I’m not due to NAS servers and in fact, I’m not new to servers in general. I’ve been running and working on Linux for the past 20 years and I’ve always built my own home servers, which usually would run a hypervisor either Xen or KVM and have a storage VM on top of it. Another VM would run Plex and other VMS for other workloads.
After playing around with TrueNAS on some spare hardware, I’m ready to build my first trueNAS server for home use. I’ve always used commodity hardware for my server builds usually parts from my last gaming desktop. I want to step it up a little bit with this build but still keep it to about a $2000 budget. My current Nas has about 20 TB of spinning disc storage in a raid5 so I’m looking for about that much disk space and then adding SSD’s and NVME me on top of it.
If you had to stick to a budget, where would you look to use commodity hardware and where would you insist on server hardware? Any recommendations for where I can start looking.
the minisforum MS-01 looks nice, is low power and comes with 2 SFP+ plus a PCIe for a HBA card.
Well, yes. If you can, is preferable.
…I guess look around. New vs. used ?, your call. But a good foundation ( hardware wise ) is best. Later when you get more money you can add more memory, more drives, …but it depends on your basic choice of server vs. commodity/(non ECC workstation type) hardware.
AMD EPYC first gen (Naples 7001) is relatively cheap on eBay.
You can get an ATX Mainboard and CPU for $350-$500, another $200-$250 for 256GB of memory. Many of the Mainboards have 12-16 SATA ports so you can spend the rest on a 10 GbE card, a few breakout cables, Case, PSU, etc.
That should come out to around $1000.
The other $1000 could be used on drives. If you find good offers (either on drives or the core components), you might even be able to fit an Arc A310/A380 for about $100 in there.
The advantage of this setup is I/O bandwidth. Even those relatively cheap boards get you close to 80 usable PCIe lanes in addition to all those SATA ports. It’s also nice to have Server features like IPMI and the ability to use cast off Registered Memory with ECC and a lot of bandwidth. You also get a lot of cores for different VMs.
The disadvantages are: Relatively high power usage (like 100W continuous), relatively weak single threaded performance (good enough for 10GbE, probably also 25GbE, but not great for a virtualized gaming system or 100GbE) and no platform security updates (stuff like spectre has to be patched over in the OS)
Server-grade hardware in any case. If you’re going for ZFS, it doesn’t make sense to skimp on ECC RAM. Plus IMPI and other server niceties.
Refurbished server hardware is not expensive. If this is pure storage, look into X10SDV boards—nice, low power, cheap DDR4 RDIMM. If this is more than storage, clarify your requirements and look into refurbished EPYC/Scalable systems.
A NVMe drive is a SSD (Solid State Drive). SSD ≠ SATA.
What are these intended for?