I built my first (and so far only) NAS in January 2017 and dove right into FreeNAS. It uses the following hardware:
Mainboard: Asus P10S-I Intel C232
CPU: Intel Core i3 6100T
RAM: 2x 16GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR4-2133 ECC CL15
Storage: 4x 4TB WD Red WD40EFRX 64MB (RAIDZ1) + some 240 GB SSD for containers (or jails back then) + a small additional SSD for the OS (started with USB sticks but they were dying constantly)
I am using it mostly for storing ripped Blurays and photographs. I am having trouble with transcoding 4K videos at the moment, that is something I might want to improve with a new setup. The main reason I am thinking about an upgrade is that I am running low on storage. It is definitely the TV shows. I could just erase a few but the ripping takes forever so I would rather not. I have been playing around with voice on my home assistant installation (running on a raspberry pi, not the NAS) and was thinking a local LLM would be very nice in the future.
I have considered keeping the NAS simple and having a second permanently running machine for the LLM, but my usage would be quite sparse, so seems like a waste of resources. My networking stuff is all 2.5Gb/s-ready, so that would be another nice-to-have on a new machine.
Summary of what I would like:
more storage (I am thinking maybe 4-6x 8TB in a RAIDZ1 again)
2.5 Gb/s networking
better transcoding capability (4K reasonable?)
local LLM capability
Power efficiency while idling would be a nice bonus. It is going to be idling a lot.
The NAS lives in a broom closet in the living room (small apartment), so it needs to be quiet. The max width is 65 mm and the max depth is 55 mm. I can play with the shelves to adjust for the height.
I am looking for general opinions on my plan to have all of this capability in one machine and for some concrete advise on what hardware would be suitable in 2025.
Looking forward to a friendly and productive discussion.
Hi!
Maybe is not what you expected to earā¦ but honestly in your place i would āsqueezeā a bit more your actual system, i have your same motherboard on my backup system and it is really a gem IMHO:
replace your i3 6100T, Xeon E3 are really cheap at this moment, the E3 1260L v5 provide a lot more power without consuming so much more (yeah, tdp is 10w greater, but despite the expectations it idles some watt less than the i3 7100T i had before, probably because it doesnāt have integrated VGA) and with a 15~20ā¬ max of buy cost. Donāt know if you are cooling your i3 with a passive cooler, in case i donāt raccomend that for this Xeon (i had an arctic alpine 12 passive and he struggle on full load to keep the cpu at good temp, despite the i3 never reach more than 60Ā°), instead look for the E3 1240L v5 if this is important for you (giving up on ~20% of power vs the 1260)
you donāt have to care about the missing integrated GPUā¦ the asus have a basic Aspeed VGA to use when you need to access directly to the nas (just to mention, is also capable to run Win11 without issue )
put a dedicated VGA in the PCIE available slot for the transcoding and other stuff, i see that the Arc 310 is adviced a lot on this forum (and should cost about ~100ā¬)
replace your app SSD with a 2242 NVME (this will enable the grey sata slot), buy an USB-SATA adapter and use your boot SSD in the internal port with it. Is not the best choice, but he will not die soon as an USB thumb, and until you proper place it in the case you will not have temp problem or the risk of accidentally disconnecting it
you have now 6 sata slot free (2+4 from the min sas cable), and you have save some money (than having bought new parts), so IMHO you can invest them on buyng larger disks, and building a safer raidz2 instead of the raridz1, that you can always use in future on another system
The flip side:
the only 2 ram slot donāt allow install more ramā¦ i donāt even know if 32gb size ecc udimm sticks are available (and even if they exists, I imagine they would be prohibitively expensive)
you wouldnāt have any slot avaible to upgrade the NIC (although the 2.5gbps is not so raccomended, it is always recommended to jump directly to 10gbps)
If you consider that a āsmall upgradeā, more focused on increase space, can be totally worth, and you still gain a lot without spend a lot of money (you can always think about change mainboard-cpu-ram later and reuse disks and vga)
@oxydeās recommendation sounds pretty good overall - the A310 is indeed a great card for transcoding (remember to update the firmware).
