Valantar
Dabbler
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2021
- Messages
- 26
Hi everyone! I've had a Windows-based DIY NAS for around seven years now, but it's been giving me trouble lately and I've been weighing moving to some more NAS-oriented OS for a couple of years, so I guess the stars kind of aligned. I've had TrueNAS recommended to me the most among the various NAS OSes, so that's what I've landed on using. So far I've set up a test install on the core hardware it'll be running on, though I'll be re-using a lot of hardware, so the current iteration is necessarily rather preliminary. I've got a bunch of questions, and I've been searching, reading and looking around, but can't say I've found much in terms of answers. No doubt my searching and skimming skills are the source of that issue (as well as a limited understanding of relevant terminology), but most of my questions being kind of vague and specific at the same time is probably also a reason. I'm pretty experienced as a PC user, but I've never managed to penetrate Linux, BSD and other non-Windows OSes beyond the odd experiments and copy+pasting terminal commands from the internet. That might change now that I have an actual legitimate use for such an OS, though I also hope I can make this a mostly appliance-like setup with minimal maintenance required.
First, the hardware I'll be running:
CPU: Ryzen 5 1600X
Motherboard: Biostar X370GTN ITX
GPU: n/a (have a spare one ICE)
RAM: Currently 2x8GB DDR4, planning to upgrade to 2x16GB ECC UDIMM
PSU: Silverstone SX500LG SFX-L, keeping this from the current build
Case: Fractal Design Node 304, also keeping this
Boot drive: currently a 32GB flash drive, long term I'm planning to re-use the 128GB SATA SSD from the current Windows setup
Storage: 2x4TB WD Red drives, 1x 6TB Seagate, all three from the current NAS. 4TB drives mirrored, used for backups, 6tb as standalone media storage. Also have a spare 512GB SSD I'm thinking I'll use for a read cache.
The motherboard and CPU are inherited from my main PC. PSU is from the current NAS, as is the storage. I don't have the budget to meaningfully upgrade this at the moment, but I'm planning to replace the 2x4TB drives with 10TB drives this year. The 6TB drive is for now treated as expendable, though it would be nice to get some parity set up for that too. But again, that's in the future.
Usage: this is a home backup/media storage build. There will be two users across five PCs, three wired and two wireless. Overall system load will be very low, with no performance intensive local tasks. Photo editing (Lightroom/Photoshop) off the NAS will probably be the most intensive workload in terms of actually noticeable performance differences depending on the configuration.
So, to the questions:
- The motherboard has four SATA ports, which is barely enough for the drives I currently have. So I need an HBA. LSI hardware seems widely recommended, but they have a million models (especially when counting OEM variants), making it pretty much impossible to figure out which to get, or if there are meaningful differences at all. I've seen recommendations to buy from specific Ebay sellers to ensure you get the correct firmware (though I don't need configuration options or anything beyond the drives showing up). Are there any widely accepted best practices/best HBAs/recommended sources of hardware?
- I'm also planning on wiring up the apartment for 2.5GbE (any faster isn't worth it for our use, but the speed increase over 1GbE will be nice for photo editing off the NAS and similar work), which means adding a NIC. I'm thinking one of the relatively ubiquitous Realtek-based ones, which do seem to have BSD driver support (at least judging by the relative lack of recent posts asking about it compared to a while back). Are these reliable, and does TrueNAS have drivers for them included? I haven't got the foggiest clue how to install drivers for anything in TrueNAS (I assume this requires the shell?), so it would definitely be nice to choose OOTB supported hardware. I know there is plenty of affordable used 10GbE hardware out there, but sadly most of that doesn't support 2.5/5GbE speeds, and 10GbE switches are either too loud for home use or disgustingly expensive, so that's a no-go (and SFP+ is out of the question). Any advice here would be much appreciated.
- Related to the above point, seeing how I want to add two pieces of PCIe hardware on an ITX board: does anyone have any experience with PCIe bifurcation in TrueNAS? Is there any reason to avoid it? My motherboard has the worst BIOS I've ever come across (that includes motherboards in the early 2000s - that's what I get for absolutely needing the first available AM4 ITX board I guess), so I'm not 100% sure bifurcation will actually work on it, but worst case scenario I get a split riser I can re-use for something else later, and I'll run the NIC off the m.2 slot instead. Still, I would love to hear if anyone has any (good/bad) experience to share.
- Storage setup: The current W10 setup runs two separate storage pools, with the 4TB drives in a parity Windows Storage Space and the 6TB drive by itself. I'd like to keep these separate still, so I'm thinking I'll set up two pools, one for media and one for backups etc. The backup pool will also be hosting photos for editing etc, so it's not quite cold storage, but it's not accessed frequently. Backups from PCs are periodic, though I'm thinking I might configure separate shares for Windows File History for the two main desktops, otherwise everything will be accessible to both of us. I don't think a write cache is at all necessary for this setup, but a read cache would be a huge boon for photo editing - browsing through a library of 50MB RAW files in Lightroom gets laggy quickly off a HDD. As mentioned I have a spare 500GB SATA SSD that could do this job nicely. Are there any glaring oversights in this setup? I know reusing old HDDs is a bit iffy, but they'll be upgraded in due time, and with the HBA I'll even have the SATA ports for a parity drive for media at some point.
