At what point does it make sense to purchase a retired rack server as opposed to build?

[Davvo]

Coral (version 10)

The version thou shan't nominate?

Not at $500 a system. That is not expensive. I'd still love to see the system specs for that machine if it's something you already have build. I'm curious how far it might waver from a recommended ZFS system.

Especially since ITX is usually pricier, really curios myself as well.

 

[Whattteva]

LOL, yea. We had version 8.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.0.3, 8.1, and it incremented like that. I would modify and compile my own unique versions and feed back any problems generally with code for the fixes. I stopped working the code just as Coral (version 10) crapped all over us. iXsystems rushed it and it flopped, hard. Coral was written in another programming language that I was not familiar with and I didn't care to learn it. I was only a beta tester after that point. My Beta testing is limited now, mainly because there are so many eager kids out there ready to do it. I'm not that eager anymore.

That's pretty cool. I know that TrueNAS currently runs on Python, but what did it run on at first and what did Coral run on? That was indeed quite a crapshoot. I was confused when the upgrade of Coral looked like I was really reverting back to the previous version.

I guess if I had a towering system that used 1.21 Gigawatts then I might do some beta testing again.

This is just begging for a Back To the Future reference. I guess all you need to get back to beta testing again is just a DeLorean and a "bolt of lightning!"... and of course.... The Flux Capacitor.

The version thou shan't nominate?

And.. just like that, we've jumped from Back To The Future to "you know who" (Voldemort of FreeNAS).

 

[rvassar]

Just a quick thought... Many rackmount servers have tower equivalents for office use, even the "current" stuff. They're not as common, and it's often difficult to find the backplane configs most of us would be interested in, but they do exist, ala:

R630 -> T630
R640 -> T640
Etc...

I know some of the T630's came with 18x3.5" slots...

 

[tawnytim]

LOL, yea. We had version 8.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.0.3, 8.1, and it incremented like that. I would modify and compile my own unique versions and feed back any problems generally with code for the fixes. I stopped working the code just as Coral (version 10) crapped all over us. iXsystems rushed it and it flopped, hard. Coral was written in another programming language that I was not familiar with and I didn't care to learn it. I was only a beta tester after that point. My Beta testing is limited now, mainly because there are so many eager kids out there ready to do it. I'm not that eager anymore. I guess if I had a towering system that used 1.21 Gigawatts then I might do some beta testing again.

Well this was a bit off topic but fun.



Not at $500 a system. That is not expensive. I'd still love to see the system specs for that machine if it's something you already have build. I'm curious how far it might waver from a recommended ZFS system.

That's $500 to me, not my client. That's also a budget machine designed for the two person legal office, etc. I just went on pcpartspicker and threw something together. ASUS A320 AM4 board, Ryzen 5, 16GB DDR4, Corsair 450W psu, Fractal Node 304 case - nothing fancy. I'm now enthralled with truenas because I see endless possibilities in terms of hardware.

 

[Davvo]

I'm now enthralled with truenas because I see endless possibilities in terms of hardware.

As long as you don't use a realtek NIC and a few other things you are generally fine.

Show : Hardware

Is my Realtek ethernet really that bad?

One of the longest running issues faced here in the forums may be people who come to these forums, wanting to recycle an old PC into a NAS. In general, this is a bad idea because typical PC hardware isn't optimized towards the task. However...

www.truenas.com

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers

In the last year or two, we've had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use port multipliers, and use cheap SATA controllers only after extensive research. SATA controllers and SATA...

www.truenas.com

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

I suggest you looking in my signature for more resources or directly in the appropriate section of the forum.

 

[joeschmuck]

That's $500 to me, not my client. That's also a budget machine designed for the two person legal office, etc. I just went on pcpartspicker and threw something together. ASUS A320 AM4 board, Ryzen 5, 16GB DDR4, Corsair 450W psu, Fractal Node 304 case - nothing fancy. I'm now enthralled with truenas because I see endless possibilities in terms of hardware.

