For what you need (storage and android backup) i think the x3500 M4 will be an “overkill”. And he Will consume a lot for do his job.
I do the same (and more) with my “consumer low cost” Hw, with 40w consumption and low noise… But if you wanna made some test off course will be a better choice agaibst the E5700 
maybe on that (the 775) you can try OMV 
Yeah, home server builds are always a balancing act between cost, performance, heat, noise, space, and possibly power consumption if you live somewhere with high prices.
I’m fortunate enough to be able to host my kit in the datacentre where I work, so using old server hardware (which I don’t pay for, for the most part) I don’t care about the noise, heat and power requirements
But if I were building a rig for home use these days I’d want it as quiet and low power as I could fit in my budget. That would mean as much NVMe storage as I could afford (fast, and cooler/lower power than HDDs) and a fancy case with big, slow fans in it.
1 Like
Well i have put my disks in an somewhat stronger rig, its still old (3.gen i5), but the asus mobo has 6x sata connectors, and could be usefull for 2x more disks…
Its 16gb ram in dual channel (if that plays any role in nas). As said an i5 cpu. Just needed to config the network device again, as someone mentioned in the comments before.
At first it wasnt starting, got stuck at GOEM_ELI: Crypto: accelerated software. But after a few restarts i got to the config page.
For now it seems a little bit faster, when loading the pictures, but thats like just a little bit better… Still loads the thumbnails for ever…
I see cpu used stays at 0%, free ram 12gb, ZFS cache used only 1,3gb…
I ill let it run over night, hopefully looks better tomorrow.
1 Like
Any more way to improve the performance some more? Or is it just hardware based?
The zfs cache will grow, dont worry 
i have used for a bit a very similar system, and i dont have encounter this poor performance on loading thumbnail.
I think the next step to find the bottleneck is monitoring the disks you are using
1 Like
Someone mentioned an update to 13.3 to be a good next step for my case?
Or are there some plugins, apps that do a better job? I saw some cases where they use nextcloud or something similar? I didnt use it by now, so if its the same performance i wouldn’t go to that length of installing and figuring it out
What kind of performance are you seeking and - more importantly - in what kind of use case? Looking at stored photos/videos via a client in the same local network over smb i.e. is entirely different than over the internet with something like nextcloud. Maybe you want to upload photos from your mobile device automatically to your storage when on vacation? Maybe you want to share some parts of your library with other people. Both can be achieved with nextcloud.
Though a software update to the next stable release is always advisable, I doubt that it would benefit the performance in your case.
I agree with mistermanko, an app is not the solution.
The bottleneck IMHO must be find on disk or network performance.
Thinking back to my situation, i have my workstation and the nas direct connected by an unmanaged switch… maybe is just this that “help” performance via smb?
Nextcloud is really usefull for backup smarthphone, maybe Zenphoto can provide a better user experience to “consume” gallery/foto (i have installed it yet but still not used)
Well, i just want to be able to access the photos/videos from my truenas on other devices (mostly by phone).
The backup part works all right now, as I changed to the better hardware, it doesn’t crash when uploading new files to the nas, it goes at the wifi speed. So the backup part is not a prob for now. Maybe sometime later I make a better config for uploading over the internet as mistermanko said. But for now it’s just a photo/video storage, to access the files from home for a few family members.
The problem is just the speed of the thumbnail generation over SMB (that’s what i have configured right now).
I want to be able to go into a folder (with 200-1000 photo files) and see the file thumbnails at a faster speed. Let’s say 1-3 minutes for 100 photos would be fast for me. Now they generate faster than with the old setup, but still, it generates the thumbnails 1 by 1 like 5-20 secs per photo, and then it stops for some time (1-2min). The ZFS Cache is still the same size.
I know the local network speed plays a role in this, and the hardware speed.
But when I’m connected with cable, it’s the same scenario. The network is gigabit, the wifi is 1167 Mbps (300 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 867 Mbps on the 5 GHz band). I know, it’s not that fast but for the other stuff I need it gets the job done.
For the switch, I bought an unmanaged gigabit switch. I also got a managed one, but it’s megabit speed. Just wanted to see if it makes any difference…
So im interested if there is some setting or a different approach just for those thumbnails 
. Maybe some way to generate them somewhere, maybe on the SSD, or on the free disk/ram space? So when a client (phone) connects to the smb, it loads those small generated images as thumbnails, for each file name, or something like that…
Well, I don’t want to bother u guys with this small stuff… But it thought maybe someone was in a similar spot, it would be more useful this way for finding photos faster.
At least, for now, I have a backup, what was 1 of 2 tasks I wanted to accomplish 
.
How to configure file screening to block image, music and other files such as on Windows Server on Truenas Core
As I understand it, when browsing an SMB share, the server isn’t responsible for creating or caching thumbnail images. The clients reads each individual file (which could be relatively large?) and creates the thumbnails itself.
Have a read of this thread, it may help:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/ik4am5/i_solved_the_slow_thumbnails_appearance_when/
1 Like
There is no such feature in any version of TrueNAS, AFAIK.
Thanks for the link, i will see if it has some info on that topic. Yes, as im familiar with SMB, its the client that generates, that would sugest the wifi speed to be at fault… But when its on the eathernet, its still generated slow.
My gut feeling is that it’s not the network speed or your TrueNAS that’s the problem here, but the workload on the client computer of scanning all the photos and generating the thumbnails.
You could test this by sticking the same collection of photos (you talk of 200-1000 photos per directory) in a folder on a USB HDD and seeing if you get the same performance issues. Look at the CPU activity on the computer while you’re doing this. Are you maxing out one or more cores while generating the thumbnails?
Also, what is the client computer, OS and hardware wise?
If your OS isn’t locally caching the photo thumbnails you may want to consider a specialist photo library curation tool that uses your network share for storage, but manages it’s own thumbnails and cache. Something like Lightroom or ACDSee? That will make folder browsing much faster.
Hmm mabe an app like that would make a difference…
The os that its mostly used is android, also accessing the smb with phone with apps like Cx file explorer
TrueNAS is not a good fit for this kind of low-spec hardware, but there are plenty of other options!
I have an old Buffalo TeraStation with a measly 2 GB of RAM and an Intel Atom D2700. It’s running Debian Linux and the Webmin interface for NAS duties.
And, you know what? It works. I still have a ton to learn about Linux and configuring servers properly, but that’s on me, not the hardware or the software.
The Terastation holds eight 3.5" hard drives, and I have five in there right now.
Another good option for low-spec hardware is OpenMediaVault. I even ran that on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. It had other bottlenecks, namely for RAID use, but that was a hardware problem with the Pi, not with OpenMediaVault.
Just because your hardware is slow and you don’t have much RAM doesn’t mean you can’t still run a solid NAS.