Hardware recomendation

TrueNAS General
, ,
1

so i wanna build a homelab server using lenovo M73 (tower) with 16gb of DDR3 1600mhz ram, intel core i3 4130, 1Gigabit ethernet, 3x 1TB drive with Raid-Z1, 256gb m.2 SATA SSD as Boot Drive, and 512gb m.2 NVMe SSD, any advice for the 512gb NVMe SSD, i dont know what i will do with it, as LOG or L2ARC??, i will use my Homelab as Immich Server, Jellyfin Server, Nextcloud Server, Syncthing Server and 1 Ubuntu LTS for Virtualization, and i will use cloudflare tunnel to get access outsite my network

2

You don’t have enough RAM to benefit from L2ARC, and you haven’t indicated any use that would call for SLOG. Use it instead as a separate pool for your apps and VMs.

2 Likes
3

great idea, i will use it as my VMs pool

4

I was going to say exactly what Dan was going to say but he got in first.

But don’t use the NVMe just for the apps and VMs themselves, you should also use it for any active data e.g. metadata that the apps create (like Plex or Jellyfin) and use the spinning rust for inactive data.

5

but is it safe?? because i only have 1 m.2 nvme slot on my motherboard and i will use it with 512gb, so i have no redundancy, or i have to upgrade the M.2 sata to 512gb (i only have 256gb M.2 sata right now) and use Msata slot for Boot Drive (my Msata Slot is still empty), is it good idea??

can i just mix the drive size??, so i dont have to buy 512gb m.2 sata drive

6

A small mSATA would be a great boot drive IMO. But personally I wouldn’t make a mirrored apps pool from 1x M.2 SATA and 1x M.2 NVMe because of the different speeds. If you do decide to use them, then your mirror would be 256GB in size and if you need 512GB you will need to buy another M.2 card and it might as well be a matching one to your existing 512GB M.2 NVME card.

But your apps pool doesn’t have to be mirrored IMO providing:

  1. You replicate the apps pool to your spinning rust.

  2. The apps pool doesn’t hold irreplaceable data and you can afford to lose (say) a day’s worth of updates.

My own apps pool holds only the apps and their metadata (mostly Plex metadata downloaded from the internet) plus a few cron scripts so I can easily afford to lose a days updates because e.g. Plex will download the metadata again if it needs to.

If you are going to have irreplaceable data created by apps or VMs where you cannot afford to lose a day’s worth of updates, then this needs to be on a redundant pool, and if you don’t have a redundant SSD pool it will need to be HDD.