I’ve been reading many posts here and find the community of people who respond to be a wealth of knowledge, so for starters… THANK YOU!!
I’m in the process of trying to “unlearn” what I’ve seen on YouTube re gamer MoBos, and am glad I came here to learn more about TrueNAS before settling on hardware.
I’m currently looking to build a NAS to run alongside my homelab. Not sure if I’ll be using CORE or SCALE and am open to suggestions.
The need for my NAS is as follows:
move from relying on crappy web hosting to self hosted websites utilizing Cloudflare. these are small websites, low traffic.
replace my old Apple AirPort Time Capsule that backs up 3 laptops using Apple’s Time Machine
storage for RAW image and video files. storing, viewing, editing…
homelab running Proxmox with VMs and containers with the usual stuff, web servers, test VMs, home assistant, plex, audio books and paper archive and so on.
replace Dropbox file system where I can share files externally
Considerations:
I’m thinking of using RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 but am still weighing options. I’d like a setup that lets me edit large files quickly but have the security and redundancy setup for drive failure. I currently only have 3x Seagate Exos X16 14TB Manufacturer Recertified HDs and am planning on getting 3 more totaling 6 HDDs.
I’m leaning towards a miniATX so it can sit alongside my 10" homelab in my living room. I don’t want something noisy.
I’m looking to spend under $1K for this if it’s possible to get hardware that will perform fast and reliably. Would consider spending more in needed.
I do a lot of graphics and CAD work in addition to photography. I would like to be able to access and work on files quickly.
I’m platform agnostic and would need to be able to read/write from Mac, PC, and Linux.
components I can reuse:
List item
750w fully modular PSU
140mm noctua fans
2x32GB Crucial Pro 64GB DDR5 RAM UDIMM (got these for free but will most likely get ECC ones, recs?)
That would strongly tilt towards raidz2, especially with large drives. Z2 can lose one drive and still be safe while recovering; Z1 is insecure as soon as it loses one drive…
Trouble ahead… A 1 Gb/s network is a bottleneck here. A 10 Gb/s network is limited by drives, and would require multiple vdevs to sustain line rate, with much more than six drives—or a full SSD pool.
All of that, alongside TimeMachine but with the possible exception of live editing, will be fine on raidz(2).
Make a SSD pool for that. Just two drives in mirror, or a single one with regular backup to the HDD raidz. Served data on the HDD pool of course.
That’s more of a case issue…
For six HDDs, a Fractal Design Node 304 is a nice NAS case that is not too noisy, depending on the drives that spin in there, but it takes mini-ITX only, which brings its own complications when shopping for a motherboard.
It certainly is possible… if you look into older hardware. DDR5 era hardware is pricey.
TrueNAS is agnostic. All three clients can do SMB, at least Mac and Linux do NFS.
That depends what you settle on, and how paranoid you are, but fundamentally… yes.
Use these on your PC/Linux desktop, and ideally get ECC RAM for the servers.
I agree that a Z2 makes sense from a redundancy POV. As everyone will tell you, it’s still not a replacement for regular, offsite copies.
The proxmox stuff I have zero experience with. However, it has been stated repeatedly in the forum that even with proper pass through settings that TrueNAS can silently corrupt. So I would research that further in case you want TrueNAS to run under proxmox.
As for scratch vs. pool, you certainly could try something out like a pool dedicated to SSDs for video editing and another with HDDs for long term storage. Or, you go exotic and put in a sVDEV and create a dataset the resides exclusively on the SSDs in the sVDEV.
However, all that is way complicated compared to just attaching a proper SSD to your Mac for scratch and then uploading projects on a hourly, etc. Basis.
