Hello Guys,
I’ve been thinking to build a small server that only uses NVMe for faster data access. My question is i’m not sure about the CPU selection and memory sizing. The drive i plan to use is Intel DC P4510 8TB and i’ve 4 of them. I think maybe in RAIDZ1.
Secondly, i wanted to ask whether i should SMB or NFS. I know that SMB is single threaded but not sure about the NFS.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
What happened to the last server you built? Or did you build it?
I built an all NVMe server, works great however I built mine with the following needs: Quite, Lower Power Consumption. And my storage requirements are minimal compared to so many here who have out of this world storage capacities.
Let me add a sanity check here and I’m sure someone may was to debate it, but it is just my opinion:
If you just happen to have these drives laying around, that is great. If not, then can you send me some money? Or I’ll take 5 of these drives if you have them 
Yea, I couldn’t live with myself if I purchased sereal of these. If my wife found out, I wouldn’t be living.
When asking these hypothetical questions, you must provide a Use Case, otherwise you are going to get crazy answers like mine.
That is still in progress ;(
General use case. Nothing specific. Just to be nice endurance+24x7 on (if possible), for a faster data access, like storing system backups, apps, etc.
Umm, can you rephrase your question please?
Fast and high IOPS. This is more like of an active storage and the last server is archival one.
I bought it quite cheap, most of them are unused and it was sourced before the price hike. Now, i’m not sure if its good to have a wife or not. xD
My question was, if your systems bottleneck was your LAN connection, then a high speed NAS isn’t going to help much. It will not increase the speed of which you can pull data from the NAS, well I’m sure it is measurable in milliseconds but not a noticable improvement.
The only place (in my mind) I could see where these drives (thankfully you are not going out to buy them new today) and a really fast CPU is only if you are running VM’s on TrueNAS, where you need fast everything. There may be other use cases but this is my point, unless you have the need for high speed everything, then why build it? That is almost a stupid argument because most of us will build it because we can or just want to. It is not based on if we should.
My advice, write down what you want to do with this new machine, not just “I want fast IOPS”, but be specific like “I want to run Windows on the system as a very snappy VM” or “I want to build an AI machine”. Maybe it is “I want to run XYZ apps while running a VM of Ubuntu and a VM of Windows”. These kinds of things are measurable as to what kind of system you would need.
You have been here on these forums long enough to know that RAM is King! If you want a snappy (fast reacting) system, lots of RAM are in your future. How much? That depends on your expectations of the machine. 64GB minimum, but it could be more like 128GB just to keep the most active accessed data in high speed RAM.
When it comes to CPUs, a lot comes down to personal preference. I prefer Intel, however I often buy AMD due to features I want vs. the price difference. It took me a year to plan and purchase my NVMe system. The trigger was when I saw 4TB NVMe for $200/each. I bought six immediately, wish I had bought a few more. A weeks later, the price was back above $300/each. They had over 1000 units for sale. This was through NewEgg but directly by the manufacturer. They were targeting the PS5 market for Christmas.
Anyway, write down what you want the server to specifically do. Saying High IOPS is not easy to pin point. If you said IOPS of at least 1.5 million, or 40 million, then you have something we could work with. High end servers can hit the 80 million IOPS mark, however I’m most certain those are big money. Hum… Now I want to know how I could benchmark my NVMe system. I know it is fast, but how fast.
Time to go, but I hope this helps you some. Decide what you need the system to perform, it will help. But based off of what your said above, I would say any system with 64GB ECC RAM, high end server motherboard with a single CPU, and then examine the higher end CPUs that you can afford to purchase. The NVMe drive interface will play a key role as well.
Hey, I’m not the expert at all on servers, this is just what I do, I write down what I need it to do, then what I’d love it to be capable of, I read all the literature/specifications of every component that will go into the system to identify limitations or problems. I research it a lot.
If you want to watch something interesting, search on Lauriewired and she put out a video 2 weeks ago that will blow your mind. You want high IOPS, if you could make what she discusses, that would be fast. This young woman is freakin smart. She has a funny laugh and it is cute, a few times. I was driving me crazy buy the end of the video. And the trains drove me crazy too. Maybe she could have used them only 2 times only. She is a reverse engineer working for Google in Seattle area, and I think she is only 28 or 29 years old. Damn she has a brain in that head of hers.
My answer is based on several assumptions: First, I assume you’re talking about building a small all-flash TrueNAS storage server?as you’ve posted on a TrueNAS forum. Second assumption, that this is for home/homelab use - if that is wrong, please add more info.
If you have 2.5GbE networking, the Terramaster F4 SSD or Beelink ME Mini might be a good choice for a low-effort and small-form result. The Beelink ME Mini has 2x2.5GbE which might be useful if you have multiple simultaneous clients - can balance the traffic across both NICs.
If you have 10GbE networking, likewise the Terramaster F8 SSD Plus (which is what I use) is fantastic with TrueNAS for home use. Single 10GbE but fine for my homelab usage.
If you want to build your own, and plan on using this at home, any 6th-gen Intel or higher with 4 cores will be fine, unless you need constant high throughput (then possibly look for 8 cores). I’ve found the 8-core Intel N305, used in the F8 mentioned above, is a very capable processor for running TrueNAS and multiple docker apps. When it comes to RAM, 16GB is the lowest starting point but should be fine for home. If your plan is for multiple clients constantly accessing this storage server, 32GB or 64GB should be your starting point - ZFS loves RAM for cache, and typically good planning is about ‘1GB RAM per 1TB storage’ – you will have 24TB of usable storage in RAIDz1 with 4x8TB drives.
As for SMB vs NFS, while TrueNAS offers both, if really depends on your use case. SMB would typically be used for Windows, Linux, or macOS clients connecting to the NAS for access to files. NFS is usable by Linux and macOS but will need careful config. Typically, NFS is more commonly used for things like shared storage for hypervisors (Proxmox, XCP-ng). If you just want to store files for clients to use, go with SMB.
Hope that helps. But please provide more details on what you are wanting to use this server for, and what the data types are (file, video, database, VMs), client types (Win, Mac, Linux), etc.
