None of the ones available for public consumption are good for anything but regurgitating stuff you can’t trust. I doubt the private ones are much better.
In the future? We’ll see I guess.
None of the ones available for public consumption are good for anything but regurgitating stuff you can’t trust. I doubt the private ones are much better.
In the future? We’ll see I guess.
That sets your requirements to a micro-ATX board (or larger) with 4+ SATA ports (preferable 6-8, just in case…) and preferably two x8 PCIe slots. Last generation not required.
AsRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T?
I orderd this one, as my cpu is AMD.
GIGABYTE MC12-LE0
Considering it has IPMI, that is an awesome price. Reminds me of the $50 mobo everyone used to recommend.
Good if you still found one for a reasonable price (it was a 50 € bargain last year, but prices went up when stock finally ran low). ![]()
6 SATA. Get a x8x4x4 adapter to run a low profile dGPU and a pair of M.2 SSDs in the x16 slot, as the single on-board M.2 slot is x1 and strictly meant for the boot device.
It cost 250€… But I can install a HBA, if I am running out of SATA ports.
I will keep that in my mind. My sparkle arc a310 eco only uses x8.
Still a fair price for a genuine server board, the modern likes of which are 400-500 €.
But a that price level an E3C246D4U2-2T gets you 2 more SATA ports, 2 x4 M.2 slots on-board, x16/x8 + x0/x8 slots and 10GBase-T.
With a single x16 slot and a x8 dGPU, you’ll need a x8x8 riser and a bit of creativity with extension cables—and move your app pool to SATA SSDs.
So plan ahead to avoid headaches!
So I need a x8 for my future HBA. Gotcha.
This is already done. Mirror incoming as soon as the second SDD arrives.
Sounds good.
Okay, I’ll then switch to that one. It’s cheaper on eBay.
But these Xeons are still very pricey… even in used state.
Have all supported cpus on the ASRock support list full ECC support?
C246 supports ECC with Xeon E-2100/2200 and Core i3-8100/9100 CPUs (not i5 and higher). The only difference is that i3 support only up to 64 GB RAM while Xeon E go up to 128 GB (and can have more cores).
ASRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T and Intel Xeon E-2236 ordered. GIGABYTE MC12-LE0 is canceled.
That motherboard supports xeons with integrated graphics, and the UHD Graphics P630 is capable of both transcoding and tonemapping in jellyfin, hence no need for that arc a310 unless you need to encode to hevc or av1.
All you need to do is enable multi monitor in bios and the P630 is available for passthrough to jellyfin.
You could swap that 2236 for a 2226G, and have 8 more pcie lanes free for other things, just a thought.
I feel better with HEVC and AV1 support.
I cannot see any differences.
I’m sorry! It took me a while to understand it. I could omit the dGPU and thus save x8.
But E-2226G is a six core CPU without HT.
Yeah, i was referring to the lanes the dgpu would free up, sorry, I could have worded that better.
Yes, you are indeed correct, and the E-2246G would be the nearest match. I looked too quick only judging by core count and tdp on intel ark.
I recently swapped out the hardware in my truenas box, going from the typical “ex-gaming pc to nas build” with an 11600k with uhd graphics 750 to a supermicro x11spi-tf and a xeon 6244 mostly for the option of going with lots and lots of cheap second hand ecc server ram and onboard 10GbE , and got an arc a310 for jellyfin, and it performs amazingly, but honestly the igpu wasn’t that far behind. Intel igpus are very performant in h.264 encoding, but fall flat on their face in hevc encoding.
Since you’ve made it clear that you’d rather use the a310, then that’s that, you’re set in regards to cpu.
Hello,
a few days have passed. Today I finally finished with my new server. The migration went smoothly. Thank you very much for your support and the helpful tips, both regarding TrueNAS and the hardware recommendations!
Initially, I had a 20 TB hard drive. When I upgraded the hardware for the server, I purchased three additional 20 TB hard drives. I created a RAIDZ1 with these and copied all the data from the first hard drive onto it. I then added the hard drive from which the data was copied to the array.
