Hello everyone, newbie here! Part 2 Regarding Build

TrueNAS General
1

Ok this is part 2 of my original post, I’m ready to start this build of TrueNAS Scale, here are my components:

-For space concerns, I cannot rack this build so it has to be a tower, setteled for a Rosewill Helium NAS Black ATX Mid Tower

-Running ESXI 8.0 U3 OS
-Asrock B450M Pro4 motherboard with a 2700x CPU
-80gb of DDR4 2400MHz RAM ( 2x32GB and 2x8GB, different vendors)
-8+ 2.5 SSD’s 3.8TB each (I have a few spares to have as hot spares)
–Read Intensive
–TLC flash memory
-LSI 9305-16i HBA card
-SFF-8643 to SATA cables
-M.2 256GB SSD Drive for OS
-Dual 10G Intel x520-DA2 network adapter, but my network stack is limited to 1G at the moment

Setup:
-The motherboard has dual m.2 slots, will be using the non-nvme slot as the boot drive and then with the HBA Card pass all drives to a TrueNAS Scale VM
–Unfortunately, the motherboard states:
—M2_2 and SATA3_3 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the other one will be disabled. (which is not a problem but I do loose one on-board sata
-Also, since the CPU does not have on-board video, this will be a headless system as the HBA card will utilize the PCI Express 3.0 x16 Slot and the network card will utilize the PCI Express 2.0 x16 Slot

Questions:
The idea is to spin up a TrueNAS Scale VM and pass all the drives to the VM, I’m contemplating what setup I should do. Been watching videos of how ZFS works and it looks like you create a pool with vdevs. What is important to me is a balance between space and resiliency, and it seems doing a Raidz1 is a good balance (but comment if otherwise)

So some questions would be:

  1. Should I create 1 pool in raidz1 with 8 drives and 1 vdev, with my capacity I should be around 24.313TB
  2. Create 1 pool in raidz1 with 8 drives and 2 vdevs, the calculator drops this to 20.9TB
  3. Create 2 pools in raidz1 with 4 drives, wity my capacity I should be around 10.42TB
  4. Not sure if raidz2 or 3 advisable with only 8 drives
  5. In any of this configurations, I’m wondering what the resilvering time would be like in case of a failed drive? Since these are SSD drives, could I just mimic a failed drive by disconnecting it and connecting one of my spares ones
  6. Realistically, I also read that if you loose one complete vdev in a pool you loose the whole pool? Not sure the best way to avoid this

If you read the whole thing thanks for taking the time.

2

That depends on how important your data is. Remember, RAIDZ1 means you can lose 1 drive and still be good. If you lose 2 drives then you are not good at all. This is why you will see a lot of us promote RAIDZ2 or Mirrors, but something more resilient thatn RAIDZ1. Of course if you have a routine backup then that could mitigate this a bit.

All those questions you are asking, you should have answered those before buying your drives. Only you know your use case and you should design it with that in mind.

Do you have enough airflow? I took a look at this case and you may need to do some directed airflow across the HBA. These HBAs are meant for a high airflow chassis. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it. you just need to ensure very good fast airflow for proper cooling.

Yes, all the Motherboard SATA ports will be for ESXi use, most likely unable to pass any of these through, so this does not affect TrueNAS directly.

1 Like
3

Possibly not if you use a NVMe M.2 drive. This is a SATA lane being shared. Check the manual…

4

Thanks for all the useful tips, fortunately, I only paid for the case and HBA card, everything else are parts from other builds

I’m actually going to double the capacity and will be doing 16 drives, so do you suggest maybe 2 raidz2 2 vdevs?

5

Yes since I was dual booting into windows I was not using the nvme but you are right, once this is finished, I will use the nvme drive (as long is doesn’t share lanes with the PCIE slot) and all 4 slot I could probably connect other drives and create and expansion data store