Building 2nd NAS to store clients photo and edit 4k video

TrueNAS General
,
1

I have a 7 year old setup with ASRock E3C236D2I + Pentium G-4400 and 6 HDD RAIRDZ2 in Node 804. This works well to store clients photo and videos, but is very slow for using videos directly when editing 4k weddings.

I am currently upgrading HDDs in the pool from 4Tb to 8Tb. I thought to re-use older 4Tb drives as a backup. So the idea is to build newer NAS, which is better suited for the needs, while using older one to do partial backup of most important data.

By searching the forum looks like my best bet is to have a slow storage pool with HDDs (eg 6 in raidz2) combined with a few NVMEs for a fast pool. About 1TB of fast storage would be enough for my needs. I also want to have 1 SATA port free so that I can burn-in new hard drives.

Additionally I have a Node 304 lying around with a PSU, that I plan to use in the backup system.

Therefore I envision to start with MB+CPU+RAM and 1-2 NVME (1Tb). I am in Europe and it would be good to stay within 500-600 Euros.

So far I have the following MBs in mind:

  1. ASRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T – 8 SATA + 2x10GbE LAN, can buy from China but will need to pay import taxes in EU (200-300 Euros)
  2. Supermicro X11SSM-F – 8 SATA + 2x1GbE LAN, can find used within EU (200-300 Euros)
  3. Supermicro A2SDI‑4C‑HLN4F – 8 SATA + 4 × 1 GbE – I can buy new for reasonable price (around 400Euros)

So far I am leaning towards E3C246D4U2-2T with something like i3-9100 and 32GB RAM. Intel Atom is probably not going to be enough for my needs?

p.s. the closest thread I found is Drive Recommendations for Network Editing Setup - #17 by roberth58 from @Orlando_Furioso , but my budget and scale is smaller.

2

Why?
It is a good fit for your Node 304 case, unless you also want 10G networking.

Otherwise, get the E3C246D4U2 as primary in the Node 804 and put the E3C236D2I in the Node 304 as backup NAS.

3

I was thinking about a primary MB for Node 804. 10G is one part, which would be good to have, but I was also wondering whether CPU has much influence on read speed if I am editing videos off NAS?

4

Unless you’re using encryption and/or some unsane compression level, CPU is not likely to be a bottleneck; IOPS from a single vdev and networking will take precedence.

1 Like
5

thanks for clarifying, @etorix . Then I will focus on MBs with 10Gbe.

A follow up tangential question: given that I will use a M2 slot in MB for a boot drive, I presume I need a PCIe card to mount fast (mirror) pool with (two) NVME? To your knowledge, is there anything I need to be careful with when looking for one so that the speed is not negatively affected?

6

You’ll need to make sure that your board and CPU support PCIe bifurcation on the slot you want to use for the SSDs. Otherwise you’ll have to buy a very expensive adapter that does that by itself.

Even a PCIe 3.0 slot or SSD would be no bottleneck for even a dual 10G link I think.
Using crazy fast PCIe Gen.4 or even Gen.5 SSDs would most probably not be worth it.
I’d recommend a WD SN700 or something similar ‘NAS-grade’.
Also check your NVMe temperatures under load and maybe use a heatsink.

1 Like
7

interesting, thank you for the advice.

Then I need to re-consider the list of MBs. What I found so far is this Supermicro list based on customer support reply Bifurcation on Supermicro X12STH and Supermicro X12STL boards -- short answer: No

according to ASRock Rack E3C246D4U - The Perfect Media Server Motherboard? E3C246D4U supports bifurcation, could not find anything specific E3C246D4U2-2T, but in comments someone mentions this board with “4 x NVMe”, so I presume it should support bifurcation.

8

You may safely assume that BIOS features are consistent across the line, including all networking variations (-2T, -2L2T) and further revisions (*2-).

1 Like