Using old HW

[PaNicRaGeZ]

Hi

first post, so please dont be to harsh.

I am planning to reuse old Hardware I have at home.

This includes:
Asus ROG Strix B550 F
Ryzen 3000 CPU
16 or 32 GB non ECC RAM
Asus GTX 1060


Now I am Planning to get 3 or 4 18TB Seagate Exos HDDs
Since my board has 6 Sata connectors should i already consider buying a PCIe extension card for future proofing? If so, which ones are best?

I am also Planning to get an 10Gtek® 10Gb PCI-E NIC , Dual Copper RJ45 Port, Intel X540 Controller - any thoughts or recommendations?

Purpose of the build should be a Plex Server for Home Media streaming.


I welcome all comments!

 

[Heracles]

future proofing?

Future proofing the server would be best achieved by starting with something that is not already outdated. Considering yourself describe your hardware as old, better to acknowledge your own judgement on the lifetime that hardware can still have or not.

Also, gaming hardware is not meant to be used as server. It is meant for gaming. Server need to be running 24 / 7 while gaming is designed to provide peak power and capacity for short bursts.

10Gtek® 10Gb PCI-E NIC , Dual Copper RJ45 Port, Intel X540 Controller - any thoughts or recommendations?

Not a good idea at all.

Your hardware will never be able to saturate such a network link. Doing so will be 100% wasted. To gain speed, you need a maximum number of drives and not just basic spinning drives. You will not even be able to sature a 1G link with these drives, so no need to look at 10G links.

Now I am Planning to get 3 or 4 18TB Seagate Exos HDDs

With 3 drives, there is not much you can do. Raid-Z1 is discouraged for today's drive and will not protect you properly. That leaves only 3 way mirrors which is overkill.

4 drives would let you do Raid-Z2 or 2x mirrors. These options offer better performance and protection.

So I would not use that motherboard, not use 3 drives, not go for 10G link, would respect the ECC recommendation, ... So basically I would not keep much of this first design.

I recommend you look at used servers for proper server hardware. Also, define the expected usage and capacity you are looking at. These have a real impact on the design of your NAS. Is really Plex the only need you have ? If so, then go for Raid-Z2 with up to 6 drives. Consider your actual library should not represent more than 33% of your storage and your expected increase over the next 5 years should not bring you over the 50% capacity.

To backup your personal data would be nice to include in your plan because people always start to do backups after loosing everything. Be smarter than most and start yours while you still have your data...

 

[Pacific27]

Hi

first post, so please dont be to harsh.

I am planning to reuse old Hardware I have at home.

This includes:
Asus ROG Strix B550 F
Ryzen 3000 CPU
16 or 32 GB non ECC RAM
Asus GTX 1060


Now I am Planning to get 3 or 4 18TB Seagate Exos HDDs
Since my board has 6 Sata connectors should i already consider buying a PCIe extension card for future proofing? If so, which ones are best?

I am also Planning to get an 10Gtek® 10Gb PCI-E NIC , Dual Copper RJ45 Port, Intel X540 Controller - any thoughts or recommendations?

Purpose of the build should be a Plex Server for Home Media streaming.


I welcome all comments!

I've been using an ECS KBN-I/2100 AMD E1-2100 to run a CentOS NFS file server for the last 8 years, running 24/7 with never a hickup. I back up all my folders on an external HDD and most important folders in the cloud. This has worked incredibly well for me, streams all my media to Kodi quite well. I built a PFSense box so I like the idea of being on a BSD base (TrueNAS Core) and getting more familiar with it.

I just did my final upgrade on my Am4 platform from a Ryzen 7 1700 to a Ryzen 5 5600 and thought I'd make a more powerful server with this chip and use TrueNAS. I jumped the gun and ordered some parts for the new build and then started reading through these forums and quickly realized TrueNAS is a completely different animal, so everything was sent back. I"m now selling off all my old components to reduce the overall cost of my build.

All I'm saying is that TrueNAS is much more of a science than I first realized and a lot of planning should go into your build. You really are designing the infrastructure that is going to "safe keep" your digital world.

