BUILD First NAS - R720 Build Review

[SonicUK]

Hi,

I'm building a new NAS with FreeNAS and wanted to run the build past some experienced members such as yourself for any advice before proceeding.

The plan is to have something primarily as a NAS initially with 12-disks but room to expand, with virtualisation capability and Plex and I'm looking to build something with older server kit i've got lying around after dismissing building an i3-8100 / ECC tower.

The kit lying around includes an HP ML115 G5 with LSI 3442e BBWC / 32GB / 6x 3.5" + tape with an old AMD CPU and a Dell R510 2x E5503 / 128GB / 8x 3.5" but have excluded these as they're slow and ancient and figured something is needed with at least DDR3.

I also have 2x Dell R720 so was planning to use one with 2x E5-2630 v2 (10k passmark) / 128GB as a basis. The chassis are 2.5" and have a bunch of SSD (which isn't really needed for my NAS / Media Server).

I've replaced the H700 with a H200i and have a H200e to install also to break out to a 3.5" drive enclosure. I have 6x 10TB WD SATA disks shucked plus 6x 4TB N300's to form the main pool with 2x 6 disk vdevs respectively. I may as well use the 2.5" SAS drives also but unsure of the best way to use them - whether as another vdev or l2arc (which seems unnecessary from my reading, but i have the disks...). Note the drives are SAS not NVMe / SATA.

For the enclosure i was thinking of getting a HP D2600 or similar but unsure if this would be plug-and-play via the integrated SAS controllers wired from the H200e in the R720? It's a shame i can't recycle the r510 chassis but it is 8-bay not 12 which is annoying! I also have a couple of HP 487738-001 SAS expander cards...

Any advice greatly received.

Thanks,

Andy

 

[SonicUK]

HP D2600 ordered so we'll see where i get! Bargain at £90 + £20 delivery with dual PSU and controller cards.

 

[SonicUK]

Got the R720 setup with usb key on the motherboard, h200e flashed with v20 IT firmware, connected to each of the D2600 controllers, and all setup and working fairly seamlessly with 6x 10TB disks in z2 which was nice!

Only niggles were getting my W10 machine to see the share along with my Mac, but sorted by using NFS resource pool and SMB share with WORKGROUP\user to connect from windows as using AzureAD domain with Office365 on my machine at home.

Also doesn't look like multipath is detected - presumably because using SATA disks vs SAS in the disk enclosure?

 

[jasper-zanjani]

I know I'm about 2.5 years too late but I installed TrueNAS Scale on my R720XD with 24 HDDs and it's working like a charm! (so far)