12 years ago I built the system that is showing in my tag-line. It’s worked great. I am planning a massive upgrade and would like some feedback from the experienced eyes of this community.
I plan to use it only for the Truenas dataserver, no jails or plugins. I have another proxmox box doing the plex, nzbget, sonarr, radarr, etc.
I have bought 9 x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 22 tb drives and plan to make a z3 pool. I will add my current 6 drive z2 pool to the box as a seperate pool.
I am looking at the following:
Case: HL15 2.0 – Chassis + Backplane + PSU (RM1000x)HL 15
Motherboard: ASRock Rack W680D4U-2L2T
CPU: Intel Core i7-13700
Memory: 128 GB DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMM
HBA: Broadcom/LSI 9400-16i
So, what do you think? I was thinking that it would be near overkill for the task – and give me “some” room for potential expansion in the future.
Anyone have experience with these parts such that you would recommend I not do this?
I can’t really comment on the new parts, except for the boot drive. TrueNAS uses dedicated boot drives. With 9 + 6 drives for data pools, that is 15 that your chassis holds, no slot for the boot drive.
However, you can possible use a USB to SATA / NVMe adapter for the boot drive. While not perfect, many people say they work good enough for boot drives. Or you can use the 16th port off your Broadcom/LSI 9400-16i for the boot drive, somehow using it internally. Or even use a NVMe drive for booting, (either system board or via PCIe slot adapter).
I was thinking to use a couple a small SSDs (mirrored) for my boot drive(s). I have 8 sata ports unused. I hadn’t considered if there was someplace to “put them” having aready occupied all 15 slots of the HL15. I figured that there was someplace in the case for them. I have one m.2 slot on the mb, but I did want to mirror my bootdrive.
Your old system appears to be adequate for your usage case.
In contrast, for a basic data server (in a presumed home setting), the hardware you’re looking at getting is massively overspecced.
Maybe just look at a different chassis for your current hardware?
Or get used server hardware from a few generations ago, that should still be a lot cheaper than your proposed set up.
I have seen PCIe brackets to hold a 2.5" drive, that might be an option. Especially if you have PCIe slots that you can’t use for other purposes. This would be reasonably secure mounting for extra internal drives.
Of course the old standby of velcro may work if you don’t move the chassis much.
It wouldn’t be “near overkill;” it’d be overkill to an extreme degree.
Moreover, I really don’t see the value proposition for the HL15. A Supermicro 846 gives you 24 bays in 4U vs. 15 for the HL15, redundant PSUs, SAS expander backplane, and if weight is anything to go by, a considerably more solid construction. Oh, and quite a bit less money. For one example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/195993327960
I have consistently had trouble with keeping my temps down in my prior nas box. I switched out cases and fans and made nice neat cable runs for air flow – yet I always seem to run hot (ambient 78F in my house). In addition, I really like the notion of the backplane for hotswaps. The other models that had a back plane had such restricted airflow that I really didn’t think I would solve my heat issue without “server room sounding” fans … So this was where I saw the beauty of the HS15 design – clean backplane with front and back fans without the backplane inposing and airflow restrictions.
When you spoke of “overkill to extreme degree” were you refering at all to the mb/cpu choices or only my expensive case choice? I was considering dropping the cpu to i5-13500 for a little quieter and lower power without sacrficing (I think) performance over 10GbE.
CPU, RAM, HBA–I’m not that familiar with the motherboard. The HL15 is most definitely not overkill, and I continue to believe it’s a suboptimal choice for, really, any use case. Its only real benefit is if you’re depth-constrained.
Sir, your spec is way overkill for such an application…
I would drop down to i3-13xxx easily
And the RAM also to 32GB (maybe even 16, if you only use it for NAS only)
You can and should check the CPU and RAM graph in your current system to tell you what your load for those is.
And after evaluation the numbers, you can find out, if you need any upgrade.
But I lean to the opinion of @neofusion. Just buy a new, better ventilated case for your old system.
My friend built a Windows based NAS for himself recently.
It has a i3 14100 and 64 GB of normal (non ECC) RAM.
I asked him, the CPU load is almost zero, and the RAM usage is about 12GB.
My Main TN system is sitting in a Proxmox VM with 4 cores and 32 GB of RAM.
Now the backup mirror is runnig the Scrub work and the CPU load is between 50-90%.
(It has 4x QEMU 2,5 virtual CPU cores of the physiscal Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPU.
It clocks up to 2,7GHz)
