@Davvo Thanks for the plug! 
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I have a node 804 here. No cooling issues what so ever. But i did employ a push-pull configuration with the drive cage.
Snapshot of my spinning rust temperatures:
People who complain about temps are usually cramming too much in too little, or they forget to turn on the fans 
…
(see my HW config here)
I crammed the Node 804 full to the brink with Noctua fans, and all i hear is the comforting rattle of the disks.
Worth mentioning are the plethora of primers that @jgreco has written. (HBA’s & SAS controllers, Network primer, …)
Also take a look at his solnet array testing script if you buy second hand (or even new) drives. Worth the time testing the HDD’s if you don’t plan on having multiple drives as a spare.
(i used 8 Exos 16TB’s X16 for a RAIDZ2 with a hot spare → overkill for my use, but better safe than sorry i think. Redundancy is key for me.)
Depending on which collection of DVD’s/Blu-Ray’s you’re talking about… don’t underestimate the filesize of movies.
I already used up half the space in 2 years… (72Tib Usable 
)
Those 4K HDR movies come between 50-120GiB a piece! (un/low-compressed)
Also take note that, if i’m not mistaken, Truenas hates adding drives to a pool, apart from hot spares. The only way on expanding a pool is to swap every drive of that pool with a bigger one and let it resilver. But that means at least RAIDZ1. (again, if i’m correct)
Happy hunting reasonable prices and good luck!
@Apathy You appear to have a good grasp on it, so the rest (how many drives, and of which capacity) is a matter of you and your budget.
Personally, I would go for a least two drives (and possibly up to four for a raidz2 setup, since this cannot be extended after creation) to have some redundancy from the very beginning.
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That’s a bit too harsh a statement… I’d go with “requires planning and forethought”.
No, you add vdevs. And you don’t strictly need redundancy to replace disks (you’d want it for other reasons, of course).
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Thanks, I have ordered the single 20TB drive now. Once I have the mirrored pool, I will save up for another 2 drives of the same capacity and re-assess my options. By then I’ll have been using the NAS for a little while, so I’ll have developed a better understanding of my requirements, though of course if I wan’t to go from my mirrored setup to RAIDZ2 at that point, i’ll have to start over. Anyway, will cross that bridge when we get there 
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Fair enough.
Technically, there is a migration path from a mirror to a raidz# without extra drives by creating a degraded raidz vdev, replicating to it and then “replacing” the missing raidz drive with the last drive from the mirror, but it’s a somewhat dangerous hack.
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Make sure to burn in the single drive.
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Ok, and thanks for setting me straight on that one… I’ve been thinking on planning to expand my current setup, but if it’s as simple as that, i think i can simplify alot. New thread incoming XD.
You can reply and branch the discussion here.
Here’s another option, not so sure how good it is
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve come across the SilverStone cases but they have very mixed reviews. If the Node 804 never comes back in stock I may consider looking at a SilverStone as an alternative. I’m really surprised at how few options we seem to have these days. I imagine it’s a symptom of:
- consumer cases adding more transparency panels to show off the ever present RGB
- spinning rust becoming less desirable as storage media for apps and games now that SSD/NVME storage is more affordable
- the vast majority of people that want a NAS solution buy an off the shelf box (probably)
- people preferring small setups in general
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I hear you. So much emphasis has been put on cloud storage with a little local flash as buffer / cache of sorts. Works OK until / if you have a major failure and it’s making a lot of folk in data centers quite rich.
I love my ungainly Lian Li a76 for the simple reason that it holds everything (including a flex-ATX board), can be modified to cool it very effectively, and if fitted with backplanes can do a good enough job of being quasi-hot swap. The two 5.25” slots are great for holding 3 HDD hot swap bays for drive torture / qualification.
The only one that did it better for a mini ITX board is the q26a.
The JonsBo T59 is a pretty faithful copy of the Lian Li a76 though without the backplanes, it seems. The price point is pretty similar so I’d only go for it if the Lian Li a76 is no longer available.
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I can’t say i have had any troubles with that. I have been running for years on refurbished SAS 2Tb disks. I did get a couple extra and i had one failure after only one month in operation but i swapped that and all good since then. I believe mine are HGST LFF 3.5"
I do have to say though that i have been thinking about how long my luck will last lately as i am now using Nextcloud for my business and the cost is not an obstacle. I am just in between moving to SSD’s, plug in new WD RED SATA’s or replace them with new SAS. The thing is, i want to expand the pool when i change them out and i just need to make a decision…
I agree, the marked really shifted in the past 10-14 years… and a lot of excellent solutions are really niche, overpriced, or dead. 3D printing might be a solution, but that’s a different meaning altogether to “DIY”.
You might find interesting my own thread I started a few days ago. Laying out my next upgrade
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If you were ready to consider a Fractal Design R7, see if you can find a Nanoxia Deep Silence 8 Pro (the “Pro” is important here!). It is a near clone, less elegant in finish BUT it comes with all (tool-free!) trays for 8 drives and is generally easier to work with than a R7 for use in storage layout.
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Thanks @Davvo for the link to that thread, good suggestions for cases in there too that i’d never heard of, shame that the new Jonsbo appears to have some issues as otherwise it looks pretty sleek.
@etorix Oh nice, i’ll keep tabs on that, it seems to be a little hard to come by here, and that price makes me cry a little inside haha.
In other news, the build is alive and well. Running a long smart test on the drive as we type. Not looking forward to how long the badblocks test will take, but got to be done, especially as i’m only running the single drive for the short term.
It took a little bit of effort to get IPMI working on the board, but got there in the end (also how amazing is IPMI!?!). I spent a few hours getting the fans running properly, I ran into the ramping behaviour noted by many people using Noctua fans, but it’s pretty inaudible now and doesn’t ramp up and down like it’s possessed.
Full Specs list
Mobo: SM X10SL7-F - £69.50
CPU: Xeon E3-1241 v3 - £22.99
ECC RAM: 32GB Samsung M391B1G73QH0-YK0 - £45.98
PSU: Seasonic Focus Plus 550W Platinum - £75
Boot Drive: Crucial BX500 120GB SSD - £15
Storage Drive: Toshiba 20TB MG10ACA20TE - £319.99
IO Shield: Supermicro MCP-260-00042-0N - £8.60
CPU Cooler: Cryorig C7 - £19.99
Stuff I had already:
Case: Corsair Carbide 600Q
Fans: Noctua NF-A14 (intake) & Noctua NF-F12 (exhaust)
So total costs:
- £257.06 without the drive
- £577.05 with
- £593.43 including postage
Everything that wasn’t the storage drive was purchased second hand on eBay.
Running at idle it pulls around 40W from the wall. On my tarrif (24.66p/kWh) this works out to £7.20 a month, not too bad.
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That is a nice setup but i would be very concerned storing anything on a single drive with no redundancy. I would have gone for 2 x 10Tb drives in zraid1 instead. You can always upgrade storage capacity by exchanging the drives one after the other by larger ones but at least you would have some form of redundancy from the start. Stuffing the 20Tb without anything seems very risky to me.
Terminology and Abbreviations Primer | TrueNAS Community, iX's ZFS Pool Layout White Paper.
RAIDZ1 requires 3 drives, you likely mean a two-way mirror.
That being said, the concern is valid.
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Appreciate the input! I have mutiple backups of my critical data, and there isn’t a lot of it (< 100GB) so it’s a calculated risk, but it is indeed a risk as you say
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Correct. My bad. i indeed mean mirror.
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