First Home Server Build for TrueNAS - seeking advice & guidance

[Prasad]

I am exploring options to build TrueNAS Server for home use.
Currently I have 3 NAS units (Drobo5N, Synology, D-Link with over 50TB of data mostly video & audio)
I hav been assembling my own PCS for past 2 decades (Windows PC only)
Zero experience with Linux/ TrueNAS

Hardware Shorlisted:
Casing: Fractal Node 804 (MicroATX) (Already purchsed)
Motherboard: SuperMicro X12STH-LN4F 'OR' X12STH-F
CPU: Intel Xeon E-2334
RAM: 128MB (32x4) Kingston 32GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600)
HDD: WD Ultrastar HC570 22TB (planning to procure in phases - need your advise to start with minimum count, will eventually get 8 HDDs)
PSU: 850W modular
Internal HD Mini SAS to 4XSATA Cable - 01
M.2 SSD - advice required

Budget - $4-5K

Appreciate your feedback/ advice/guidance/ suggestions.
Thank You.

 

[Prasad]

Did I post the query in the right place ?

 

[MisterE2002]

We have a hardware and quick buy guide pdf's.
Also be aware that "just add another drive to the pool" is not possible. Make sure you understand what is (and what is not) possible.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

There are about six threads very similar to this one in the last three weeks, you might want to poke around a bit for the problems they encountered and solutions.

 

[Etorix]

Case OK (not quiet, if this matters).
Board and CPU OK, but you may want to look at older hardware to reduce cost and/or at RDIMM platforms if you're considering 128 GB RAM.
Boot M.2: anything cheap (small if fine, I boot off second-hand 9.99E Optane M10 16 GB drives).

Best advice would come with knowing the use case. If it's "just" bulk storage, it seems a bit on the overkill side.
As pointed by @MisterE2002 you cannot just add a drive at a time as with Synology, it has to be a whole (redundant) vdev at a time.
Mirrors are most flexible, but with drives so large I would not be comfortable with less than 3-way mirrors!
Raidz1 is out of question.
Raidz2 (or raidz3) is most efficient, but you have to bring in all drives in one go (8-10 is a good number).

 

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

@Prasad I have a system mostly from 2017 rather similar to yours , but the X11 version with the X11SSH-LN4F-O motherboard, with PC4-2400 Unbuffered ECC RAM, and a Xeon E3-1240 v6 CPU. I've progressively grown the RAM from an original 8 GiB, which was lackluster at best, to the MOBO's max of 64 GiB as of recent, which amply covers all of my current needs.

As for storage, I've progressively expanded from a single pool of 1 2-way 4 TiB mirrored VDEV with GELI encryption, to three pools as follows: 2 2-way 4 TiB mirrored VDEVs with ZFS encryption + 1 spare (main pool, multiple ZFS datasets, storage, TimeMachine backups, Samba, critical zvols, e.g. for my pfSense VM, etc.), 1 2-way 6 TiB mirrored VDEV with ZFS encryption (cold storage), and 1 2 TiB single drive stripe pool for everything ephemeral (iocage, swap zvols, playing around with ZFS, FreeBSD's GEOM, etc.). As stated previously in this and many other threads, mirrors buy you a great deal of flexibility in future proofing for expansion, plus good data safety, albeit at the cost of storage efficiency (50%, 33.33%, etc.). That said, I just couldn't be happier with my mirrors, but I do have to admit that my storage needs aren't anywhere near as great as it tends to be common in this forum.

For a few years I housed my NAS in a U-NAS 810A case, and it worked very well, zero complaints. But then, of course, the rackmounting bug bit me, and I eventually migrated it to this case (I really wanted something like this, but budget wasn't on in my side), and it's been humming along even better than before for approximately 6 months already.

Overall, TrueNAS CORE works so well on those specs that my system is, truth-be-told, just plain ol' boring stable, hardly ever giving me any headaches while it hums along day-in-and-day-out 24x7x365, running a few Samba shares in frequent use (manual storage & TimeMachine backups for two Macs), ZFS snapshotting & replication tasks, a Unifi Controller jail for my UniFi equipment, Plex, Zoneminder, and Grafana jails, one to two Famp (Apache + PHP + MySQL + Redis) jails for local dev, and even my home's pfSense router as a Bhyve guest (running DHCP, DNS, mDNS, three VLANs, firewall rules, etc.), with PCI passthrough for three of the MOBO's NICs and a 1 CPU & 2GB RAM allocation.

So, all in all, I just couldn't be happier with my system, it's incredibly versatile, capable, and stable, so I'd say yours should also work just fine with the specs you have in mind.

 

[Whattteva]

HDD: WD Ultrastar HC570 22TB (planning to procure in phases - need your advise to start with minimum count, will eventually get 8 HDDs)

You have to choose between flexibility and resiliency/space efficiency. You can't have your cake and eat it too, unfortunately.
RAIDZx is more space-efficient and resilient to failures, but you trade flexibility and performance for it.
Striped mirrors give you flexibility (you can upgrade in pairs) and greatest performance (particularly for block storage), but sacrifice space efficiency and resiliency.