As @Davvo earlier posted, read the recommended hardware guide. I think the key things to look for are:
1) ECC RAM
2) CPU and MB that supports ECC RAM
3) Intel NIC (preferred), not Realtek.

Everything else is a Use Case decision:
1) CPU Speed
2) How much ECC RAM
3) NIC Speed
4) Case Size
5) Drives (HDD/SSD/NVMe)
6) Boot Drive (highly recommend a SSD approx 16GB or larger)

I have a small Atom based Supermicro motherboard, slow as hell to bootstrap (about a minute) but once it's up, file transfers are fine. A good small office NAS but it depends on the Use Case. I bought it as a Firewall (Sophos) project and that ran fine for years, then I moved and didn't need that firewall anymore.

 

[firesyde424]

A good place to get reasonably priced servers can be 5-6 year old server models from Ebay. The reason for that age specifically is a lot of corporate replacement cycles around servers are typically 5 years. So go look for servers about that old as most company IT departments will strip the servers of drives and send them to recyclers or 3rd party sellers. Right now, you can find a ton of 13th gen Dell servers(T330,T430, R430, R530, R630, R730, R730xd, ect...) for right around $500-600 USD. If you get lucky, you'll have some RAM, if not, low spec DDR4 registered ECC is also cheap for similar reasons as the servers.

 

[Whattteva]

HP G8 I think is around that same gen. Tends to be cheaper also than Dell's.

Worth noting that going rack probably isn't the right route for most home users, especially if you're looking into running it in your living/bed room as these things tend to be loud and power hungry. They also usually don't use a standard form factor, so you can't just take the motherboard and fit it in another chassis. Lastly, they tend to come with RAID controllers and need the HBA replaced for use with ZFS.

 

[tawnytim]

@joeschmuck You know what, I completely didn't account for ECC memory. Although Synology DS series appliances do not use ECC memory. Probably their RS series do.

Yeah, can't do it for $500 if I need an ECC board and CPU.

 

[tawnytim]

HP G8 I think is around that same gen. Tends to be cheaper also than Dell's.

Worth noting that going rack probably isn't the right route for most home users, especially if you're looking into running it in your living/bed room as these things tend to be loud and power hungry. They also usually don't use a standard form factor, so you can't just take the motherboard and fit it in another chassis. Lastly, they tend to come with RAID controllers and need the HBA replaced for use with ZFS.

Yeah, I think I'd be happy replacing our office NAS with a rack server (and I'd use an HBA regardless of requirement)due to already having rack appliances but I'd never sell that to a client. I'm dumbfounded Synology doesn't really have any 1:1 competitors. The truenas boxes are really nice but SPENDY. Of course I know when you're selling data protection and redundancy you should be selling value and not price but my main client base for this application are very small businesses generally with fewer than 10 people. Most of the time it's a two person legal or accounting office and they tend to scare easily. Folks have trouble envisioning a total data loss if they've never experienced it. I had a business come to me with a machine which wouldn't boot. They had all 20 years of their quickbooks files in exactly one place - that hard drive - which was smoked. Sent it to the forensic lab we normally use and it couldn't be saved. The look on her face... Now being a tech guy, all my stuff is secure and redundant both on site and off site. I too would love one of those truenas boxes but I just can't justify the cost. I love the idea of supporting the devs by buying their equipment when I have other options but the price gap is just too large. Same thing with pfSense. I was always a pfSense guy but the netgate appliances are crazy spendy. I do sell them to clients but for myself, my router/firewall is a Dell Optiplex:)

I guess that's part of why Synology doesn't direct ship or deal in any type of partner logistics, so they can keep the cost of entry low and desirable.

 

[jgreco]

Worth noting that going rack probably isn't the right route for most home users, especially if you're looking into running it in your living/bed room as these things tend to be loud and power hungry. They also usually don't use a standard form factor, so you can't just take the motherboard and fit it in another chassis. Lastly, they tend to come with RAID controllers and need the HBA replaced for use with ZFS.

