After playing around with TruenNAS on some hardware I had lying around, I’ve quickly come to realize how important good hardware is. I’ve decided on putting together a “proper” NAS this time, hoping to migrate what I already have over to the newer, better system. Before I hit “buy”, though, I was hoping to get a quick sanity check on the main hardware choices.
The purpose of the NAS would be general file storage and file sharing applications, as well as storing data for some media applications (notably: Immich and Jellyfin). Jellyfin in particular I’d like to run on TrueNAS itself and do transcodes, and after some reading, it seems smart to use a dedicated GPU for that. The rest of the applications using the NAS run on either separate machines or VMs that live elsewhere.
The components I settled on are:
MB: Supermicro X13SEM-TF
Processor: Intel Xeon Silver 4410T
Memory: Crucial Micron DDR5 64GB (4800Mhz version)
Cooler: Noctua NH-U14S DX-4677
GPU: Sparkle Intel ARC A310
Hard Drives: Reuse the Seagate Ironwolf Pros + NVMe drives that my current TrueNAS uses.
If you have any suggestions or improvements, I’d be very grateful, as even after spending days on this topic, I still don’t feel like I understand much of anything.
Okay, probably I’m blind, but I can’t find an edit button. What I should have said was: I already have a Case & PSU (Fractal Node 804 and Seasonic Focus GX @850W - those I’d simply reuse).
As for the CPU being overspecced: That’s great to hear, because I would love to go with a cheaper one. Which one would you recommend? Couldn’t find many that were much lower-specced for the LGA-4677 socket. Except maybe the Xeon 3508U, but I remember reading somewhere that I shouldn’t go for the bronze and more for silver or gold xeons.
The LGA4677 platform, or any Xeon Scalable for that matter, is overspecced for your stated goal. Unless you’re hiding something about a full NVMe pool…
Either way, the NH-U14S is also massively overspecced for a low TDP Scalable. A NH-D9 DX-4677 4U would do, with airflow is the right direction—although it doesn’t matter much for the top open Node 804.
Hmm…I see, so I’m overdoing it. (and here I was, wondering if this was enough…)
@etorix Would you have any recommendation for a platform that you think would be better suited? Would the LGA-3647 be good? I saw that it’s getting on in years and uses DDR4, but otherwise looked solid from what I could gather.
Mind you, I’m only just starting with the whole Homelab thing, so I’m happy to be just a tiny bit overspecced, just so I can have the peace of mind in knowing that I can try more things with the NAS in the future once I get more comfortable with it.
Certainly. And much cheaper with seoncd-hand parts, in particular DDR4 RDIMM.
How many drives do you actually have, or plan to use? That’s the crux, especially NVMe drives. Depending on the answer, we may find that your requirements could fit on a consumer-style plateform, with possible transcoding by an Intel iGPU (which codec?), or directly by brute force on the CPU (a very realistic option with Scalable).
10G networking but no NIC yet?
I have 4 drives, and I may upgrade at some point to the full 8 (the Node case doesn’t take more).
As for NVMes, I have two: One for TrueNAS scale to run on, and one for additional apps like Jellyfin. As such I have two datasets: data which unites all the hard drives and programs, holding the default ix-applications.
My main reason for trying to upgrade is mainly my current lack of ECC memory and the fact that the iGPU I currently have doesn’t support for AV1 transcoding, iirc. It did cause me quite some weird trouble with the TV until I finally figured it out. After some reading, it seems that only the dedicated GPUs like Arc support this, though I might be wrong here yet, as well. Ideally, I’d like to be able to feed the largest possible variety of codecs in there, since I don’t know in advance what I’ll have and would like to avoid having to convert files manually.
As for networking: Currently, my network is all 1G - I did once try to start the conversion process to 10G, but failed miserably. I’ll try to tackle this if I can in the future. That said, if the NAS I build now already has support for 10G, this would be really nice. “Future-proof”, as people love to say.
You may want to plan for a mirrored VDEV for your apps, etc. If the single NVME goes down, you lose the current pool. You didn’t mention if it was backed up elsewhere for recovery.
Thanks. The 804 can actually take 10 HDDs, but let’s fit your needs at 8 SATA ports, plus 2-3 M.2 for boot and apps. Keeping a x8 slot for dGPU and x8 (or open x4) for a 10G NIC, this can fit in a consumer-style Xeon E, AM4 or AM5 platform.
For instance: AsRock Rack E246D4U2-2T
(there are other variants, but this one is readily available on eBay…)
8 SATA, x16/x0 or x8x8 CPU slots, x4 and M.2 from PCH, plus the x1 slot which would be perfect for a boot drive on adapter. 10G on-board.
Complete with a Core i3-9100 (max. 64 GB ECC RAM) or Xeon E-2100/2200 (128 GB RAM), DRR4 ECC UDIMM and an Arc A310/A40 for transcoding.
Should be distinctly cheaper than Sapphire Rapids. What do you think?
The iGPU of LGA1700 Core CPUs have the same media engine. Core i5-12000 and higher actually support ECC UDIMM when used with the W680 chipset, but this is maybe not the best option for a server.
Hi @Farout and @etorix. Thank you both for your recommendations (and for saving me from a truly dumb spending mistake). Both look really solid and should fit my needs wonderfully.
