Which Mini system for home use on Scale

[Grit]

I need some quick/pracitcal input on Mini hardare for TrueNAS Scale on a home system.

This is just a home system, acting as a file server, home backup, and a few VMs (thus Scale) that are local use (Roon Core, an internal web server, a local Minecraft server, etc). I'd prefer a smaller and quieter system, but I do not want to underpower it or have delays accessing VMs or files due to hardware limitations.

I was looking at the Mini (2 core, 16GB RAM), Mini X (4 core, 16GB or 32GB RAM), and Mini X+ (8 core, 32GB RAM). I'd greatly appreciate any thoughts/inputs for hardware requirements for my use case!

 

[Stux]

In my experience, RAM is important if you are going to be running VMs, but something which should be considered is what the backing store for the VM is going to be.

You want fast low-latency storage for the VM, and you ideally want the VMs image to be sync enabled too.

Thus running a VM off a RaidZ of disks is not great for performance.

A pair of SSDs would be a good alternative for your VMs.

 

[ian351c]

Hi @Grit!

My use cases are very similar to yours. Here's what I have so you can compare:
Use Cases:
- Storage for movies, music, etc. for my family
- VMs for Home Automation (Homeseer) and DNS.
- Apps for Plex, Minecraft (using hexparrot/mineos Docker container), and *rr apps.
My System:
AMD 5650 6 Cores/12 Threads
64 GB RAM (Not ECC, which is a no-no, but I choose to live dangerously here)
1x 64GB SATA SSD for boot
2x 512GB NVMe SSD in a mirror for Apps and VMs
4x 12TB SATA HDD for mass storage

You could probably get away with the Mini X with 32 GB RAM. I recommend against 16 GB RAM if you are going to do both storage and Apps/VMs. The only red flag to me is the fact that the Minis are all Intel Atom based. That could be an issue if you want to do Plex transcoding, or large and/or multiplayer Minecraft worlds.

 

[Grit]

Oh, that's quite helpful. All of my videos are in 4K or HD and I never transcode things up, just down. My minecraft server is just for my kids and an occasional friend. I don't envision it ever having more than 10 players, and regulary it's just 2-4 players.

I looked at motherboards yesterday.. most of the PC ones don't support ECC RAM, but I' not convinced I'd need it for my purposes here. I looked mostly at Supermicro and ASRock Server boards, usually with Atom chips built in.

I liked the lower power use by the Mini boxes, but never considered any transcoding issues.

What case did you go with? Smallest I found won't support hot-swappable drives. I don't NEED hot-swappable drives, but I don't love the idea of them.

 

[ian351c]

As far as transcoding and Minecraft edge cases go (for CPU anyways): transcoding down to 720p or 480p for people watching movies over the internet (which I have) can be a problem, especially from 4k. If you don't have to worry bout that, then an Atom prolly isn't an issue for transcoding. I also happen to have this one Minecraft map that has been played by my family for years and they love keeping it around. It's HUGE. It's a CPU hog when even 1 person is on it (mostly because Java hasn't been multithreaded until very recently and even now, I'm not sure how much advantage the current Java gives me in that space).

Edge cases aside, it sounds like an Atom might work for you.

As for the case, I have a used Supermicro 3U case I got on eBay and replaced the super loud dual power supplies with a single 500W Silverstone TFX PSU. I used a TFX PSU because an ATX PSU won't fit in that particular case. This is technically for my "old NAS" which is now my home lab box. I have a couple older Rosewill 4U cases as well, but they aren't anything special. I also happen to have a 36U rack in my basement, so my situation might be different than yours. Unless you have a rack, a tower case is prolly the way to go. I've seen some pretty cool cases in the forums over the years, but I don't know any off the top of my head that I'd recommend. Having a hot swap backplane is nice though, so if you can afford it, I'd go that way...