I’m planning on using this to run Plex (via app) and a windows VM (for Minecraft bedrock server, AP software controller and for ripping my DVD’s via handbrake Hardware: Motherboard: Supermicro x11ssh-l4nf CPU: Xeon e3-1275v6 RAM: 32gb ddr4 ECC (will upgrade to 64gb when ram prices come down a bi…

Don’t skimp on the power supplies or the cooling. Don’t use RAID cards but invest in HBAs and SAS expanders if you need more drive ports.

Price are not so affordable in this moment, but instead of use SATA SSD you can also evaluate to buy a PCIEX-NVME adapter and slap on it 1 nvme each slot (or if the motherboard supports bifurcation, like i think, buy a 4x4x8x adapter directly to put into the main PCIEX slot). As already pointed, do…

Thanks, sorry forgot to list PSU, I’ll be using my PC Power & Cooling Silencer MK2 750watt PSU for now. Huge overkill but it’s kicking around spare. Once I’ve got a good idea of power draw I will look into a good quality new PSU (likely 300-400watt ball park, for 50% load hitting peak efficiency) S…

I’ll also be using a 240 aio cooler (again overkill for an 80watt tdp chip but I’ve got it laying around haha

Not just the CPU cooler. You’ll need cooling for the drives and the HBAs too.

The case I’m using has 8 drive bays (2 stacks of 4 side by side) right behind a 200mm intake fan. Not using HBA’s I’m not worried about heat in this build :slight_smile: Just wanted to check ice not missed anything major on the truenas side of things. Hardware I’m more than confident with. Any c…

The onboard SATA ports should be just fine. Do not use the ASR cards as they are RAID Cards and will likley cause issues with ZFS. Use HBA’s (From LSI) if you every need more ports (though those will need planning for extra cooling). As @Samuel_Tai says - do not cheap out on on the PSU. A quality P…

[image] Chrispy69: 200mm intake fan. Not using HBA’s I’m not worried about heat in this build 200m has static pressure issues in my experience - I ending up swapping mine out for 140s. HDDs get hot faster & longer than you might expect during a scrub, resilver, smart test, or anything that …

WRT to power supplies, beware most power supplies prioritize the 12V rails for CPUs/GPUs. For a storage system, you want a power supply that prioritizes the 5V rails for the drive cages, which is why server power supplies are built differently from desktop power supplies. You can usually tell the d…

Ah interesting, the case is pretty open and will be running 3x 120mm arctic cooling p12 fans which are fairly good for static pressure, as exhaust so hopefully the 200mm intake should not struggle. But I’ve got loads of 140 and 120mm fans kicking about so can swap out if I need to. I’ll be monitori…

Build advice

TrueNAS General

Whattteva May 22, 2026, 5:51pm 8

Some guides from the old resident grinch:

Multiply your problems with SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers Resources

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. In the last year or two, we’ve had a resurgence of users asking about SATA Port Multipliers and cheap SATA controllers. Please, do NOT use port multipliers, and use cheap SATA controllers only after extensive research. SATA controllers and SATA Port Multipliers are some of the cheapest hardware, designed to make a number of hard drives acc…

TrueNAS Community

Resource - "Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not...

[---- 2024/01/16: Still relevant. Virtualization really doesn't change much. Updates made as appropriate. ----] [---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some...

TrueNAS Community

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting? Resources

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what TrueNAS is. TrueNAS is not a “Linux distro” and it is not designed to try to meet your arbitrarily spec’d use cases. TrueNAS is an appliance firmware for storage, which happens to be built on top of FreeB…

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