Advice on Hardware for New NAS Build

[PhantomICEMAn]

Hi im in the process of planning on building a NAS build. intially i was going to opt for synology nas but now looking at the money saving as well as the performance increases you can get through a DIY solution ive decided to go down that route. Im planning on building a 8 disk nas intially starting with 3 16tb EXOS X18 drives and adding more further down the line as and when the need for more storage arises.My inital plan was to build intel 12600k system on the B760-i platform with DDR 5 to make it furture proof but by reading some of the posts im concerned i might be going in the wrong direction and may fall into issues further down the line with the TRUE NAS software.The server will be used for 3 main things:-

• File Storage
• Plex Streaming - predominatly streaming 4K
• Running a small number of virtual machines if required

I might be allowing others to connect to plex so for the purpose of this assume theres probably 10 streams required at one time and will most likely require transcoding capability since these could be accessed on an assortment of devices.Ideally i want something that has built in graphics if possible to remove the need for buying a seperate graphics card.Im looking for a small form factor setup most likely using the JONSBO N3 case to house the hardware. Can you please recommend hardware that would suit my requirements. I want to benfit from the black friday sales hence why i have held back till now so if you can please provide this week that would be greatly appreciated .

 

[danb35]

intially starting with 3 16tb EXOS X18 drives and adding more further down the line

You should do some reading about ZFS, because it doesn't work like you seem to think it does. The resources section of this forum has some relevant information.

As to hardware recommendations, those are also in the Resources area--they really haven't changed in the last few years. There's no particular reason to be using the latest-generation stuff. But do you really expect to be serving 10 streams simultaneously on a regular basis? That's a lot of transcoding.

To put this in perspective, according to Plex, transcoding a single 4k stream requires a CPU PassMark score of roughly 12,000. Ten such streams would thus require ~120,000. My dual Xeon Gold 6132s score about 35,000, so might manage three such streams. The i5-12600k you mention performs surprisingly well (at least to me) at just under 28,000, but that still only handles two 2k streams.

 

[PhantomICEMAn]

I think 10 streams is thinking of the worse case scenario, i think 2-3 max is probably more realistic and i think i wil be limited by upload bandwith so currently streaming outside my home network is probably out of the question until my ISP increases its .

Il be reading up on zfs but is the short of it is once its setup it cannot be expanded so you have to start with all the disks?. I need a solution that is expanable as i cannot simply afford close to £2000 on disks to start off with along with the hardware on top. Its something i will have to add and expand as i go along.

To rephrase my above question this the intial hardware (below) i had in mind is it likely to cause an issue with a true nas scale implementation as im reading various articles here where people have fallen into issues in deploying true nas using desktop hardware. But the ive seen other where people seem to have none so im might a bit confused and conflicted. Apologies but ive never built a server before so im probably approaching this more from a desktop than a server architecture.Ive opted to use recent hardware just to get benefit of the more recent technologies as well have a longer life span in term technology wise(if im already using pre-dated hardware , how long will be before its not able to keep up with the current technological requirments.).

CPU: 12600K
Mobo: Strix B760-i
memory : 32 gb DDR5 ECC ram
NVME cache: drive : WD SN850x 2tb
bootdrive: undecided
PSU: SFX PSU most likely plantinum

again i might be approaching this totally incorrectly and there might be an alternate solution that will be better suited to me. I can only spend upto £1000 on hardware(excluding disks), im already going above budget as is but at the end of the day i want to make sure its money well spent and it works as intended.

 

[somethingweird]

Mobo: Strix B760-i
memory : 32 gb DDR5 ECC ram

Does that motherboard *really* support ECC? - https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-b760-i-gaming-wifi-model/spec/

NVME cache: drive : WD SN850x 2tb

Don't bother till you max out memory.

bootdrive: undecided

Just need to small like 500GB .. (don't know exactly how small - but I know 1TB+ is a waste of space)

 

[somethingweird]

Im planning on building a 8 disk nas intially starting with 3 16tb EXOS X18 drive

How are you planning to expand to 8 disk with that motherboard?

 

[danb35]

once its setup it cannot be expanded so you have to start with all the disks?

Not exactly. However, you can't expand a vdev. So, if you were to start with three disks in RAIDZ1 (which we wouldn't recommend anyway, but that's a separate discussion), you can't turn that into a four-disk RAIDZ1 vdev--at least not currently. You could, however, add a second three-disk RAIDZ1 vdev.

If you're planning on expanding over time, mirrors are probably a better way to go. Start with one mirrored pair of disks, add a second as needed, etc.

I'd again encourage you to read and follow the hardware recommendations guide you appear to be ignoring.

 

[PhantomICEMAn]

How are you planning to expand to 8 disk with that motherboard?

Im getting an nvme adapater that adds an additional 6 sata ports to it which would sit in the nvme port underneath the board . This would directly feed into sata ports on the case i can then use two ports from the motherboard to complete the 8.

 

[Ericloewe]

Oooh, that's a terrible idea. Please avoid all sorts of dodgy AHCI controllers. Since it's not easy to identify the non-dodgy AHCI controllers, that means "avoid all AHCI controllers not integrated in the chipset".

Also:

nvme adapater that adds an additional 6 sata ports

That's not a thing. I happen to know of the product you're thinking of, but what you describe does not make sense. You are referring to a PCIe AHCI SATA controller crammed into an M.2 form factor. NVMe is a protocol on top of PCIe for non-volatile storage, not a physical layer and certainly not a connector (I can think of more than half a dozen families of connectors typically used with NVMe SSDs on the host side of things).

 

[asap2go]

You should do some reading about ZFS, because it doesn't work like you seem to think it does. The resources section of this forum has some relevant information.

As to hardware recommendations, those are also in the Resources area--they really haven't changed in the last few years. There's no particular reason to be using the latest-generation stuff. But do you really expect to be serving 10 streams simultaneously on a regular basis? That's a lot of transcoding.

To put this in perspective, according to Plex, transcoding a single 4k stream requires a CPU PassMark score of roughly 12,000. Ten such streams would thus require ~120,000. My dual Xeon Gold 6132s score about 35,000, so might manage three such streams. The i5-12600k you mention performs surprisingly well (at least to me) at just under 28,000, but that still only handles two 2k streams.

With Exos you should have a constant load on the drives. Otherwise it will continuously load and unload the heads which is bad for their lifetime.
There are tools to disable that though.
I believe OpenSea under linux. Just did that recently. There are several threads about it here.
I prefer the Toshiba MG08 Enterprise Drives.

 

[somethingweird]

interesting piece of hardware.

Gen3 M.2 M Key to 6 Ports SATA 3.0 Adapter Card NVMe to SATA3.0​

https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-0003-00027

 

[Arwen]

In general, any M.2 M key to more than 2 SATA ports has to be examined carefully. Their are some that use a 2 port SATA chip, and a SATA port multiplier to get 5 or 6 SATA ports. SATA port multipliers are not recommended for use with TrueNAS.

The one listed above does not show any indication of using a SATA port multiplier. But, more research would have to be done to be certain.