I’m building my first TrueNAS system and have been researching for weeks, but I can’t find the right hardware combo to meet my needs. I’d appreciate any suggestions or advice from the community to help me finalize this build.
My Goals:
Primary Purpose:
File backup for photos, videos, and general data.
Running lightweight apps or Docker VMs, such as a photo manager (similar to Google Photos), a torrent client and home assistant.
Future Goals:
Support for Intel Quick Sync to experiment with Plex/Jellyfin for transcoding films and streaming to my TV.
Low Power:
I want the system to be as energy efficient as possible while meeting the above requirements.
Components I Already Have:
ITX Case: The motherboard has to be mini-ITX, as I’ve already bought the JONSBO N3 case (it was on sale).
SFX PSU: I already own a good SFX power supply, but I can return it if needed for compatibility.
Memory: I’ve recovered 2x 16GB UCS-MR-X16G1RT-H ECC DDR4 RAM (Samsung M393A2K40CB2-CVF 2933MHz 1Rx4). Based on my research, this memory should be compatible with most systems, but I’d prefer a motherboard/CPU combo that won’t make compatibility a hassle.
Key Requirements:
10GbE RJ45: This is a must-have, whether built into the motherboard or added via a PCIe card.
Motherboard + CPU Combo:
Needs to support the ECC memory I already have.
Should include Intel Quick Sync support for future transcoding and streaming.
8 HDD Capability:
Since the JONSBO N3 has 8x hot-swap HDD bays, I’m planning to use all of them. The motherboard needs at least 8 SATA ports. If it doesn’t, I’m okay using my PCI slot for an HBA card, as long as the motherboard still offers 10GbE LAN connectivity.
My Challenge:
I’m struggling to find a low-power mini-ITX motherboard and CPU combo that checks all these boxes. Before telling you what I’ve found so far, i’d like to see what do you suggest. maybe I did’nt get all consideration
If you’ve built something similar or have suggestions for compatible hardware, I’d love to hear them!
Regarding QuickSync, I’ve always seen the sentiment that “to use Plex effectively, you need QuickSync, and to get QuickSync, you need Intel.” There are countless posts comparing Intel vs. AMD for Plex, and Intel consistently seems to come out on top in this context.
You are too kind. It is a pretty awesome board with the only caveat that Asrock Rack has shown spotty support for direct customers in the past. I was incredibly fortunate to have had the assistance of iXsystems when it came to my 2750D4I board going kaploink due to the AVR54 bug. Many other folk here were less fortunate.
That said, the beauty of this motherboard is that the CPU is not embedded and the board basically incorporates everything one would want in a small form-factor NAS, with some future-proofing. For example, it’s two Oculink connectors can handle 4 SATA or 4 NVME drives each. The PCIe connector is PCIe 4.0x16, and it has a on-board copper 10GbE Intel NIC.
Pair it with a -G or -GE Ryzen (see the approved CPU list), and you get a ton of performance with relatively low power consumption.
You could easily add a Arc A310 ECO slim card and get all the QuickSync performance you’d ever want. The motherboard can support it out of the box. It’s $100 and fully supported by the kernel AFAIK ever since Dragonfish SCALE.
You’re right, but it will definitely increase power consumption.
The idle power draw for this card is around 40W, and it can go up to 75W under load. I’m sure there are other cards with different specs, but the general idea remains the same.
I have to run, but someone on Youtube actually did measurements with a power meter. I will try to find that video. Others have not been happy with the Arc, so more research is needed. I have yet to own one.
Other folk apparently have not liked the Arc series so if you’re looking to accelerate games, this may not be the card for you. But transcoding, Handbrake, etc seem like good candidates (or potentially in my case, BlueIris Inside a windows 11 VM). I need to review it further myself so anything you find out would be appreciated also.
Mini-ITX socketed Intel motherboard with ECC support, 8 SATA and 10GBase-T. You’ve cornered yourself in an “interesting” way… Are you on a budget by any chance? That would be a nice opportunity to remember Marilyn Monroe’s last, unfinished, movie…
Which generation of QuickSync do you want?
AsRock Rack E3C256D4I-2T and E3C246D4I-2T use SO-DIMM, like the X570D4I-2T.
You could use an E3C256D2I or E3C246D2I with a 10G NIC card. (thanks to @Constantin for the correction)
Mind cooling in the limited space of the case.
I’ve looked up (in retrospect, M393 was a give up): This is RDIMM. So incompatible with all of the above.
This would be compatible with either a X10SDV-nC-TLNnF (Xeon D-1500) or A2SDi-H-TF (Atom C3758). The former has a x16 slot for a (half-height) Arc 310, but only 6 SATA; the latter has 12 SATA, but only an open x4 slot, which may not supply enough power to the dGPU. X11SDV is not low power (ca. 60 W idle).
