
Cadet
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2022
- Messages
- 3
Hi, I'm new here and looking for some advice if possible please. So first an introduction and some background .
I used to be workstation PC builder for a living several years ago and used to be quite content researching, spec'ing and building powerful machines for use in multitrack audio recording studios but I've been out of the game a while and my on hand knowledge is somewhat out of date. I now work as a broadcast engineer and our infrastructure rather more "corporate IT managed" than DIY so I haven't kept my and in with what options are out these besides HP off the shelf storage solotions.
In recent years I've been doing a lot of personal video work for my youtube channels and a few years ago I put together a fairly decent editing workstation consisting of a Windows 11 Pro build, intel i9 10850K CPU Z490 motherboard, 32GB or DDR4 RAM, an Nvidia 1080ti GPU and lots of mixed storage ranging from some fast NVME SSD's to older SATA SSD's.
I have a second computer running Windows 10 Pro made from parts from my older workstation X99 motherboard i7 6 core CPU and 16GB DDR4 RAM that is something of a storage server, I added an 8 port LSI SATA card which connects to a DIY JBOD drive enclosure containing 8 spinning hard drives of various sizes, these are pooled together with another 5 internal PC spinning drives (various sized) using DriveBender software.
The two machines are directly connected over copper 10GbE (each PC has a cheap Mellonox PCIe Card).
This setup was originally intended as just a random storage pool for downloaded installers and libraries of various pieces of software I used to test for a side job and it was a pretty much a glorified NAS on a DIY budget. I upgraded from previously using 1Gbe connections to the 10GbE when I started doing the video work which helped with transfer speeds but I'm not really satisfied or confident with the drive bender solution, I seem to lose small bits of data every now and again and this week I think I've lost multiple drives at the same time but it may be a drive controller or power problem (I'm yet to investigate) but its got me thinking about just putting together a replacement setup which led me here.
The beauty of Drivebender and what made me decide upon using it was that you can quite literally pool any number of any sized drives together and just keep on adding them whenever you like and they just add to the overall capacity (and resilience) of the storage pool. If a drive fails, no big deal you just remove if from the pool and providing you had enough failover capacity your data is still intact and you can just add more drives later on to make up for what capacity you lost in the failure.
Can TrueNAS do this or do I need to stick to using drives of the same capacity ?
Noise and power consumption are beginning to be an issue with my current setup, its running 24/7 and I could shut it down overnight but I tend to just leave it on, with so many drives there also a lot of PSU requirement which I've been ok with so far but that might be the underlying issue to the new problem I've just experianced.
So I'm wondering whether to get perhaps three or four 20TB spinning drives rather than the 13 or so drives I have right now which range in size between 2TB and 8TB.
Cost is going to be a factor so its trade off between convenience and simplicity as well as what I already have.
I do intend to keep on using the same PC hardware but perhaps just re-do the drive situation and move to TrueNAS rather than Drivebender.
What happens with TrueNAS if the operating system or PC hardware fails, can I take the drives and put them into a new TrueNAS build and restore the pool and data like I can with Drivebender?
is there something else I should be thinking about instead or are there any caveats I may not be aware of?
Thanks for any help anyone may be able to offer!
I used to be workstation PC builder for a living several years ago and used to be quite content researching, spec'ing and building powerful machines for use in multitrack audio recording studios but I've been out of the game a while and my on hand knowledge is somewhat out of date. I now work as a broadcast engineer and our infrastructure rather more "corporate IT managed" than DIY so I haven't kept my and in with what options are out these besides HP off the shelf storage solotions.
In recent years I've been doing a lot of personal video work for my youtube channels and a few years ago I put together a fairly decent editing workstation consisting of a Windows 11 Pro build, intel i9 10850K CPU Z490 motherboard, 32GB or DDR4 RAM, an Nvidia 1080ti GPU and lots of mixed storage ranging from some fast NVME SSD's to older SATA SSD's.
I have a second computer running Windows 10 Pro made from parts from my older workstation X99 motherboard i7 6 core CPU and 16GB DDR4 RAM that is something of a storage server, I added an 8 port LSI SATA card which connects to a DIY JBOD drive enclosure containing 8 spinning hard drives of various sizes, these are pooled together with another 5 internal PC spinning drives (various sized) using DriveBender software.
The two machines are directly connected over copper 10GbE (each PC has a cheap Mellonox PCIe Card).
This setup was originally intended as just a random storage pool for downloaded installers and libraries of various pieces of software I used to test for a side job and it was a pretty much a glorified NAS on a DIY budget. I upgraded from previously using 1Gbe connections to the 10GbE when I started doing the video work which helped with transfer speeds but I'm not really satisfied or confident with the drive bender solution, I seem to lose small bits of data every now and again and this week I think I've lost multiple drives at the same time but it may be a drive controller or power problem (I'm yet to investigate) but its got me thinking about just putting together a replacement setup which led me here.
The beauty of Drivebender and what made me decide upon using it was that you can quite literally pool any number of any sized drives together and just keep on adding them whenever you like and they just add to the overall capacity (and resilience) of the storage pool. If a drive fails, no big deal you just remove if from the pool and providing you had enough failover capacity your data is still intact and you can just add more drives later on to make up for what capacity you lost in the failure.
Can TrueNAS do this or do I need to stick to using drives of the same capacity ?
Noise and power consumption are beginning to be an issue with my current setup, its running 24/7 and I could shut it down overnight but I tend to just leave it on, with so many drives there also a lot of PSU requirement which I've been ok with so far but that might be the underlying issue to the new problem I've just experianced.
So I'm wondering whether to get perhaps three or four 20TB spinning drives rather than the 13 or so drives I have right now which range in size between 2TB and 8TB.
Cost is going to be a factor so its trade off between convenience and simplicity as well as what I already have.
I do intend to keep on using the same PC hardware but perhaps just re-do the drive situation and move to TrueNAS rather than Drivebender.
What happens with TrueNAS if the operating system or PC hardware fails, can I take the drives and put them into a new TrueNAS build and restore the pool and data like I can with Drivebender?
is there something else I should be thinking about instead or are there any caveats I may not be aware of?
Thanks for any help anyone may be able to offer!