I know this is quite the wall of text, and that most of these questions are no doubt answerable with sufficient time spent searching and reading. I just really hope someone can show some mercy to a TrueNAS beginner and help me parse some of the tons of (often conflicting) information out there. Thanks in advance.
First, the hardware I'll be running:
CPU: Ryzen 5 1600X
Motherboard: Biostar X370GTN ITX
GPU: n/a (have a spare one ICE)
RAM: Currently 2x8GB DDR4, planning to upgrade to 2x16GB ECC UDIMM
PSU: Silverstone SX500LG SFX-L, keeping this from the current build
Case: Fractal Design Node 304, also keeping this
Boot drive: currently a 32GB flash drive, long term I'm planning to re-use the 128GB SATA SSD from the current Windows setup
Storage: 2x4TB WD Red drives, 1x 6TB Seagate, all three from the current NAS. 4TB drives mirrored, used for backups, 6tb as standalone media storage. Also have a spare 512GB SSD I'm thinking I'll use for a read cache.
The motherboard and CPU are inherited from my main PC. PSU is from the current NAS, as is the storage. I don't have the budget to meaningfully upgrade this at the moment, but I'm planning to replace the 2x4TB drives with 10TB drives this year. The 6TB drive is for now treated as expendable, though it would be nice to get some parity set up for that too. But again, that's in the future.
Usage: this is a home backup/media storage build. There will be two users across five PCs, three wired and two wireless. Overall system load will be very low, with no performance intensive local tasks. Photo editing (Lightroom/Photoshop) off the NAS will probably be the most intensive workload in terms of actually noticeable performance differences depending on the configuration.
So, to the questions:
- The motherboard has four SATA ports, which is barely enough for the drives I currently have. So I need an HBA. LSI hardware seems widely recommended, but they have a million models (especially when counting OEM variants), making it pretty much impossible to figure out which to get, or if there are meaningful differences at all. I've seen recommendations to buy from specific Ebay sellers to ensure you get the correct firmware (though I don't need configuration options or anything beyond the drives showing up). Are there any widely accepted best practices/best HBAs/recommended sources of hardware?
- I'm also planning on wiring up the apartment for 2.5GbE (any faster isn't worth it for our use, but the speed increase over 1GbE will be nice for photo editing off the NAS and similar work), which means adding a NIC. I'm thinking one of the relatively ubiquitous Realtek-based ones, which do seem to have BSD driver support (at least judging by the relative lack of recent posts asking about it compared to a while back). Are these reliable, and does TrueNAS have drivers for them included? I haven't got the foggiest clue how to install drivers for anything in TrueNAS (I assume this requires the shell?), so it would definitely be nice to choose OOTB supported hardware. I know there is plenty of affordable used 10GbE hardware out there, but sadly most of that doesn't support 2.5/5GbE speeds, and 10GbE switches are either too loud for home use or disgustingly expensive, so that's a no-go (and SFP+ is out of the question). Any advice here would be much appreciated.
- Related to the above point, seeing how I want to add two pieces of PCIe hardware on an ITX board: does anyone have any experience with PCIe bifurcation in TrueNAS? Is there any reason to avoid it? My motherboard has the worst BIOS I've ever come across (that includes motherboards in the early 2000s - that's what I get for absolutely needing the first available AM4 ITX board I guess), so I'm not 100% sure bifurcation will actually work on it, but worst case scenario I get a split riser I can re-use for something else later, and I'll run the NIC off the m.2 slot instead. Still, I would love to hear if anyone has any (good/bad) experience to share.
- Storage setup: The current W10 setup runs two separate storage pools, with the 4TB drives in a parity Windows Storage Space and the 6TB drive by itself. I'd like to keep these separate still, so I'm thinking I'll set up two pools, one for media and one for backups etc. The backup pool will also be hosting photos for editing etc, so it's not quite cold storage, but it's not accessed frequently. Backups from PCs are periodic, though I'm thinking I might configure separate shares for Windows File History for the two main desktops, otherwise everything will be accessible to both of us. I don't think a write cache is at all necessary for this setup, but a read cache would be a huge boon for photo editing - browsing through a library of 50MB RAW files in Lightroom gets laggy quickly off a HDD. As mentioned I have a spare 500GB SATA SSD that could do this job nicely. Are there any glaring oversights in this setup? I know reusing old HDDs is a bit iffy, but they'll be upgraded in due time, and with the HBA I'll even have the SATA ports for a parity drive for media at some point.
I know this is quite the wall of text, and that most of these questions are no doubt answerable with sufficient time spent searching and reading. I just really hope someone can show some mercy to a TrueNAS beginner and help me parse some of the tons of (often conflicting) information out there. Thanks in advance.