Ii wouldn’t be easy to fit a 10G NIC to a MJ11-EC1 (RDIMM, 8 SATA) in the limited space of a mini-ITX case.
The E3C256D4I-2T, E3C246D4I-2T, and E3C256D2I can allegedly use a LGA-1200 Xeon with video built-in. I wonder if you could use a W-1390T, which is a low base frequency, 8-Core Xeon w/video CPU? See here. 35W TDP, about $250 used.
The E3C246D2I uses a different socket, for that the E-2278GEL looks tastier. See here. But that’s a super rare CPU with super-rare pricing.
None of these CPUs show up on the supported CPU list for either motherboard. So it’s entirely possible that I mis-interpreted how Intel intends me to use their search function. Please proceed with caution in case I looked up the wrong chips for these sockets, respectively.
This board is an AMD Ryzen so definitely will NOT support QuickSync. But AMD integrated GPUs probably have something similar - you would need to check for Plex support.
That said, my own NAS has an ancient 2-core processor, the integrated GPU cannot be allocated to Plex, and there is no PCIe slot to add a GPU card (and in any case I do not have a Plex Pass for hardware transcoding). However, I try hard to avoid the need for real-time CPU transcoding, and despite the ancient CPU, the few background CPU transcodes I need to do complete in a reasonable timescale.
@Farne99 Once you have settled on a spec and built it successfully, it would be BRILLIANT if you would be willing to share the spec and the costs with us here, and if you do (& with your agreement) I would like to include it as an example in @dan’s Uncle Fester’s Basic TrueNAS Wiki.
Xeon E-2300 is based on laptop chips (Tiger Lake, hence the X12STH in Supermicro’s nomenclature), while W-1300 are desktop Comet Lake Core CPUs with ECC. So W-1300T could be another possible pick, but with W480/W580 chipset, not C256; the only mini-ITX boards I can find have only 4 (X12SCV-W) or 2 (X12SCV-LVDS) SATA ports. 8 ports is for the more common micro-ATX boards.
With this generation, a cheap and readily available Core i3-9100(T) would do—with ECC!—if 4 cores and 64 GB RAM is enough. But it is the pre-Arc generation of iGPU, hence my question about QuickSync. Which generation for which codec, H.264 or H.265/AV-1?
I’m fairly confident that embedded Xeon E-2200GE would work with a E3C246D2I. But putting a W-1300T CPU in a C256 motherboard would require adding proper microcode to the BIOS; the VRMs of a C25x board most likely cannot support the higher power of non-T W-1200/W-1300 CPUs[1], and maybe even that of a ‘T’.
Comet Lake was the first generation of desktop CPUs to break the 200 W barrier, yeah! And “35 W TDP” parts such as the W-1390T can use 125 W at full load. Beside segmentation, and removing ECC from the Core i3 to strictly enforce the “Xeon tax”, there’s a genuine technical reason why Intel went with laptop Tiger Lake for the Xeon E-2300 server parts… ↩︎
That’s where an arc a310 comes in. If the ryzen doesn’t have the horsepower, a $100 arc a310 will. It’s relatively inexpensive but it will eat a x16 slot so the mini-ITX motherboard better have everything else you need in the NAS, i.e. SATA / NVME, NIC, and so on.
The x570 has all that for this use case. So for a small (sub-8 drive) NAS, that motherboard makes for a compelling solution, especially if used with a -G or -GE chip off the QVL list, since that gets you low idle power and ECC too.
Correction on the power for the a310, BTW, per that video I linked to it idles at about 4W.
Thank you for those corrections. It shows how lazy my thinking was, assuming that a motherboard with a LGA-1200 CPU holder could take any LGA-1200 CPU, I will now include underlying chipsets also!
That pretty much takes the w1390t out of contention. It’s an awesome CPU, with such a wide range of frequencies, a decent core count, Video, and ECC. Bummer!
Addendum: For use-cases that just revolve around BlueIris, a better solution is a Google tensor processing unit, or TPU. They sell a external, USB-3 powered version for about $75 and it allegedly crushes all CPU-intensive tasks related to recognizing birds, people, whatever using the AI inside BlueIris. You simply have to upgrade / change the version of CodeProject AI to use the version that can take advantage of the TPU.
The biggest pain related to the TPU appears to center around making it work / pass through the confines of docker / VM / etc. I will first fit the TPU to my existing NVR and see how much it reduces power consumption. I may also look into using Frigate via docker on the NAS as a alternative to my NVR.
