Advice on Hardware for media vault and streaming

Well crap. I really like that case. I figured it would be good with the 2 fans attached to the side of the drive bays. Guess I need to look at other options that support 8 drives. Maybe ALAMENGDA BD-1

Typo on the Xeon, I was planning on the G version. Wanted the dGPU for playing with since they are pretty cheap.

So you are saying use the 8th drive in the vdev instead of hot spare since I have it and the board has a 8 SATA ports?

You may want to double check the case compatibility.

I couldn’t find the specs for the CS380b, but the CS380 says that the “limitation for CPU cooler” is 146mm.

Noctua says the NH-D14 is 160mm.

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8 way RaidZ2. I ran a stripe of those for years. No need for a hot spare when you have double redundancy in my opinion.

(In a non mission critical scenario)

8way also scales into a 24 bay chassis nicely :wink:

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I use an NH-D9L with my Xeon E5 1650 v3, and it’s more than plenty good. The 120/140 mm coolers are getting into overkill territory for most applications.

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I just checked my build log :slight_smile:

I used a Noctua NH-U9DX i4 on my Norco build. Plenty of cooling for either a Xeon E5-1650v4 or E5-2699Av4 :slight_smile:

Tested with Prime95.

Xeons don’t get overclocked.

125mm tall “full 4U case compatibility”

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Awesome guys thank you for the feedback on the CPU cooler!! Looking at a Fractal Design Define 7 case and others. Sucks I didn’t know about the CS380B cooling issues with HDD’s but it is what it is.

The Lian Li a76 is what i use with 12 ‘hot swap’ bays (that you need to buy backplanes for). Three 120mm fans up front keep the Pool drives cool and a hacked @Stux script keep the rig quiet and the disks at 30C or below.

The only reason I had to hack at all was the SATADOMs on the motherboard caused the fans up front to get spun up. That only needlessly added noise and power. Plus, the fans up front do little for the motherboard. I have a whole different set for that.

That would be me and my n=1 motherboard sample. All I can say is that I bought RAM sticks based on the QVL. Both resellers sent me sticks which featured RAM dies with a later revision than on the QVL (so the SKU was off by one digit, in 12th place or whatever). No combination of RAM sticks allowed all 4 sticks to be recognized, only 2 out of 4.

Based on my very limited experience, motherboards seem to become more finicky the closer you get to their respective RAM limits. I had a similar issue with the factory RAM in my C2750D4I (32GB, no issues) vs. QVL RAM at the 64GB limit - OK for some time and then errors erupted.

For the X10SDV-7TP4F, I am operating the system at the 128GB RAM limit and using exact factory spec QVL RAM has resulted in no errors since. Obviously, I may have also gotten unlucky re: the initial RAM sticks in the X10SDV, but it doesn’t explain why the two sets would post OK as a single pair and pass every memtest yet would not get recognized successfully when inserted as two sets of parallel pairs - only one of them would.

I highly recommend looking at an Arc A310 or like GPU for that application. Very inexpensive and highly optimized for QuickSync operations. X16 slot which sadly interferes with the components on my motherboard, such that I’d have to use an extension cable and x8 to x16 converter. The A310 uses less than 50W so it’s powered solely by the PCIe Bus, which is a plus.

Thanks for the advice. Sadly it turns out that my system is so old it won’t even support a x16 card in a x8 slot. I suspect the problem lies with power negotiation: the card needs 30W, but the x8 slot spec only allows up to 25W. The card doesn’t even show up in the BIOS as a consequence.

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Any update on the components you have finally chosen? I‘m in a similar situation and very interested in what you ended up getting.

Configuration I just started up yesterday. Got it to boot first time with the following

Before you update read the following thread as your video card may not have default support anymore. It affects 25.10 and later versions.

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Wow, did you save my bacon there. I would have spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out as I’m just getting back into this. I’ll read more indepth but it sounds like stick to Core until I have a different card that works with the kernal change. Stinks because I was going to replace my HTPC 1080ti soon and use that in this. But not now………. More reading, thanks again

If you want to go to Scale, your card would work fine with 25.04 versions. That would at least get you updated to a newer OS and give you options of upgrading the ZFS features for items such as Raid-Z Expansion.

If you post what features you need to have in a video card, other users could post suggestions for replacements. Looking for uses like transcoding, AI, etc

Thanks SmallBarky. I will look for 25.04

At the moment it is just for Plex transcoding.

Got 25.04 installed, thanks for that. A side note I have a 1TB nvme which was originally for cache which I now know is not needed for my use case. TrueNAS is now installed on this which is overkill I feel. My thoughts are since I have two 256GB SSD’s laying around to plug those into the MB and reinstall TrueNAS on both for redundancy as i’m not using them and redeploy the 1TB NVME somewhere else. Seems sound?

You might be better off with the two, SSDs as a mirror VDEV for the apps pool. The NVME is wasted space for just the boot-pool. The Mirror VDEV would give your apps pool some redundancy and is better for IOPS. Just keep a backup of your system configuration file elsewhere. It is real easy to do a new boot-pool install and reload the system configuration if the boot device fails.
If you do a Mirror VDEV for the app pool, you can replace each SSD with larger models and gain more space for that pool after both resilver and your do the manual Expand operation.

Okay, that is interested on the apps pool and was just planning on putting them together with the media pool. First question, can the boot pool be on the same devices as the apps pool? Which is why you suggest saving the config elsewhere? So If I understand this correctly as I’m just learning here, having the apps pool on a NVME or SSD for IOPS and low latency. Apps pool being the data sets for the various apps like Radarr, Sonarr, etc correct.

I have one NVME stick in now but another 2 identical laying around which I could us with my PCI-E expander. To summarize my rambling:

  1. Currently using 1 1TB stick in a PCI lane
  2. Option 2: use 2 1TB sticks in a expander plugged into the PCI lane
  3. Option 3: use 2 256GB SSD plugged into the MB

Option 2 and 3 would be mirror boot pool and Vdev for App pools?

This is really go info for me so I really appreciate your time here!!!

boot-pool needs to be on it’s own device. You don’t really need to mirror the boot as you can do a fresh install on your boot device or its replacment and then you upload the system configuration and you are back to normal with all your pools, etc. That’s one of the reasons by design.

A usual setup is a main pool for data. Mirror or Raid-Z(1,2,3) VDEV type.
A pool for apps, usually a mirror pair VDEV. It gives better read speed and iops. You could start with a single, stripe VDEV for the apps pool and then add on a second same size or larger device and make it a Mirror VDEV later.

BASICS

TrueNAS Systems pool layout whitepaper
White Papers | TrueNAS - Open Enterprise Storage (Just look for Pool Layout Whitepaper, near bottom of page)

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