shanemikel
Dabbler
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2022
- Messages
- 49
Hi everybody, this is my first forum post! I'm a prospective, new TrueNAS user. I'm looking at some used hardware on eBay, Craigslist, and elsewhere for a new home lab I'm building. I've read a bit on the forums and hardware guides, in addition to watching YouTube videos, but there's a ton of information to consider. I'm looking for any advice, considerations, or possible concerns about the hardware I'm looking at for my TrueNAS build. I'll start by giving some background.
I'm building a home lab in a 25U 4 post open rack. I already have a 2x 6TB HDD (Software RAID 1) Synology NAS. My goal is to prune data, organize it, and move it onto a TrueNAS system, after which I plan to sell the Synology system.
I have a Dell R610 server, and I expect to pick up 1 or 2 more compute servers over the coming months. I'm planning to use OpenStack or VMware, and I'm interested in using iSCSI or something similar (i.e. the OpenStack Cinder driver for TrueNAS) for storage on the compute servers. So I don't expect to use the TrueNAS system for much compute or virtualization, other than storage management tasks. For instance, I may want to run some monitoring, search, indexing, or remote backup services on the TrueNAS, however I may want to run (even these) storage related tasks on dedicated compute.
I found a used Dell PowerEdge R730xd server with the following specs:
From what I've read, my sense is that this is plenty of beef for a dedicated storage server. What do you think? My guess is the bottleneck here will be RAM. I read somewhere that you recommend 5GB RAM per 1TB of storage? In that case I should double the RAM to 64GB? If necessary, I can find another CPU for the other socket.
I'm building a home lab in a 25U 4 post open rack. I already have a 2x 6TB HDD (Software RAID 1) Synology NAS. My goal is to prune data, organize it, and move it onto a TrueNAS system, after which I plan to sell the Synology system.
I have a Dell R610 server, and I expect to pick up 1 or 2 more compute servers over the coming months. I'm planning to use OpenStack or VMware, and I'm interested in using iSCSI or something similar (i.e. the OpenStack Cinder driver for TrueNAS) for storage on the compute servers. So I don't expect to use the TrueNAS system for much compute or virtualization, other than storage management tasks. For instance, I may want to run some monitoring, search, indexing, or remote backup services on the TrueNAS, however I may want to run (even these) storage related tasks on dedicated compute.
I found a used Dell PowerEdge R730xd server with the following specs:
- 19x SAS 600GB drives
- I'm not sure the model of PERC in this server, but they should all support JBOD, right?
- 1x Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 2.4 GHz CPU, 8 cores
- 32GB DDR4 ECC RAM (not sure if it's buffered)
- NICs unknown
- Redundant PSU
From what I've read, my sense is that this is plenty of beef for a dedicated storage server. What do you think? My guess is the bottleneck here will be RAM. I read somewhere that you recommend 5GB RAM per 1TB of storage? In that case I should double the RAM to 64GB? If necessary, I can find another CPU for the other socket.