Hello everyone, I am currently in the process of building my own server, and I have a question: Will my configuration of 3x2TB HDDs in RAID Z1 with 16GB of RAM be sufficient? I will also be using Jellyfin and qBittorrent, and it will be only for one user. My second question is: I have a 128GB M.2 SSD - should I use it in my configuration as cache or as a LOG?
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truenas scale for 1-2 users
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Thank you for your response.
I forgot to mention that I am using a 128GB SSD (not M.2) as a boot disk.
WI_Hedgehog
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Hello from the U.S.!
TrueNAS might be more than you're looking for-- it is incredibly powerful but there is overhead. There are hardware requirements not easily met in Poland for a small system and Ubuntu Server might work better, that is for you to decide. My signature contains 2 buttons, the second has links to documentation you'll want to read read and understand first in order to save yourself time and money.
Welcome to the forums.
TrueNAS might be more than you're looking for-- it is incredibly powerful but there is overhead. There are hardware requirements not easily met in Poland for a small system and Ubuntu Server might work better, that is for you to decide. My signature contains 2 buttons, the second has links to documentation you'll want to read read and understand first in order to save yourself time and money.
Welcome to the forums.
NickF
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I think your setup is fine. I've run various versions of TrueNAS/FreeNAS for years on lower end hardware, mostly SFF old corporate desktops.
SCALE will automatically use about half of your RAM for ARC, or about 8GB. So whatever apps you use will be limited to about 6GB of ram. I am seeding over 2000 torrents right now and my qBittorrent is using less than 400 MB of RAM, and JellyFin isn't going to be particular RAM hungry either.
IX Literally sells TrueNAS mini's with 16GB of ram. Don't let folks tell you it's not enough...
For your first sever, this sound fine. But as other have said, don't bother using that extra M.2, it's only going to hurt performance. If you have room for more M.2s, you'd be better off using a SPECIAL VDVEV https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-metadata-special-device-real-world-perf-demo/191533
SCALE will automatically use about half of your RAM for ARC, or about 8GB. So whatever apps you use will be limited to about 6GB of ram. I am seeding over 2000 torrents right now and my qBittorrent is using less than 400 MB of RAM, and JellyFin isn't going to be particular RAM hungry either.
IX Literally sells TrueNAS mini's with 16GB of ram. Don't let folks tell you it's not enough...
For your first sever, this sound fine. But as other have said, don't bother using that extra M.2, it's only going to hurt performance. If you have room for more M.2s, you'd be better off using a SPECIAL VDVEV https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-metadata-special-device-real-world-perf-demo/191533
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Hello from the U.S.!
TrueNAS might be more than you're looking for-- it is incredibly powerful but there is overhead. There are hardware requirements not easily met in Poland for a small system and Ubuntu Server might work better, that is for you to decide. My signature contains 2 buttons, the second has links to documentation you'll want to read read and understand first in order to save yourself time and money.
Welcome to the forums.
Thank you for your response :) Did you suggest that Poland is a third world country? :)) That's funny. I just want to use my old computer for this purpose. I5-7600k and possibly 24gb of RAM should work efficiently. I just don't know what to use the M.2 disk for...
NickF
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What information do you have to support this claim? The minimum is 8GB. He has 16. As always, with ZFS, more is better.
Installing SCALE
Provides SCALE installation instructions for both physical hardware and virtual machines using an iso file. It also describes the iso verification process using and OpenPGP encryption application.
If anything, SCALE will likely be a bit more forgiving for a small system due to the very conservative approach to maxmium ARC (due to differances in the kernel between Linux and BSD).
Module Parameters — OpenZFS documentation
Please stop posting generalizations with absolutely no teeth to them. The quantity of RAM in his server is fine.
@otyly_pan My only question is what CPU and motherboard do you plan for this, so that I can advise more specifically?
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The minimum is 16GB.
Core has better memory management.
Please stop giving wrong informations as if they are the absolute truth.
I said he should consider 32GB if he wants to go SCALE.
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On that contrary, that means (potentially) wasted RAM.
NickF
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I literally just linked the manual for SCALE. Please consider clicking on the link and reading the manual. IX Literally sells Minis with 16GB of ram. I have one right now running SCALE. https://www.amazon.com/iXsystems-TrueNAS-Mini-X-Diskless/dp/B08FCWC3VC?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1
More RAM is always better. But 16GB is NOT the minimum. 8 is and has been since SCALE was released, and really has been the minimum for FreeNAS for a decade.
Or, considered another way, it means more RAM is statically allocated to the Linux kernel and any subsequent applications he may want to run, instead of being tied up in ZFS. In larger systems, I agree with you, and I personally have manually modified the maximum ARC because it is otherwise wasteful. In small systems like this,
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NickF
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I hear you, but for a first time user of the software not having to worry about server stability and RAM exhaustion, it's really not a bad default. For OP, he''ll probably have 2-4GB of RAM free and can experiment with a couple other apps in addition to those he linked and shouldn't have to worry.
