I’m planning to make the jump from Synology to TrueNAS for home lab use. I built home servers for a couple of decades but then got lazy and switched to Synology. So it’s been a minute since I designed a system. I’d appreciate feedback and recommendations.
This is for a rackmount. I can go 2U or 3U but would prefer to stick with 3U. The rack can accomodate a device with up to a 19" depth. This system will host a combination of Docker-based media tasks (e.g., Roon, Plex, LMS), Home Assistant, a variety of other home lab-type docker containers (Syncthing, homepage, etc.), and will run a couple of rotating low-use VMs running Windows and various Linux distros. The four storage drives will run Raid-Z2 and the SSDs will be boot, mirrored SLOG, and Striped L2ARC.
Here’s what I’m thinking. I’m fine with the total cost of this system, so not looking for options for less expensive.
Case SilverStone RM21-308
Motherboard ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T
CPU Ryzen 7 5700X
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-L9x65
RAM 2 x 32 GB DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM (Micron)
PSU Seasonic Focus GX-750
Cache/Boot Samsung PM9A1 1 TB PCIe 4 ×4
HBA Broadcom/LSI 9300-8i
Storage 4 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 12 TB 7200 RPM
Am I in the right ballpark? Any specific alteratives I should consider?
I use a couple of shallow wall mounted racks - that’s the only mounting option I’ve got. Tripp Lite SRW6UDP.You’re right that they’re primarily intended for network gear but Synology makes a rackmount option that fits (the RS1221+), which is what I’ve been using for years.
There aren’t many rackmount cases that fit the bill for me - that’s why I’m going with the SilverStone case I mentioned. It measures at just under 19" deep.
Thanks for the pointer to the Primer. I just did a quick read and need to do a deeper read to fully understand how caching works and what, if anything, I need to do.
When you wrote “64Gb of RAM” did you mean to suggest something about that choice?
Older advice was to consider adding L2ARC starting at 64Gb of RAM. You would go by the ARC statistics to see if you have a low hit rate that adding L2ARC would help. The L2ARC needs to be faster than the storage pool to assist. If you had fast NVMe storage for your data VDEV & Pool, the L2ARC isn’t as helpful if it is the same speed to read from.
The other issue with your first choice for L2ARC looked to be planning 2Tb but that needs to take up RAM, that could otherwise be used for plain ARC. The memory requirements aren’t as high as they were in the past but you should start with a smaller amount allotted.
You can play with both L2ARC and SLOG as both types can be removed from the pool without having to recreate the data. (pool destruction and recreation).
A recent thread on L2ARC sizing, etc discussion
See below for Special VDEV (sVDEV) Planning, Sizing, and Considerations
