Hardware suitable?

TrueNAS General
1

Hello,

I actually have a Synology 214ds with two WD Red 8 TB. It is working, but of course it’s gotten rather old. But I have three identical Zotac Geforce 9300 ITX mainboards. Specs:

Socket 775
2x DDR2 slots
Internal GeForce 9300 graphics
2x SATA2 intern, 1x eSATA
Gigabit LAN
1x PCI-Express x16
Legacy BIOS only, no UEFI
Hardware RAID in BIOS possible

I’ve modified the board to use Socket 771 Xeons. I’m using a Xeon L5408, 4 cores, 4 threads, 12 MB L2 Cache, 2.08 GHz, FSB 1066 MHz, 45W TDP.
I also have 4 GB DDR2 memory sticks, so 8 GB RAM would be possible.
The PCI-E x16 port could be used for a 10GBit LAN card.

The TrueNas system has to be compatible to macOS and Android.
I also need DLNA media sharing.

Would this be a good setup for TrueNAS?

Greets, E29.

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Correction: The Xeon L5408 has 2.13 GHz and 40W TDP.

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No. This is not a hardware raid. It’s BIOS firmware raid, not compatible with Linux.
The whole setup seems to be 15 years old. I wouldn’t trust it any more. 8GB of RAM is the absolute minimum required for TrueNAS Scale, and you cannot upgrade. 2 SATA ports aren’t enough, you need a dedicated boot drive. Your system is too old to support M.2 and NVMe.

So: no, get something newer.

1 Like
4

Welcome to the TrueNAS forums!

Question: What are you trying to gain when compared to the Synology you have running? I have a D-Link DNS-321, two drive small NAS, similar to your Synology. This was before I got into FreeNAS/TrueNAS. I wanted more throughput, I could only get 25Mb over my 1GbE. Very slow.

The WD Red drives, are they the older ones or newer ones? The old ones are CMR recording, the newer ones are SMR recording. SMR is not compatible with ZFS which is the file system used by TrueNAS. So if you have SMR drives, do not use them for this project.

My two cents are:

First of all, if you have the hardware then you can slap it together and test it out. Why not?

What I see:
8GB RAM is going to hit your performance. No need to even think 10GbE. You will not have a good sized ARC so you are starving for RAM. Also, SCALE does not use a SWAP partition so if you run out of RAM, your system fails to work. For this one reason, you might consider using CORE vice SCALE. I know CORE is going away, someday, but it uses a SWAP partition which would help fill in those low RAM gaps a little bit. If you want to run SCALE, you may need to purchase some more RAM, two 8GB sticks. I’ll bet used DDR2 RAM is cheap!

The number of drive ports is another issue. You should have a dedicated drive, not USB Flash Drive, as the boot drive. You can use a USB to SATA adapter for example, or USB to NVMe adapter, “IF” your motherboard will support booting from the USB drive. Possible options are:

  1. You purchase an HBA to put into that PCIe x16 slot. This would free up the two onboard SATA ports, one for the boot drive, and give you several ports from the HBA.
  2. Use the eSATA port for the boot drive and then you still have 2 internal ports for the Mirrored drives.

The CPU is okay, the lack of ECC RAM is okay, just do not expect any transcoding. A simple DLNA will place very little strain on your system. If you choose Plex, just enable DLNA and that is it. Do not use transcoding. Plex may not work smoothly, you will just need to see if you go down this road.

If you do look to purchase an HBA, realize that the HBAs recommended here the most do require a very high airflow rate to remain cool, or they fail. Another option that gets a bad name is a simple 4 port SATA adapter. This can have problems with CORE (FreeBSD) due to driver support, but some do work fine. I don’t know how well these are supported in SCALE(Linux Debian). It is a risk you may want to take.

Regardless, I do not see a “no purchase” way forward, while ensuring some reliability. Not unless you think outside the box. I am always willing to toss out options that many would not. One good option is to run an older version of TrueNAS or possibly FreeNAS, where you could run the system on a Flash Drive. If you are looking ONLY for DLNA and to saturate your 1GbE, that is doable. And no need to purchase anything new, except possibly your hard drives.

Whatever you do, run some stability tests, a MemTest86+ and Prime95 for example. If your hardware is not stable, your data would be at risk.

2 Likes
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Wow. So many text and it sounds so negative.

I mainly asked because I have on this system Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 Server installed, mainly for using 32 bit and PowerPC-based applications. I have 8 GB RAM, a 512 GB SSD and a 2 TB HD for data. No additional graphics card.

OS X and TrueNAS are based on FreeBSD. Why is this configuration capable of using OS X, but not TrueNAS?

By the way, I own a physical copy of Mac OS X Server with unlimited clients.

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TrueNAS uses ZFS exclusively. ZFS needs memory.

That platform is not suitable for TrueNAS.

2 Likes
7

TrueNAS CORE is based on FreeBSD, but the OS isn’t the issue. ZFS is the issue as @pmh said. You likely could run a server on this hardware as I previously said, it just may run terribly. All you can do is slap one together and give it a try. I would only place a copy of your data on the system, test it. You ay find that you like the GUI and ease of use enough to purchase a new set of hardware to support it.

If you have a server operating, which is something you didn’t mention, you only mentioned the Synology, then why not continue to use the OS X Server that is working? maybe you are just asking questions to find out if you can make the TrueNAS move using the same hardware. It is risky.

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You asked for the opinion of the community.
The reply was that the hardware isn’t suitable.

Plenty of people run TrueNAS on unsuitable hardware and live with the limitations. When you run into issues the available community support will likely be limited, due to your esoteric hardware.

I’m sure you’ll make your own decision on what is best for you eventually, if you haven’t already.

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Notwithstanding the age of this hardware, and notwithstanding that 8 GB is the bare minimum for TrueNAS (ZFS, really), an obvious answer to this question is given by the limited number of SATA ports. A NAS is about storage, isn’t it?
Just about any other old motherboard with 4-8 SATA you may have lying around would be a better (or “less bad”) candidate.

10 Gb/s? Out of a pair of HDDs? :rofl:
Get more drives and at least 32 GB RAM for that.

2 Likes
10

IMO, this HW can be ok for some purposes. For example, it can be used as a museum exhibit NAS with the second copy of your data. You could replicate your “primary” NAS to this NAS for the sake of implementing the 3-2-1(-1-0) backup strategy. Thus, performance wouldn’t matter. Only 2 sata ports can be restricting (for raidz) though.