Build recommendation

[truenasinterested]

Hi there,

many thanks for TrueNAS Scale and this forum!

I come from a QNAP TS-653D using 6x 16TB in a RAID5 configuration with 2 SATA SSDs for another volume. Although it's really not a bad NAS at all, I'd say, the creators for the money they took spent every second of their time designing this making sure you'll regret not having spent more. I only say PCIe 2.0 x1 (no, it's not obvious, you got to read the small appendix to know as the physical slot is x4 or x8). The 10Gbps interface thus is next to useless. Anyway, the TS-653D was sufficient to tease me how much sense centralised (useful!) storage will make so i need to move on. The TS-653D will stay and backup each other. There will be a backup of essential folders using RSYNC on external hard disk drives (need to understand how these tasks can be automated).

I will require
-media storage (several TB of TV recordings) on Plex (hardware transcoding licensed), est. 60TB
-document storage (nothing special, some word files, tax documents, archive of old files, est. 20TB
-backup (Proxmox, Time Machine, Clonezilla) storage, est. 12TB
-future unknown use (rest), but i assume it will fill well in time

I will be 99,9% of the time the only user so i think IOPS performance is not an issue and will certainly be better than the TS-653D which would be fine if it were to support 10Gbps. Plus i use external Thunderbolt SSDs if performance is really required, but saturating 10Gbps link r/w would be good.

The parts list i came up with is
-Fractal Design Node 804
-10x Toshiba MG10ACA20TE (20TB) in a RAIDZ2 configuration (to keep resilvering times lower than on RAIDZ)
-Asrock Rack E3C236D4U
-intel Xeon E3-1275 v6
-64GB ECC DRAM
-LSI 8port SAS/SATA PCIe x8 9300-8i Adapter with IT firmware
-Mellanox 10Gbps card
-StarTech PCIe-Expander for m.2 NVMe SSDs with 2x 1TB WD Red SN700 (because the Mainboard does not support bitfurcation)
-SATA Crucial 256GB MX500 Bootdrive

I value my data and will sync with the second NAS as well as backup to external drives.

What do you think of the build, of the RAIDZ2 plan? Any general comments, advise? Many thanks in advance!

 

[Arwen]

Nothing stands out as a bad choice. (Others might have more opinions...)

However, what is the plan for the 2 M.2 NVMe drives?

Your various use cases don't list them. The old NAS had 2 SATA SSDs in another volume, but again, no specific use case was listed.

 

[truenasinterested]

Thanks, i am not too sure yet about them. I think because it's an expander board with a PCIe bridge, the second m.2 is not as fast (but quick enough with ~2GBps). Best thing would be to have some kind of tier-ing (like taking the data, then pass it through with delayed write but there is no solution yet doing this IIRC. I read that one can use it for ARC cache but I don't know how useful this will be. I any case, i value my data and if avoiding SSD usage benefits the file system integrity, then i will be using them only for additional storage and maybe i script some tier-ing if possible.
Any other recommendations?