Need hardware guidance for my first NAS build

[etorix]

@Nasdara

The lower the power consumption the better

THAT is a stronghold of the Xeon D-1500. 45 W when churning at 100% on all cores—and with 10 GbE in the SoC.

@Nasdara

99% set on using Proxmox with TrueNAS as a VM (unless there are serious reasons not to)

There is strong suspicion that Proxmox sneakily corrupts pools beyond repair even when properly implemented…

Can't import datapool

Hi all, I have a server that is showing the datapool is FAULTED. Luckily all the disks are showing back online. I have this setup in ProxMox as a VM. I’ve tried several commands “zpool import data -FXf, zpool import -f, etc”. I can’t get it to import. Anyone know how to fix this issue? See the screenshots. 16 disks total. Thanks! [image] [TN 2]

@Nasdara

I don’t really know what I will be using the server for other than data storage

Very, very strong argument to go for bare metal and leave any app/container/VM on your other server. Plus you can skip a HBA and save its power draw.

@Nasdara

I decided on the ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI motherboard which I can get for £380 brand new + a 12th gen Intel i5 12600k or i7 12700k for about £225, total about £600 lets say.

Add the cost of DRR5 ECC UDIMM to have the complete picture. This should bring you closer to £1000.

@Nasdara

So then with zero knowledge about any of the Supermicro boards or their naming schemes

Learning a bit about the naming scheme is useful, as you can then work out the name of the board you’d want and lookup if it exists in the lineup!
But do not forget to looks elsewhere. AsRock Rack makes some interesting server boards and their website is easier to search than Supermicro’s (not a high bar, admittedly).

@Nasdara

Being in UK my options for used Supermicro boards are pretty limited in general and there is no used X10SDV-TLN4F for sale

Keep looking on eBay. Years ago, I actually got a D-1541 from a UK refurbisher, as a complete system featuring a (Datto-rebranded) AsRock Rack D1541D4U-2T2R. If it weren’t for the Java-based IPMI it would still be nice board.

@Nasdara

am I correct in that if those two were the only option - then the W680 route is the way to go?

If you want Quick Sync transcoding on the CPU (iGPU) and/or run high compute apps/VMs, then yes.
If you want pure storage at low power, a Pentium D-1508, Xeon D-1518 or higher is your best call. Bonus: These use DDR4 RDIMM that is really, really, cheap second-hand. The D-1500 could still do Quick Sync by adding a cheap Arc dGPU, and provide enough cores to play with quite a number of apps/VMs on top of NAS duties (all the “fine on a Raspberry Pi” stuff will positively thrive on a 2 GHz Broadwell-D Xeon!).

@Nasdara

I am not really familiar with the different non-consumer grade Intel products so I don’t even know what other board from Supermicro to target as an alternative.

The alternatives are the intermediate generations and the Xeon E-2000 corresponding to the Core consumer CPUs you may be familiar with (we discussed some of these here). To keep with your “ECC and Quick Sync” requirements:

• Comet Lake. C256 chipset (Supermicro X12STH, AsRockRack E3C256D4U) and Xeon E-2300G.
• Cascade Lake. C246 chipset (X11SCH, E3C246D4U) and Xeon E-2100G/2200G or Core i3-8100/8300/9100/9300 (these do ECC!).
  Not the same Quick Sync generation, not as much compute power as Alder Lake (but you’ve not made a great case for needing this kind of computing power on your NAS), DDR4 ECC UDIMM should be cheaper than DDR5 ECC UDIMM, and there are plenty of E3C246D4U2-2T boards on eBay (£500 total with CPU and RAM?).