For my initial build I wanted to keep the cost down until I had a better idea of what all I want TrueNAS to do for me. For my budget build the HDD's are going to be the biggest expense. I currently have (2) 8 TB HDD, so I will need to buy (2) more for (4) 8 TB HDD's in Raidz2. I feel lucky in that both of the HDD's I do have are CMR and not SMR considering when I bought them I had no idea of the difference.

Again I'm doing a very simple build to replace my NFS box and learn a bit before I build my next box and spend more money:

Reusing:
Corsair CX-M Series CX430M 430W 80 Plus Bronze PSU
iStarUSA D-313SE-MATX Black Aluminum / Steel 3U Rackmount (Wish these would take ATX MB)
TeamGroup 240GB M.2 SSD (Boot Drive)
(2) Western Digital 8 TB HDD

New Parts ($180):
Supermicro X11SSH-F LGA 1151 Socket H4 C236 DDR4 MicroATX Motherboard Tested
Intel Xeon E3-1240v6 - SR327 CPU 3.70GHz
(2) Micron 16GB 1Rx4 PC4-19200 DDR4-2400 ECC REG DIMM MTA18ASF2G72PZ-2G3B1 (32GB Total)

Need to buy:
(2) 8 TB HDD
Heatsink

Future:
HBA
10gb NIC

I think this is about as basic a build as you can do while still benefiting from using TrueNAS in Raidz2. My current storage needs are pretty minimal at 4 TB and with a new 16 TB capacity. If it turns out that this meets my needs then the only future upgrades will probably be higher capacity HDD's and increase network speed between my workstation and storage, so probably a couple SuperMicro 10gb PCIe NIC. Or I may find I want to add a couple CCTV cameras to my house and record the footage, nextcloud, serve my media to family elsewhere etc etc.

I still probably jumped the gun, but I should be able to sell off some of my old components and recoup some of what I spent, thinking I'll have around $250-400 into this build once the dust settles.

I found this guide helpful, but there are many others as well. Quite a bit of information to take in.

[Guide] NAS Killer 6.0 - DDR4 is finally cheap

This is what AI thinks the best home NAS looks like. It sure looks like a Cooler Master N400 to me. Intro What is a NAS Killer? It’s a powerful, cost-effective, and upgradable Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. What’s it “killing?” Slow, expensive, and proprietary off the shelf NAS...

forums.serverbuilds.net

TrueNAS is quite a deep rabbit hole, I posted as I'm just starting out and thought seeing where someone else who had planned to do something very similar to you ended up after going down the rabbit hole a little bit further.

Anyways, have fun and don't be afraid to pump the brakes on your build and go down a few rabbit holes, you'll most likely get quite a bit closer to the mark.

 

[PaNicRaGeZ]

Well first of all thank you for your thoughts.

I am Using the old HW because i have it.
I am just starting with TrueNas and i dont want to spend a fortune on hardware if I dont even know how the whole thing works.
The goal is to keep the expenses as low as possioble.
So just throwing Hardware away or not using it wopuld be dumb in my eyes.
I know that the Hardware is no Server Hardware. BVut for what i have planned it should be okay.

About the 10G Card, yes you are right that it will be hard for really using this. And i probably wont use it the way it is meant to be used fo r the next Months / Years.

I do plan to copy a lot of files from a local Server which is connected with 10G so a 10G card would be very benefitial.


For starting and beginning, there wont be much Options for me on using used Server Hardware, since what i have should be used.

if so, then go for Raid-Z2 with up to 6 drives.

RaidZ1 or Z2 is not fully planned at the moment.
Since RaidZ1 is quite similar to Raid5 it should be okay for my use case. Without loosing to much Disks
Since there only will be Data stored for Plex i don't care about loosing some, if more than one or two drive Fails.
I can redownload these files.

To backup your personal data would be nice to include in your plan because people always start to do backups after loosing everything. Be smarter than most and start yours while you still have your data...

