Hi all! First of all, thanks for the wealth of info I've found here. I'm a Mac user and jumping into the deep end of component choices has been pretty overwhelming, but fun all the same. I've spent the past week or so hopefully zeroing in on a TrueNAS build and was hoping for some expert eyes on both my (possibly!) chosen spec, and on a deal I may have tracked down.
I currently have a cobbled-together setup of a Mac mini running vanilla macOS + a USB DAS. I can feel you all recoiling! It's an improvised setup rea I went from being on the verge of going for a Synology, to thinking 'hey, maybe it'll be fun to do this myself'. Time will tell whether I regret that, of course.
My needs are fairly straightforward. Media storage to my Apple TV, plus backups, maybe occasional file storage. This is at home, so only a couple of users.
I don't need 10gE networking, or have any need for transcoding (I don't use Plex, so it's direct file access only).
I do want ECC for the sake of data integrity and ideally something low power-ish, but that's about it as far as hard spec requirements. I currently have two WD 18TB CMR drives I've shucked and have so far not touched any device. 5 drives was my aim with the Synology, but anywhere up to 8-ish would be nice.
The Fractal Design Node 804 looks nice and is reasonably compact for the size. So essentially now I need a microATX ECC board and processor.
I've found a possible deal — a bundle with a Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, Xeon E3-1220 V6 and 32GB of ECC RAM, for around £100GBP (approx. $125USD). Two questions on that — first of all, is it a good combo in 2023, and secondly, if it is, that feels like a good price, right? I've seen that board around for sale new for around £300GBP! This is my first proper foray into this arena so I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious, like the board/chip combo is power hungry, or etc etc. I've done my best to research this but I know what was true in 2017 may not be true today.
Thanks so much for reading and for any advice you may have!
I currently have a cobbled-together setup of a Mac mini running vanilla macOS + a USB DAS. I can feel you all recoiling! It's an improvised setup rea I went from being on the verge of going for a Synology, to thinking 'hey, maybe it'll be fun to do this myself'. Time will tell whether I regret that, of course.
My needs are fairly straightforward. Media storage to my Apple TV, plus backups, maybe occasional file storage. This is at home, so only a couple of users.
I don't need 10gE networking, or have any need for transcoding (I don't use Plex, so it's direct file access only).
I do want ECC for the sake of data integrity and ideally something low power-ish, but that's about it as far as hard spec requirements. I currently have two WD 18TB CMR drives I've shucked and have so far not touched any device. 5 drives was my aim with the Synology, but anywhere up to 8-ish would be nice.
The Fractal Design Node 804 looks nice and is reasonably compact for the size. So essentially now I need a microATX ECC board and processor.
I've found a possible deal — a bundle with a Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, Xeon E3-1220 V6 and 32GB of ECC RAM, for around £100GBP (approx. $125USD). Two questions on that — first of all, is it a good combo in 2023, and secondly, if it is, that feels like a good price, right? I've seen that board around for sale new for around £300GBP! This is my first proper foray into this arena so I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious, like the board/chip combo is power hungry, or etc etc. I've done my best to research this but I know what was true in 2017 may not be true today.
Thanks so much for reading and for any advice you may have!
