Hi !
I’m really sorry to ask a question that has been seen so many times, but after 2 hours of scattering here and reddit I didn’t find anyone in the same situation as me.
Little Note before starting : I’ll only keep this old pc as a NAS for a few years, just the time to buy me a new rig and replace the NAS with my actual PC.
(That was not part of the original problem but since I’m here, will it be easy for me to migrate everything when the time comes or would I need to consider another OS for more flexibility ?)
I’ve wanted to build a NAS for me and my family for quite a long time (and with docker support for different VMs). And recently I got an old pc for free, and I just need to throw storage in it. However the two problems are :
I want to increase write speeds as I’ll be purchasing (if this isn’t a dumb idea, I’m open to all suggestions) 2 12tb enterprise drives in raid 1 for storage, and 2 pcie gen 4 nvme via PCIeX16 adapters (in raid one also) for boot drives and docker apps. And as I saw everywhere, “ADD MORE RAM”. And yeah, I would have liked to be able to do that, but my current platform (ms 7522 ver 3.1 X58 Pro) cannot physically support more than 24Go of RAM, and even if most of the time it’ll only be for backups and media storage in which hdd speed is fine, I want this NAS to be able to reach 2.5G speeds when needed (10G when I’ll switch to my new rig). And so I wanted to know if I could use a bit of nvme as a temporary cache that would dump itself at slower speeds onto the hdd (or anything else that could work, again, I’m a noobie open to all suggestions). It wouldn’t happen that often though (and I would do that via SMB probably, don’t know if it’s important to mention. And this leads to the second question).
I have a dead slow internet (100 mb/s). And so, I wanted to purchase 2 pcie to lan cards, connect my pc to the NAS via ethernet cable (while using both integrated LAN ports for regular internet as my internet won’t exceed 100mbps anyway) and thus would use the NAS from time to time as a DAS connected via ethernet (as it’s the fastest thing I found to connect 2 PCs), but with like 2.5 times the speed of the HDDs.
Is it possible to link 2 pcs like that with truenas ?
And do I really need two different network adapters/cable for that ?
Thanks in advance for all your answers, and sorry for disturbing with my very specific situation/problem. I hope it doesn’t bother, and that someone experienced will be able to help me through that process
Have a nice day/evening !
If you system tops out at 24GB, I am guessing it is real old and may even use triple channel ram.
Realistic view, check for how many 3.5 drives fit in the case You also need to check the specs for the motherboard. You are looking at conventional HD and SATA SSDs as your options. Stick with 1Gbps networking and connect to internet at your current rate using a router and 1Gbps Ethernet switch
Guessing your setup will be 2x 12TB HD and 2x SSD for storage, two pools / VDEV with Mirror pairs of each technology.
There is a lot to unpack in your request. Here are some bullet points:
TrueNAS uses a dedicated storage device for it’s own use. Some people hack TrueNAS to use shared storage, but poor management can lead to data loss.
ZFS does not have a Tiered Storage where 2 NVMe are used to write data, which is later migrated to HDD storage. You can manually setup something to do the work via Cron or background script, but that is not included with TrueNAS.
Really old PCs tend to be poor choices for TrueNAS servers. They CAN work, but may use lots of power, or be less reliable due to age.
Faster writing at >1Gbit/ps speeds can be problematic with older desktop hardware.
Yes, you can use an alternate network path from your current desktop to a TrueNAS server, via separate LAN & sub-net. But, this increases the complexity of your home network. Be prepared to learn both implementation, (if you don’t already understand it), and eventual trouble shooting when something goes wrong.
TrueNAS and the underlying ZFS are not the most flexible NAS software. ZFS was designed for Enterprise Data Centers and high levels of data integrity. Certainly usable with home style equipment, just at times not as flexible as expected or desired.
No RAID1 in TrueNAS. The right terminology is: “Mirror”.
Then, consider upgrading.
No way that two spinning drives are ever going to reach 10 Gb/s.
No. ZFS does not do that kind of tiered storage.
No. One interface to your switch (2.5, 10G, whetever), client PCs to the switch, dead slow internet to the switch and everything will go as fast as it can.
Yeah it’s a triple channel memory system on this old motherboard. I can fit up to 6 drives in this case.
And I don’t know if the motherboard supports it, but maybe it can boot form PCIe gen 2 slots onto nvme.
And I’m sorry but I can give up on the idea of very fast nvme capable transfer speeds, but I can’t bear to not at least be able to use my hdd full transfer speeds. I mean if I stay on my current network speeds I would realisticly be able to transfer at 10Mo/s, that’s useless. I need to at least get stable 150Mo/s speeds from a direct connection between the NAS and my desktop .
Noted, I would prefer to avoid that. Maybe other distincts ssd could do the trick ?
That seems like a good solution to me
Do you think it would be possible for a beginner like me to setup something like this ?
And would it be performant enough while not being risky for my data ?
I know that the station will probably idle above 40 watts and go way higher when in use, but for now that’s all I got, and I need to deal with that for a few years unfortunately…
Why so ? Because of the CPU clock ? Because I checked the PCIe cards and the slots generations and physical cabling, and I can reach good enough speeds.
I see… But if there isn’t an easier way, I’ll go with that as I want at least my bottleneck to be the hardrives and not my poor network.
Ok, that’s good to know. If you have other “easy to use” alternatives I’m open to them !
Flexibility and tinkering while keeping my data safe is the way I’d like to go
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help and your detailed answer !
Sorry, I’m not yet familiar with the good vocabulary
I will in the future, but for now I’m stuck with what I have, it’s the contraint I need to deal with and cannot replace.
And it’s why I’d like to know if it’s possible to first quickly dump the data on SSDs and them let them copy at ease the data onto the HDDs. Because any nvme these days can reach far beyond those speeds, and SATA SSDs can take up to 5G networking before becoming the bottleneck.
Do you have an alternative then ? Either a wrokaround or another filesystem/OS ?
My switch is already full… It would be cheaper and better value for me to buy to LAN cards to connect the pc between themselves than buying a new switch . And anyway I can’t stay with 100Mb/s, it would ruin the NAS purpose. I mean at this price I’d better consider a cloud solution if I’m stuck with 10Mo/s kind of speeds…
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