PS. I am sorry for my frustration here. There are alot of folks who come on these forums and do stupid things, and it's very easy for alot of us here in the community to get frustrated. But at the same time, there's also still a prevailing sense of gatekeeping where people tell new comers that their hardware isn't good enough and they should instead look elsewhere. I don't think OP should, and the comments above mine seemed to be pushing him away.
NickF
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That's a great start. The board you have has Intel LAN which is always better than Realtek. A 7600k has relatively high performance in both single threaded and multi threaded benchmarks, which means your NAS will likely be faster than any commercially available entry level NAS.
You do lack ECC RAM support, however. That is not a deal breaker necessarily, but it is something to consider. I've run many NASs without it, but some folks won't consider putting data on a NAS without it. If your only goal is to watch movies, I don't think it should matter to you too much.
WI_Hedgehog
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My impression is members want newcomers to be successful.
How that happens is particular to the individual and a generalized though usually accurate impression based on past experience. We give them tools, how they use them is up to them. Like you said, ECC RAM is recommend for sound reasons, but a TrueNAS system will run without it.
Building a system is about weighing needs and finding a balance. Fortunately this site has many members wanting to help with that.
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Thats good.
In reality:
Cache (L2ARC) - whilst this can be a good use for a single M.2 NVMe it uses memory to work and you are memory constrained at 16GB or 24GB anyway. Whilst it is use case dependant I wouldn't consider an L2ARC till 32GB (our resident Grinch says 64GB).
SLOG - very few people have a use case where a SLOG is required or even does anything. When you do want a SLOG it has very specific hardware requirements that very few if any consumer NVMe drives satisfy and a lot of enterprise devices aren't good either. Unless you have a use case where its required then avoid even trying this. Its not a write cache and doesn't do what most people seem to think it does
SLOG sensible use cases:
1. VMWare & iSCSI / NFS
2. MAC NFS - caveat - much better to set sync writes=disabled in this case if its just file share
3. Running VM's remotely - I am unsure about running VM's on TrueNAS
4. Running a remote DataBase with the DB on the TrueNAS storage
NickF
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My only concern is that in the history of these types of posts, I've seen a bunch of folks bail on TrueNAS/FreeNAS for things like UnRAID or OpenMediaVault. In my opinion, TrueNAS is better than either of those for various reasons outside of scope of this thread. I want to help more people use TrueNAS :)My impression is members want newcomers to be successful.
How that happens is particular to the individual and a generalized though usually accurate impression based on past experience. We give them tools, how they use them is up to them. Like you said, ECC RAM is recommend for sound reasons, but a TrueNAS system will run without it.
Building a system is about weighing needs and finding a balance. Fortunately this site has many members wanting to help with that.
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You are wrong, because that document wasn't updated: CORE minimum requirements are 16GB, and given SCALE memory handling (which imho is a huge reason to avoid it, and not a "more forgiving" choice for newbies) it's only natural for its RAM minimum requirements to be on pair with CORE's.
Don't trust me? Ask @jgreco, just to mention someone.
Your aggressivness is something that I do not appreciate.
People go away from TN because they expect a one click easy solution (generally because they see a shitty video on YT).
In my opinion, I am happy for those kind of people that "bail" TN: it's simply not the OS they require. TN is not for everyone, you need to put in some effort; it is perfectly legit for some to not want to.
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NickF
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TrueNAS CORE is still 8GB minimum
CORE Hardware Guide
Describes the hardware specifications and system component recommendations for custom TrueNAS CORE deployment.
I am NOT saying that the performance of a system with 8GB of memory will be very good. ARC misses on a RAID Z1 with 3 disks are going to hurt perfomance pretty bad. But from a purely usability and stability standpoint, 16GB is plenty.
Even the community guide, written by some long time contributers here, including Mr Greco, states that 8GB is the minimum while they recommend 16GB.
Hardware Recommendations Guide
This is the latest edition of the FreeNAS Community hardware recommendations guide. The current major version is R2, dated January 2021, with the last minor update on 2021-01-24. The format has moved away from the forum post form factor, to...
www.truenas.com
TrueNAS really really isn't that fat. In 2012 when FreeNAS 9.x was released, the minimum was 8GB. The RAM requirements haven't really grown all that much since then, but 8GB was alot more to ask for back then. People would try and run on a system with 2 or 4 GB of DDR2 and run into stability issues. Now, a system will still happily run as a backup target with 8GB of RAM, and it's easy to get even with an older DDR3 based system. Performance is what will scale with RAM at these smaller nodes, and the payoff between 8 and 16 or even 16 to 32 is pretty big in terms of performance per dollar. But don't tell people not to use it because they have 16GB...
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