I have a Synology NAS where all my Personal and important data is stored. It is stored on my local Drives, synced to my Synology, and to OneDrive and there are weekly Backups to an HDD. So my Personal Data should be save.

The goald of this True Nas Build is Plex and nothing more.

If this works out as planned, i will build other setups in the future with more optimized hardware, but for now i do not have that many options.

 

[Heracles]

I do plan to copy a lot of files from a local Server which is connected with 10G so a 10G card would be very benefitial.

No it will not be benefitial at all. The server will receive a little data at full speed while it can save it to RAM but once RAM is full, it will drop to HDD speed which will be a crawl.

i dont want to spend a fortune on hardware

Then do not waste money on that 10G card...

RaidZ1 is quite similar to Raid5 it should be okay for my use case.

No it is not. Go see that post about RaidZ1. In your case, you would work from a cold spare, which is even worst than the hot spare case discussed there. When re-silvering Raid-Z1, you need to read all your hard drives without a single error because there is no more redundancy. The bigger the drive, the lower the probability that can happen. It is considered that above 1T, the risk is too high. Considering you are looking at 18TB drives, you are way over that treshold.

RaidZ1 or Z2 is not fully planned at the moment.

Another no go then. Pool designed can not be modified once created. As such, you must be sure of what you are doing before saving a single byte of data in your pool. Complete your design before going any further.

i don't care about loosing some, if more than one or two drive Fails

You will not loose SOME files if 2 drives fail in Raid-Z1. You will loose EVERYTHING at once.

I have a Synology NAS where all my Personal and important data is stored. It is stored on my local Drives, synced to my Synology, and to OneDrive and there are weekly Backups to an HDD. So my Personal Data should be save.

Good for these data then.

But overall :
Do not start building a system until it is completely planned and designed.
Do not go for 10G network until you have a pool with a least 4 vDev in it. (waste because disks are too slow)
Do not go for 10G network until you have at least 64 or 128G of RAM (waste because you can not buffer enough in RAM).
Do not go for 3 disks because that limits you to Raid-Z1 which is not to be used.

If you still insist to go your way, go for it but do not complain when system will not work as expected and you suffer data loss.

 

[Etorix]

I am Using the old HW because i have it.
I am just starting with TrueNas and i dont want to spend a fortune on hardware if I dont even know how the whole thing works.

That's a fair plan. Note that if you do like what the test shows you can get the Ryzen server board Gigabyte MC12-LE0 for cheap at the moment.

I do plan to copy a lot of files from a local Server which is connected with 10G so a 10G card would be very benefitial.

ZFS will NOT make full use of a 10G link if the underlying pool cannot ingest data at 10 Gb/s. Your existing board has Intel 2.5 GbE NICs, which are not great but probably okay-ish for a first test.
Future-proofing would be a SFP+ NIC card—and a used Solarflare or even Chelsio T520-CR is probably even cheaper than a X540-T2. What's the network infrastructure?

RaidZ1 or Z2 is not fully planned at the moment.

As already pointed out, ZFS is NOT flexible with respect to raidz geometry, so you need to plan that ahead. Also mind that you cannot widen a raidz vdev (for now).
In any case, you need not get a further controller for now. If you do, the recommended cards are SAS HBA (non-RAID LSI 9200, 9300); no "PCIe SATA" card.

I have a Synology NAS where all my Personal and important data is stored. It is stored on my local Drives, synced to my Synology, and to OneDrive and there are weekly Backups to an HDD. So my Personal Data should be save.

This looks like a decent backup strategy. So the design of the Plex server pool rests on the question of how ready you really are to restore some files or the whole pool in the event of a failure.

 

[HansBohne]

Im using AQtion 10 Gig cards (with 7 or 9 data drives) they are cheap (e.g. qnap uses them too) but work and LSI 9211 sata controllers they are also quite old but reliable.

Your hardware for a home server is definitly not old in my opinion - a lot younger than mine - I just swap harddrives now and then for bigger ones.

If you are still using gigabit 2.5 GBit is a really nice boost - and still very affordable.