Where I have to disagree is the networking: I think 2.5GbE currently is the absolute sweet spot for homelabs.
2.5G switches are pretty affordable by now, lots of current devices come with 2.5G NICs and standalone PCIe (and USB - not recommended for TN) cards are also relatively cheap now.
Even a 3-HDD-RAIDZ1 can take advantage of 2.5G but there wouldnāt be any real benefits there with 5 or 10G there.
If you do want to build a new system capable of running some local LLM(s) Iād suggest going for something AM5 based (or AM4 if you still find some cheap DDR4 RAM) and pack a relatively powerful Nvidia GPU in there.
Nvidia because itās NVENC encoder is better than AMDās and itās also well suited for AI stuff.
Intelās Battlemage cards (like the B50 and B60) would be great for that too but they arenāt supported very well with current TrueNAS kernels yet I think - you could pass one of those through to a VM though.
If you only wanted to transcode Iād recommend some low-powered but current intel CPU with an iGPU though.
Interesting. I would not mind using some of the current hardware further. I use a low profile Noctua cooler (NH-L9i) - I guess that would work with a Xeon. The i3 is in the low 40Ā°C. What would I gain from the fancier CPU? I thought expanding the current storage pool would be difficult. Assuming I buy 6 new high capacity drives, how do I transfer the data from the current drives if I donāt have the rest of the NAS? Temporarily set the new drives up with some other PC and then transfer the pool? Is that safe?
I have the SSDs internal to the case already. I need to check what the current config is, since I donāt remember and it has changed a bunch of times. I had a small strange connector (not SATA not NVME) 64GB Transcend thing at some point, but I think it ran out of space and I could not find a bigger one and therefore switched to a SATA drive. If I remember that right, there is an NVME drive (apps) and a SATA drive (OS) ā I have 5 SATA slots available for the big drives. I could free up another by booting from internal USB, like suggested.
On the transcoding card, I need to check if there is space. It is quite tight in the case already (Fractal Node 304).
So Intel Alchemist is supported, but Battlemage not yet? The LLMs would only be to play around a bit. It really is not a must have at this point.
If I would go with an intel iGPU for transcoding, would that handle at least one 4K stream ā 1080p?
Yes. This is also the procedure to movre from your 4-wide raidz1 to a safer 6-wide raidz2.
You could also offline one drive, replace, resilver; rince and repeat. Then use raidz expansion to go to 6-wide.
Much better: Move the boot drive to a USB adapter to free a SATA port and replace with the old drive still in place.
That depends - if your i3 was never under full load with the current setup and youāre not planning on running additional workloads - nothing. A xeon would give you more headroom.
Oh and the ability to run ECC memory which would be nice.
If you ran out of space on a 64G boot pool you probably did something wrong I assume you mean a SATADOM?
Even 16GB is well enough to boot TrueNAS SCALE from and still habe some old boot environments lying around.
This should have space for two PCIe cards. A Sparkle A310 Eco is a one slot half height and relatively short (I donāt know if quite HL) card.
I donāt no if no Battlemage cards are supported. The newer ones B50 and B60 definitely arenāt.
Depends on the iGPU but for anything slightly newer most probably yes. For H264 I think even your 6100T could do it. H265 isnāt supported there I think.
Up to 9th gen, Core i3 do ECC.
A Xeon E3 here would bring more cores and support more RAM, which might or might not be useful. (Not to forget āXeon insideā bragging rights.)
That must have been a 2242 drive for the M.2 slot. Regular connector, shorter than usual form factor but not too hard to find.
Now that I think about it: he wouldāve probably recognized M.2 as well as the SATA on a SATADOM - on a board of this age mSATA would probably be possible and it actually uses another connector.
Ok, or instead of offlining the parity drive use the free slot. With this or the other option of using an old PC to setup a temporary NAS, are there any pitfalls that might make me loose my data? I donāt want to end up with a half working pool or one I cannot access for some obscure reason. So far I have managed to wiggle myself through all the configuration. The NAS was my first exposure to a non-windows/macOS OS and setting up permissions, sharing with windows, scheduled tasks, snapshots, jails, etc, was definitely a little challenge. I donāt feel I know my way around TrueNAS well enough to confidently fix my pool if something goes wrong. Iām sure it will be no problem if I donāt encounter some strange pitfall, though.
