I can get the Supermicro X11SSM-F motherboard with Xeon E3-1225 v5 CPU from a co-worker for pretty cheap. I’ll be strictly using TrueNAS for data backup purposes only with the plan of purchasing 6 large capacity hard drives, and putting the drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration with 32GB of ECC memory, most likely in a Define R5 case or equivalent. I still need to do more research as I’m still not sure how many SSDs I require for boot and for redundancy. This NAS will mainly be offline most of the time and only turned on for backups or for accessing the data. The maximum number of simultaneous users will only be two.
I would like to know if this motherboard and CPU combo is sufficient considering I will be starting a build from scratch with no existing hardware to reuse. Is there anything I may have missed or overlooked considering this is an older motherboard and CPU. Thanks.
Seems like you have a very sound plan. Board has 8 SATA ports so you can cover your 6HDD’s and an SSD for boot. Many, maybe even most, of us here don’t worry about a second boot drive. In the case of a failure, it is very simple to prepare a new drive with the OS and copy over a saved configuration. I’d say especially so in your case of intermittent use.
Make sure you select a large enough power supply for your 6xlarge capacity drives - once you select them, come back here with the specs and get some advice in choosing a PS.
Your MOBO and CPU combo look fine to me. I have two TrueNAS instances using Supermicro X11SCH-F and X11SSH-F both with Intel(R) Xeon(R) E-2236 CPU @ 3.40GHz. I have 6 2TB SSD’s in each in a RAIDZ1 configuration. I have no problems with either, they run the current TrueNAS Scale 25.04.
I will mention that my two machines are Proxmox Hosts and the TrueNAS instances are VM’s with HBA passthrough and each has 32GB of memory allocated with 4 CPU threads.
I have the same motherboard and it has served me extremely well since 2016 when I got it new. Started with an i3 CPU, later upgraded to an E3 Xeon v6. Quite expandable too with PCIe slots. Currently running a couple of enterprise NVMe drives in PCIe, Proxmox and Ceph in a cluster, 10Gbit network and a LSI HBA passed through to TrueNAS which runs virtualised under Proxmox. 7 SATA drives on the HBA for TrueNAS (RaidZ2 plus 1 enterprise SSD for L2ARC and SLOG), 1 SATA drive on the onboard controller for Proxmox boot. Absolutely rock solid and enough performance to not waste the 10Gbit network.
In other words, for a backup server, absolutely fine, with capacity and expandability to spare.
I run triple-boot SSD; if the boot drive develops a problem (let’s say loading an OS module or writing data) there’s a backup so the system stays running and nothing is lost. And of course a second backup, because if one drive fails there’s a good chance a second drive of the same age/usage is going to fail shortly. BUT, this is on a system where the data is important and minimizing “glitches” and potential data loss is important.
