Hello, I have been handed a couple old workstations that I'd like to turn at least one into a NAS for my home studio and need help deciding which one would be better. I need shared access with 1 PC, an iMac and occasionally a MacBook Pro. My office's network is all 10Gb. I did a test build with the First system with TrueNas Scale and it seems very stable and passed all the hardware testing I ran from the Build, Burn-in and Testing post. I'm using a dual 10g Nic (still need to figure out how to do link aggregation) and a Broadcom SAS 9300 8i for my HBA. I have temp drives in it and it's been up and running for 3 months with no issues as of yet.
Here's the systems' specs:
I'm not concerned with running VMs or anything, just hosting files on my local network for editing, VFX, and animation work. I'm looking for speed and reliability. I'm looking at a different solution for cold storage. the benchmarks for the systems are very close. I'd like to have my project source and projects to live on the NAS and not use internal storage as much as possible. I'm still very new to all this, but my thoughts are as followed (please correct me if I'm wrong):
I'm hesitant about the second system not supporting ECC memory and also wondering about the bottleneck of PCIe 2.0. the advantages are that i could use 2 raid z2 groups of 5x 8TB HDDs for data redundancy. That is either the same data amount as 1 group of 7x 10TB or the same price as 1 group with 7x of 14TB (which adds 18TB of storage).
what would you suggest?
Here's the systems' specs:
1: Supermicro 732-9
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2
RAM: 64 GB ECC
Space for 4 HDDs, + 3 with 5.25" to 3.5" adapter (7 HDDs total)
4 SSD slots.
2 PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, 1 PCIe 3.0 x4 slot & 1 PCI-e 2.0 x4 slot
2 internal SATA 3 ports
4 internal SATA 2 ports
2. Bell tech workstation
CPU: i73930k (DX79TO motherboard)
RAM: 32 GB no ECC
space for 6 HDDs + 4 with a 5.25" to 3.5" adapter (10 HDDs total)
no dedicated SDD slots
I think it only has PCI 2.0
2 internal SATA 3 ports
4 internal SATA 2 ports
I'm not concerned with running VMs or anything, just hosting files on my local network for editing, VFX, and animation work. I'm looking for speed and reliability. I'm looking at a different solution for cold storage. the benchmarks for the systems are very close. I'd like to have my project source and projects to live on the NAS and not use internal storage as much as possible. I'm still very new to all this, but my thoughts are as followed (please correct me if I'm wrong):
- The first system has fewer spaces for drives, but more ram with ECC, a Xeon, and supports PCIe 3.0
- The second system has more space for drives, but less RAM, no ECC, an i7 that only supports PCIe 2.0
I'm hesitant about the second system not supporting ECC memory and also wondering about the bottleneck of PCIe 2.0. the advantages are that i could use 2 raid z2 groups of 5x 8TB HDDs for data redundancy. That is either the same data amount as 1 group of 7x 10TB or the same price as 1 group with 7x of 14TB (which adds 18TB of storage).
what would you suggest?
