Does Supermicro X9 + Xeon E5 v2 still make sense for TrueNAS SCALE in 2026?

TrueNAS General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on building a small TrueNAS SCALE system for a photography archive.

My girlfriend is a photographer. She currently uses 2 × Seagate ST10000VN000 (10 TB each). She will likely need to add one or possibly two more drives soon.

This storage is intended as a medium-term archive. There is already a separate offline backup on standalone external drives stored in another location.

Current situation:

  • Number of users: 1

  • Workload: storage and access to RAW photo files

  • Required uptime: worst case 8–10 hours/day, typically ~5 hours

  • Network: currently 1 GbE

  • Access: local network only

Data size and growth:

  • Current dataset: ~15 TB

  • Expected growth: ~2–3 TB per year

  • Data is considered fairly critical

ZFS layout plan:

My current plan is to start with mirrored vdevs due to the limited number of drives available today.

Once the system grows to around 5–6 drives, I would consider rebuilding the pool as RAIDZ2 for improved long-term redundancy and capacity efficiency.

I understand that this would require recreating the pool and restoring data from backup.

Hardware consideration:

I am considering building the NAS on an older enterprise platform, likely from the Supermicro X9 series.

The exact motherboard model is not yet decided (possibly X9SRI-F), as this will depend on feedback and whether this general platform idea makes sense in 2026.

The tentative plan would be:

  • Used Xeon E5 v2

  • ~64 GB DDR3 ECC RAM

My reasoning is that X9 is the last generation using DDR3 ECC, and DDR3 memory is currently significantly cheaper than DDR4.

I am not looking for high compute performance — mainly stability, ECC support, and good storage reliability.

Storage controller:

At the moment I am considering using the onboard SATA ports.

However, if there is a strong technical reason to invest in a proper HBA (e.g. LSI in IT mode), I am open to that.

Expansion plans:

  • Likely growth to 4–6 drives total

  • No virtualization or heavy compute workloads planned

Environment:

  • Home environment, tower case

  • Noise and power consumption matter, but are not extremely critical

Budget:

  • Flexible, but cost-efficiency is important

  • Open to used enterprise hardware if it is still a good choice

Main questions:

Does it still make sense in 2026 to build a new TrueNAS system on an older platform like X9 + Xeon E5 v2?

Is starting with mirrors and later rebuilding to RAIDZ2 a reasonable long-term strategy for this use case?

Is using onboard SATA acceptable for a small system like this, or is a proper HBA strongly recommended even at this scale?

What additional information would help you provide better recommendations?

Thank you.

2

If you can swing starting with a 4x Raid-Z2 VDEV that would be better as you will not have to rebuild the pool later. As long as your motherboard has enough HD ports for your planed life, you should be fine. One for boot-pool. You can use a small SSD or NVMe adapter with USB but ‘thumb drives’ aren’t suggested anymore. The rest of the HD ports for your planned data pool, guessing 4-6 ports?

4 is minimum number of drives you can start a Raid-Z2 pool with using the GUI. If you started with 2x 10TB in a mirror VDEV your option for more space is adding another mirror VDEV to the pool or replacing the drives with larger models. Starting with Raid-Z2 you could lose any two drives and pool is still alive. If you had 2x 2 wide mirror VDEVs, you can only lose one drive per VDEV without losing the pool.
Whatever drives you use, make sure they are CMR and not the SMR type.
SMR vs CMR ServeTheHome

TrueNAS Docs - WD Red SMR Drive Compatibility with ZFS

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It shouldn’t… but in this market it may unfortunately make sense.
For your stated needs of 4-6 drives in total and low power, the ideal plateform would actually be a X10SDV motherboard—assuming you can still find reasonably priced DDR4 RDIMM.

Yes and yes.

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Sadly not likely, DDR4 is through the roof now as well.

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Then the best plan is probably to watch for complete systems that the refurbisher did not bother to dismantle and sell as parts… Which involves time, efforts, and keeping an open mind.

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I have 2 x X9-based systems, substantially identical, see my signature for details. These have been running now for ~7 years without issues. The motherboards & processors (EBay), HBA’s (Art of Server on EBay),10G cards (EBay), and some of the current HDD’s were bought used (from Go Hard drive with 5-year warranty).

If I needed another NAS I wouldn’t hesitate to do the same again if the parts were available. I can put up with the idiosyncrasies of the X9 Java-based IPMI that you may see -ve comments about here over the HTML version of later boards.

Given your use case I suspect your needs could be well met with an X9-based system.

Don’t forget backup (I have 2 substantially identical systems as the basis for that).

Good luck with your decisions.

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I have an x-99 and Xeon E5-2630 V3 system here because DDR3 is cheaper than DDR4 right now, especially with ECC but another system I put together using an AM4 setup with a Ryzen Pro 4650G runs a lot cooler, faster and a lot better. I guess it comes down to price for a lot of these things as ram is such silly prices….
The Ryzen setup doesn’t need a gfx card either because with the latest Truenas versions you’ll need a later nvidia gpu for ease of use if that is what you have or go down a later Intel system with built in gfx

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Nope. TrueNAS is happy to run headless, the issue is the motherboard.

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Older cards will still function fine as a display/console output, they just can’t be used with Apps due to NVIDIA deprecating them in the driver.

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OP never mentioned transcoding, or anything which might use it…

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Yes, I’m just making sure it’s clear that you can still use any card you want that will work in text-mode for console output. You don’t need [RTX ON] to show the text console. :slight_smile:

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And with a server board that has IPMI, such as pretty much any Supermicro X9 board for Xeon E5, no graphic card is needed at all. :wink:

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14

For storage it’s great.

If you want GPU-assisted Immich then the lack of reBAR will get you. But that’s not a today problem, as you are only considering storage.

Given RAM prices, the X9 is a good choice.