Also, somehow I was under the impression that replacing a drive in the pool with a larger one would make the extra space unavailable. Is that only true until all drives reach the larger capacity?
Ah, yes SATADOM rings a bell. Pretty sure that was it. A formfaktor of SSD I had not come across before.
And boot environments sounds like something I delt with, as well. I vaguely remember some undeletable jail versions taking an absurd amount of space. Very possible I did something wrong.
I will try to find time on the weekend to open it up and get an impression of the situation.
Somehow Iāve not had success. Might be also high data rate, some HDR, as well.
Replicating to another NAS, no.
Replacing drives with the old drive still in place, no.
Replacing drives by offlining and removing, yes: Since this is raidz1, the pool is at risk when a drive is missing.
Sorry about the long delay, I was sick last weekend and did not get to open up the NAS to have a look.
The recommended way without setting up another PC as a TrueNAS system would then be to e.g. mirror ada0 to a new drive then replace the old ada0 with the new ada0 and continue in that manner?
Looks like I misremembered this, since the SATADOM drive is still in there. I now think It was the app-drive I replaced because of space problems and it was the plex metadata that made me run out of space. Maybe the jail versions made me move from USB to SATADOM. I really do not remember anymore.
Here are two pictures of the inside (pre-vacuuming):
I guess I would have to remove the lower drive cage to fit a graphics card. That would leave me with only four drive slots (which is the amount I am currently using ). I think I might wait a little longer with the local LLM stuff.
Maybe I just go for the Xeon processor upgrade and see where that gets me in terms of transcoding.
And I buy some larger drives (which is really the only thing I need). What size would you guys recommend? I now have 4x 4TB in raidz1. I could go for 4x 18TB for a significant upgrade or 4x 8TB for a doubling. I expect you guys will recommend raidz2, but spending ~600 USD just on parity drives feels a little insane. I have never lost a drive in my life so I guess I feel no emotional pressure. Is the worry that one might get a bad batch and if one drive fails it is more likely that another will follow? I heard the argument that the restoring process puts extra load on the existing drives and might provoke a failure. But are not the constant scrubs and SMART checks supposed to make that less likely?
Wait, the xeon i mentioned didnāt have an integrated VGA. You should at least pick the 12*5 v6 series to gain a better integrated one but i donāt think that Is worth in this terms. They cost much more than the others, for a very little gain in transcoding terms.
For the disks sizeā¦ Is very discouraged to build raidz1 with such large disks for the reasons you already said. If your backup strategy Is solid maybe you can take the risksā¦ Your call
Yes, but do not try to āmake a mirrorā: Just leave the old drive plugged, plug in the new drive and choose āReplaceā in the GUI.
Yes. It all depends how paranoid you are, whether you have good backups and how much youāre willing to resort to these backups if something goes wrong.
Scrub stresses drives, but does not test them. SMART assesses drivesā¦ but not all parts; it wonāt warn about a motor being about to break. SMART tests will warn ahead if one drive degrades prematurely. If all drives wear out at a about the same pace until one fails, then resilver may well push the others over their limit.
Looking here, the only low TDP option with P3000 graphics is E3-1265L. But I only see a v2 version. I think I can get a used E3-1245 for under 50 USD, but is that a good choice for a NAS? I struggle to find info on whether the c232 chipset works with the integrated graphics.
Got it. Could I, once I replaced all the drives like this, add another to move to raidz2?
The L series stops with the V5 (skylake -6-0), and they all have pretty the same VGA of your actual CPU.
The V6 have a bit better VGA (kabylake -7-0) but there Is no TDP limited option.
You need V5 and V6 only (first gen and V2 are 1155, v3 and v4 are 1150).
Something i forget to say you: some small LLM can run CPU only, i have tested on my system. Not impressive but if you want just experimentā¦
I assume you mean a SATADOM?
