Looking for hardware suggestions or recommendations

TrueNAS General
1

I have a TRUENAS-MINI-3.0-X+ from IxSystems. I guess they no longer make this product. I think I want to replicate what I have for two reasons. First is I am paying about $125 per month to back it up to BackBlaze and I’d like to stop that expense. The second (more lame) reason is it is currently still on TrueNAS-13.0-U6.7. I’d like to update it to the latest but I’m scared. … very scared. Perhaps more than I should be. My thoughts are that if I have a local replica, I will feel safer doing the upgrade. Part of the angst is I have a couple of jails.

It has 5 x 14TB of disks set up as a RAIDZ2 yielding about 40TB of storage which is about half used. It has 64G of memory.

I am hoping folks here will have suggestions on hardware I can buy which supports TrueNAS without much fuss – perhaps straight out of the box.

2

Comes down to a couple of questions - i.e.

Are you OK with an older board or do you want the latest and greatest? Or, a board that can be expanded in the future from spinner to flash?

Spinner (comparatively low cost) vs. NVME (OMG) Storage?

How big of a case do you want this in?

For example, I find the Asrock X570D4I-2T compelling because it incorporates a mini-ITX with copper 10GbE, ECC, and 9 SATA or NVME channels. Pretty future-proof for a small NAS, as long as you are OK with Asrock post-sales support and a non-standard memory factor.

Pair the above with a -G or -GE APU Ryzen Pro to be sourced from eBay (make sure it’s unlocked so it can run on this motherboard), and you should have a relatively power-efficient platform also. More expandable platforms exist but then you need a bigger case and need to choose more components. It’s all doable but it also depends on how badly you prefer SuperMicro over Asrock, for example.

3

I think they do TrueNAS Mini - Enterprise Storage Solution for Businesses

4

Oh WOW! If you go to the home page and look under products, the image for “Mini Series” is a rack system so I didn’t click it.

Thank you. I’ve also found that OWC makes a similar product.

5

For this, it can be super simple / cheap / low tech. I view this as the “backup” and so it just needs to be reliable.

6

If you want it simple and pre-built with having to install TrueNAS yourself, get one of the 6 bays from TerraMaster. They are the cheapest option for pre-built systems most of the time and work just fine. They have sales all the time. Or look at any of the other new-ish NAS manufacturers out there (UGreen, MinisForum, AuStor, …). If it is and always will be “just a backup”, this might suffice. With as little RAM as possible since you value your kidneys, I suppose.

I have a mix of home made, old “real” servers and pre-builts. All are fine depending on the use case. And the budget. But since you will be buying 5 x 14 TB currently overpriced disks, I suppose the rest of the HW doesn’t really make an impact, financially.