Help save my build!

[errr]

I recently set out to build a small, cheap, powerful enough and energy efficient TrueNAS server. I settled on a Thinkcentre m710q tiny with a 5x 3.5" bay usb external storage enclosure. After setting it all up I found that only one of my drives was getting recognized in the enclosure. After doing some quick googling here I found very quickly found that using USB external storage was very much not recommended. It seems like the enclosure presents the drives to the OS all under the same serial number which is why they're not getting recognized. So now I have a bunch of hardware that doesn't work together and I have no idea what to do. I'm a student so I don't really have much more money to throw at this. I'm still within the return window for the enclosure but I don't know how I'm going to recover and make the Thinkcentre Tiny work. I was looking into getting a PCIE expansion card like this but I don't know how I would power my drives with the Thinkcentre only having a small 65W power supply. Please help me save this build!

 

[elvisimprsntr]

Welcome!

1. ZFS file system requires direct access to the hard drives, e.g. not through a bridge chip (as you discovered) of any kind or a RAID controller.

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

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 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...

www.truenas.com

2. TrueNAS is an NAS appliance distribution and you will not be able to install proprietary drivers or packages, thus you will likely have challenges with the SATA expansion card you linked. The card itself does not provide power to the drives and the thermal constraints of the Thinkcentre would be of concern. I've highlighted some red flags



3. Given your cost and power consumption constraints, you are likely better off purchasing a used low power OEM x86_64 NAS off evilBay and hope you can get it to work, i.e. QNAP or Synology

 

[errr]

Thanks for posting such a detailed reply. As far as purchasing an OEM NAS, I don’t think that would work for my use case as I’d like to be able to transcode on the server. Is there any options that would be low power and still have a comparable ~5K passmark score? If I were to stick with the Thinkcentre, I think I can get one of those LSI PCIE controllers connected to via a mini PCIE to PCIE adapter (though it may be ugly) and then connect up a SAS enclosure and use a power adapter for that. Does that sound feasible or should I just give up and try to cut my losses?

 

[ChrisRJ]

I would recommend to either switch to Linux without ZFS (and not BTFRS either), or "give up". The SAS enclosure, HBA, and cables will 1) likely cost some money, 2) consume a lot of power (plus noise?), and 3) be a more complex solution overall.

 

[errr]

I would recommend to either switch to Linux without ZFS (and not BTFRS either), or "give up". The SAS enclosure, HBA, and cables will 1) likely cost some money, 2) consume a lot of power (plus noise?), and 3) be a more complex solution overall.

Ive decided to give up on using the Thinkcentre. Instead I'm looking into trying to build a mini ITX pc. Are there any recommended mini ITX motherboards that are <$200? I found this Supermicro board on eBay for $160 link. It doesn't support ECC ram but otherwise it looks pretty good. It uses the same CPU socket as the Thinkcentre, SO-DIMM ram and has a m.2 slot so I think I might be able to transplant almost all of the internals from the Thinkcentre into it.

 

[DigitalMinimalist]

As costs seem important:
Go for ATX, or Micro ATX

Best bang for the buck:

Ryzen Pro 5650G with B550 Mainboard and ECC UDIMM

Supermicro X10 with E5 26xx v3/4 and registered RDIMM

Supermicro X with i3 9100 and ECC RAM

 

[ChrisRJ]

Without going into hardware details, I would really recommend to not rush things. For comparison, I took me about 2 months to iron out what I really wanted/needed for my "new" TrueNAS system (see signature). And that was with more than 10 years of running ZFS-based servers and almost 25 years of configuring servers professionally.

If you need something more or less now, I would still recommend to use Linux as an interim solution on your current hardware. That is not a bad solution and certainly much better than what the average small business I know has. Then spend a ton of time here on the forum with reading. I am certain that after a few weeks you will see how things fall into place.