Consumer grade hardware for home system

[bflokstra]

I'm looking into TrueNas to setup a NAS for home use. It's not going to store any kind of mission criticle data or anything. It will be storing media files, personal files, etc. What I'm wondering right now is this. Would an i5-9700K with 16GB RAM, a 120GB m.2 SSD be okay for this? For the pools I'll be using two NAS drives of 4TB, mirrored, at first. And will be expanding that as I go along. My end goal is to remove my 6 HDD's harddrives from my main PC (one 4TB, two 2 TB, one 1 TB and 2 6TB hard drives) and moving all that storage over to TrueNas.

I know that it's recommended to use enterprise grade hardware. But for my home system that's a bit of overkill. Combine that will a really small appartment where I have some room for a tower, not any kind of service, plus a very small budget (I got this setup for free from a friend who got a new PC and wanted to recycle this one) and you end up with this.

 

[Etorix]

It's possible, but not optimal as you know.
With this mix of drives you can have mirrors of 2*4, 2*2 and 2*6. The third 4 TB can serve as cold spare for the first two mirrors. There is no good use for a lone 1 TB, except as external backup of the most important data because "ZFS is not a backup".
Have you checked the drives are CMR?

 

[bflokstra]

I’m not sure if the drives are CMR or SMR. They are mostly Seagate Baracuda drives. But I am planning on replacing them with WD Red NAS drives over a period of 2 years. I can’t replace them all at the same time, because of the cost.

 

[jgreco]

I know that it's recommended to use enterprise grade hardware.

No, it isn't. It's recommended to use server grade hardware, which is completely different.

Just like you shouldn't build a gaming PC out of a desktop mainboard, you shouldn't build a server out of a desktop or gaming board.

Server boards cost about the same, but are optimized for 24/7 100% duty long life, have non-Realtek ethernet chipsets (usually Intel), support ECC, have non-idiotic PCIe slot layouts that are designed primarily for x8 cards, and if you pop for an extra handful of dollars, have great-to-have features like IPMI. Many server boards actually cost LESS than comparable gamer mainboards.

"Enterprise grade hardware" includes stuff like HP EliteDesk PC's, which, while being enterprise grade, are nevertheless desktop systems that are not particularly suitable for NAS use. You can certainly get "enterprise grade" servers, but that's not particularly important, and, actually, most of the enterprise vendors sell servers that come in stupid-for-FreeNAS configurations, such as including hardware RAID controllers, dual-CPU configurations, etc.

 

[ChrisRJ]

@bflokstra , from a performance point of view your gear is certainly more than enough for what sketched out.

My "standard" question in cases like this is: Why do you want to do this? The answer to that is usually more important than looking at hardware without context.

SMR drives are a complete(!) no-go, not something like not ideal. It would not only ruin performance in certain scenarios but effectively put data in jeopardy due to long (i.e. days to weeks) resilvering times.