However, I am missing 4 TiB of storage space. The scrubbing runs until 9 pm.
truenas_admin@truenas[~]$ sudo zpool get all data2
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
data2 size 72.8T -
data2 capacity 34% -
data2 altroot /mnt local
data2 health ONLINE -
data2 guid 2771083124053792770 -
data2 version - default
data2 bootfs - default
data2 delegation on default
data2 autoreplace off default
data2 cachefile /data/zfs/zpool.cache local
data2 failmode continue local
data2 listsnapshots off default
data2 autoexpand on local
data2 dedupratio 1.00x -
data2 free 47.8T -
data2 allocated 24.9T -
data2 readonly off -
data2 ashift 12 local
data2 comment - default
data2 expandsize - -
data2 freeing 0 -
data2 fragmentation 0% -
data2 leaked 0 -
data2 multihost off default
data2 checkpoint - -
data2 load_guid 13982868841672547457 -
data2 autotrim off default
data2 compatibility off default
data2 bcloneused 0 -
data2 bclonesaved 0 -
data2 bcloneratio 1.00x -
data2 dedup_table_size 0 -
data2 dedup_table_quota auto default
data2 last_scrubbed_txg 0 -
data2 feature@async_destroy enabled local
data2 feature@empty_bpobj active local
data2 feature@lz4_compress active local
data2 feature@multi_vdev_crash_dump enabled local
data2 feature@spacemap_histogram active local
data2 feature@enabled_txg active local
data2 feature@hole_birth active local
data2 feature@extensible_dataset active local
data2 feature@embedded_data active local
data2 feature@bookmarks enabled local
data2 feature@filesystem_limits enabled local
data2 feature@large_blocks active local
data2 feature@large_dnode enabled local
data2 feature@sha512 enabled local
data2 feature@skein enabled local
data2 feature@edonr enabled local
data2 feature@userobj_accounting active local
data2 feature@encryption active local
data2 feature@project_quota active local
data2 feature@device_removal enabled local
data2 feature@obsolete_counts enabled local
data2 feature@zpool_checkpoint enabled local
data2 feature@spacemap_v2 active local
data2 feature@allocation_classes enabled local
data2 feature@resilver_defer enabled local
data2 feature@bookmark_v2 enabled local
data2 feature@redaction_bookmarks enabled local
data2 feature@redacted_datasets enabled local
data2 feature@bookmark_written enabled local
data2 feature@log_spacemap active local
data2 feature@livelist enabled local
data2 feature@device_rebuild enabled local
data2 feature@zstd_compress enabled local
data2 feature@draid enabled local
data2 feature@zilsaxattr active local
data2 feature@head_errlog active local
data2 feature@blake3 enabled local
data2 feature@block_cloning enabled local
data2 feature@vdev_zaps_v2 active local
data2 feature@redaction_list_spill enabled local
data2 feature@raidz_expansion active local
data2 feature@fast_dedup enabled local
data2 feature@longname enabled local
data2 feature@large_microzap enabled local
pool: data2
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub in progress since Sun Aug 3 12:59:09 2025
24.5T / 24.5T scanned, 21.7T / 24.5T issued at 925M/s
0B repaired, 88.83% done, 00:51:38 to go
expand: expanded raidz1-0 copied 24.5T in 21:44:46, on Sun Aug 3 12:59:09 2025
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
data2 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c35f07e6-1a5d-492f-85c0-de75b033f213 ONLINE 0 0 0
f066da66-8c78-4c82-9d22-b1889a91204f ONLINE 0 0 0
f025156c-fa3c-4530-8dc2-1a7eddd06689 ONLINE 0 0 0
1ec673d8-190a-4132-8868-d1e5b4d10480 ONLINE 0 0 0
This motherboard seems to be praised at STH. The big negative is the 2 SATA ports. I’m not opposed to pairing this with an EPYC processor in a media server/NAS if I go down that route. I’m very new to this and I’m wondering which controller I can add to give me more SATA ports?
That would be a SAS HBA, taking the PCIe slot and adding power.
Fair if you need a lot of drives, not so good if you only need a few. In the latter case, choose a motherboard with enough SATA ports (Intel C or Z chipsets, 8; AMD B550, 6; AMD B650, 4; Atom C3000, up to 12).
This board without a chipset is a testimony that SATA if being phased out. It’s well suited for compute tasks, or for NVMe storage, not so much for HDD storage.
How much capacity do you need? And how much do you expect to need a few years for now?