Storage Build 2022 - Only 16-bay server case exists

[doe24]

Hello together,

I plan to Build my first TrueNAS (SCALE) Storage Server for home usage (Plex media / SAMBA/NFS shares). Currently I have a Synology 4 Bay Diskstation, but this will be replaced by TrueNAS


What have I now for hardware?
I have a new 16 bay server case which have plenty enough of disks for future expansion:
https://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/s...ve-bays-6gbs-minisas-+-2-x-525-bays-sc-4316s/
I think cause of energy costs, I would only use max 8 disk slots, the amount of storage size is enough depends on the following disk size


What disks I plan to use?
I plan to buy the Toshiba Enterprise Disks (MG08 series), maybe the 14TB or 16TB version.


Which ZFS Pool Design should I use?
I read on many pages several discussions based on RAIDZ2 vs mirror etc. When you want to use RAIDZ2 with big disks the "best" disk amount should be a pool of 6 disks, whould you confirm this?
The problem with RAIDZ2 is the expansion, when I use 6 disks with 16TB each, then I must replace all 6 disks (example with 20TB disks), to get an increased pool.
Instead using an RAIDZ2 I considered maybe using Mirror VDEVs, for example we have 3 VDEVs, for future expansion I should only replace 2 disks within a single VDEV and you get a increased ZFS pool.

VDEV 1:) DISK_1 + DISK_2
VDEV 2:) DISK_3 + DISK_4
VDEV 3:) DISK_5 + DISK_6

The downside of Mirror VDEVs is the disk space ratio, in this example you have usable only 3 disks (3x16TB), with RAIDZ2 you have 4 usable disks (4x16TB)
I´m not sure which ZFS pool design I should choose :/

Core Hardware components
Independent of which ZFS pool design I choose, the Mainboard + CPU + RAM should not consume too much power, for me would be any small SoC CPU enough, but in 2022 maybe there are upcoming new CPUs with low power, any suggestions ? For RAM I would like to select 2x16GB RAM, and the mainboard would be grea to have enough SATA slots.

 

[sretalla]

Server for home usage (Plex media / SAMBA/NFS shares)

That screams RAIDZ2 to me... you don't need the IOPS of mirrors for those use cases.

If you really want expandability (without needing to add an entire additional RAIDZ2, then indeed mirrors allow you that flexibility (at the high cost to redundancy that you mentioned).

When you want to use RAIDZ2 with big disks the "best" disk amount should be a pool of 6 disks, whould you confirm this?

You can make it work from 4 disks and up to 12 in a single VDEV. Wider than that and you get issues with resilver times.

There are some minor mathematical advantages to using 6 disks and also 10, but it's hardly worth the trouble to consider that.

in 2022 maybe there are upcoming new CPUs with low power, any suggestions ?

Don't get too excited... support for those latest generation CPUs with efficiency and performance cores is currently not there in the builds of FreeBSD that TrueNAS uses, so you would need to disable the efficiency cores anyway to use them (at least for now).

There are a few other threads aroung talking about low-power builds, so check those out and see if you like what they did.

 

[doe24]

Hello together,

short update: TrueNAS Scale is out, now I can hopefully order the hardware components

I looked for many low power systems, here is my collected list, there are old mainboards + SoC / any Intel i3 9000/8000 series, and the current AMD AM4 Cezanne low power CPUs, all have ECC support and the mainboard should have 8 SATA ports.


Low-Power Systems:
==================
1) Supermicro A2SDI-H-TF with SoC -> Intel Atom C3758, 8C/8T, 2.20GHz / 25W TDP

2) AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650GE, 6C/12T, 3.40-4.40GHz (35W TDP / AM4 / 2021 + ASRock Rack X470D4U / X570D4U (8xSATA)
3) AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE, 4C/8T, 3.30-4.00GHz (35W TDP / AM4 / 2019 + ASRock Rack X470D4U / X570D4U (8xSATA)

4) Intel i3-9100 (65W TDP / 1151 v2 / 2019) + Supermicro X11SCH-F (8xSATA)
5) Intel i3-8100T (35W TDP / 1151 v2 / 2018 + Supermicro X11SCH-F (8xSATA)

Mid-Power Systems:
=====================
6) Intel Xeon E-2336 (65W TDP / 1200 / 2021)


Questions:
- What about my selections, which would you recommend and why not?
- One big question, should I plan to build also a system with 10Gb Ethernet in 2022 for future? If yes, maybe some mainboards should be replaced