This isn't exactly true. Supermicro's ATX stuff accepts most standard ATX boards, even non-Supermicro. The rackmount servers are generally noisy because of the energy dissipated forcing air around the drives, but you can also buy a 12 or 24 bay chassis, replace the fans with "quiet" gamer fans, and populate the drive bays in a checkerboard pattern, which generally makes it possible to cool 12 drives in a 24 bay chassis with minimal noise. I should write up a resource on this topic.

 

[Whattteva]

This isn't exactly true. Supermicro's ATX stuff accepts most standard ATX boards, even non-Supermicro. The rackmount servers are generally noisy because of the energy dissipated forcing air around the drives, but you can also buy a 12 or 24 bay chassis, replace the fans with "quiet" gamer fans, and populate the drive bays in a checkerboard pattern, which generally makes it possible to cool 12 drives in a 24 bay chassis with minimal noise. I should write up a resource on this topic.

Well sure. But I was replying to the post before me that mentioned Dell rack servers, which generally use their proprietary format.

 

[joeschmuck]

@joeschmuck You know what, I completely didn't account for ECC memory. Although Synology DS series appliances do not use ECC memory. Probably their RS series do.

Yeah, can't do it for $500 if I need an ECC board and CPU.

I guess it depends on what you are selling your customer base. If you are selling a device which has been designed with data integrity as the first priority then that is the reason for having ZFS and ECC RAM as a baseline. Then it depends on the use case as to how much ECC RAM you will need. And I would not sell a system with an L2ARC unless it has 64GB or more RAM (preferably 128GB RAM), otherwise it's just a gimmick. 16GB RAM and an L2ARC, just makes a slower system.

Last piece of advice... Do a real Burn In test of the entire system if you are selling these to a business. I believe @jgreco (sorry if I listed the wrong person) has said that he has burned in systems for 30+ days to prove they are good. That sounds like a lot to me but then again I don't have a business that depends on the data being present and correct at all times.

 

[Davvo]

iIbelieve @jgreco (sorry if I listed the wrong person) has said that he has burned in systems for 30+ days to prove they are good.

Wasn't his longest 60 or 90 days? I might be wrong though.
Anyway, regarding disks I seem to recall he suggests to burn-in the first 1000hrs to make reasonably sure they survive infant mortality.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Wasn't his longest 60 or 90 days? I might be wrong though.
Anyway, regarding disks I seem to recall he suggests to burn-in the first 1000hrs to make reasonably sure they survive infant mortality.

I did a bit more than 3 months with my TrueNAS (see signature). Still had an issue with an HDD 4 months later, though .

 

[Davvo]

I did a bit more than 3 months with my TrueNAS (see signature). Still had an issue with an HDD 4 months later, though .

The bathub strikes back.

 

[joeschmuck]

For my personal NAS, a few hours (2 to 4) of Prime 95 and at least 24 hours or 5 complete passes of MemTest86+ are fine for me, One SMART Short, Long and one complete pass of BadBlocks for the hard drives with zero errors, SSD just gets the SMART tests, but that is a personal server, not business.

 

[tawnytim]

Man, you all are wicked-intelligent - what a great community. I wish Synology could have been a different company, but you know, we vote with our wallets. Otherwise, corporations are no different than politicians. You keep letting them get away with not putting their constituents first and before you know it, it's the new status quo. I've committed to a new life with Truenas, not only for myself and my business, but for my customers too.

I'm going to have a look at the article which is purportedly very old in tech years, but nonetheless evergreen. I've got hardware on the mind.

 

[tawnytim]

Also, why does it tell me that in this category, I don't have sufficient privileges to post here? I mean, this is actually my post.

 

[jgreco]

Also, why does it tell me that in this category, I don't have sufficient privileges to post here? I mean, this is actually my post.

Where's it saying that, since clearly you managed to post? On the other hand, Xenforo is really finicky and the admin who is tasked with doing stuff occasionally runs into weird stuff.