I’ve spent 20 years on desktop Macs and Windows PCs, but this is my very first foray into dedicated network-attached storage. I’m evaluating TrueNAS SCALE for a hybrid photo/video editing and backup server, and I’d love some advice on ZFS pool architecture and app choices.
My Hardware Specs
NAS Hardware: Aoostar WTR Max
RAM: 16GB DDR5 RAM
HDDs: 5x 12TB HDDs
SSDs: 4x 1TB NVMe M.2 SSDs
Primary Workloads & Users
Photo & Video Editing: Active photo editing (Photoshop) and 4K video editing (Final Cut Pro over SMB).
Media Server: Plex Media Server serving ~5 concurrent users.
Backups: Automated backups for 3 Windows PCs and 2 Macs (Time Machine).
Proposed Drive Allocation
HDD Storage Pool: 5x 12TB HDDs in a single VDEV configured in RAIDZ1 (1-disk redundancy).
NVMe SSDs (4x 1TB):
Idea: Use 2x SSDs as a Read/Write Cache pool (SLOG/L2ARC) and 2x SSDs as a dedicated Mirrored NVMe Pool for active Final Cut Pro / PS project files and App datasets.
(I’ve heard ZFS L2ARC/SLOG cache devices can be RAM-heavy, so I would love your take on the best way to utilize 4x 1TB SSDs).
Questions for the Community
Pool Architecture: What is the recommended way to utilize 4x 1TB NVMes for high-speed video editing and app storage on TrueNAS SCALE? Is a dedicated NVMe mirror pool better than using them as cache devices?
Final Cut Pro over SMB: What SMB service settings (e.g., Enable Apple SMB Extensions, dataset parameters) should I configure for seamless FCP .fcpbundle network editing?
Recommended Apps/Services: What are the best native apps or containers to handle Time Machine backups for 2 Macs and backup shares for 3 Windows PCs?
RAM & Hardware: Is 16GB DDR5 RAM adequate for ZFS + Plex + active SMB editing, or is a RAM upgrade strongly advised right out of the gate?
Tips for Beginners: What are the top services to enable, settings to tweak, or mistakes to avoid when setting up TrueNAS for the first time?
Thanks in advance for helping out a NAS beginner! Looking forward to learning from the community.
Probably. Most specifically, SLOG isn’t a write cache as you’re probably thinking of one.
None–Time Machine is of course built into macOS, and TrueNAS can configure shares to work with it. No other apps needed.
Trickier question there, but Veeam is pretty popular there–its free edition handles full and incremental backups to a SMB share, and handles disaster recovery pretty well.
Probably so. But if you install a single 16GB DIMM, it’s easy enough (if expensive these days) to add a second later.
You’ve not said anything about what networking you’ll be using in this scenario, and that’s just as important as the NAS build itself if you’re intending to use it as a datastore to edit 4k video on.
The device has 2x 2.5GbE RJ45 and 2x 10GbE SFP on it. I’d seriously consider teaming those 2x 2.5GbE NICs to a compatible switch as a minimum, but ideally putting a 10GbE SFP in one of those slots and connecting it back to a 10GbE capable switch (using fibre or copper, whatever your switch/wallet is compatible with )
I don’t know what Mac hardware you’re using, but again, seriously consider getting a 10GbE NIC if you don’t already have one, otherwise your Final Cut work will be annoyingly slow over the network.
You’ll also likely want to ensure that your Mac and PCs aren’t backing up to this server when you’re doing editing work. Plex shouldn’t be a problem, though, unless you’re transcoding.
And yeah, as @dan already suggested: more RAM is always good, but prices are cray-zee for DDR5 (and even DDR4) for the forseeable future
Personally raidz-1 on 12 TB drives - isn’t safe. just in case you need to rebuild a single drive (which can take a while for 12TB drive) and another fails during the process - you lost the pool. Recommend raidz-2 if possible unless you have very good backups.
Thanks for the incredibly prompt reply chaps - genuinely appreciate the thoughtful replies and you are a credit to the community! Will dig a bit into those drives and check suitability!
Ryzen 7 Pro 8845HS: looks fancy, possibly ECC-enabled (though with punishing DDR5 SO-DIMM), but ultimately yet another case of a flashy consumer-oriented device with an excessively new and excessively powerful CPU for mere NAS use
…and with that Aostar throws an old 82599 as 10G NIC. Server-grade for sure but it’s PCIe 2.0 and that tells a lot about hardware design by a joint committee of marketing and finance departments.
That, unfortunately, falls short to take full advantage of a 10 Gb/s link. Can you bumpt it? (Or change the NAS…)
L2ARC uses RAM, so bump your RAM first. Then test in real use if you would benefit from a L2ARC.
SLOG demands an enterprise-grade drive with PLP. And I do not see a need for a SLOG in your workload: SLOG is only for sync writes, and is NOT A WRITE CACHE. Your video edits should be on forced async for maximal performance, certainly not through SLOG.
(TimeMachine does use sync writes, but who cares about speeding up a background backup?)
If you want a fast drive for fast edits, put some SSDs in a stripe for capacity and use that a scratch drive. No redundancy: Hot files only, save anything valuable to the HDD pool.
(Obviously, you’d better use these SSDs directly in a desktop machine for local editing.)
What do you boot from? TrueNAS takes a full drive for that.
Set periodic snapshots, even if you have no backup (which you should), SMART test and scrub. No tweak needed, but these basic services are to be defined on your own schedules.
As someone who does have 3 macs doing timemachine backups I will argue that this is actually a good use case for a SLOG. There are two reasons for this: The first is that speeding timemachine up is valuable (for the clients) since it operates on a schedule of once an hour that you cannot easily edit, speeding it up makes it more likely that there is some time spent not doing backups. The other reason goes double if there is a wifi link in the mix: sometimes odd network things can happen mid backup that result in the corruption of the timemachine backup. Anecdotally, I can tell you that since I added a SLOG to my setup this has not happened to me (going on 3 years now). Before I used to have to redo the timemachine every 8-14 months or so.
If you can find one, I would recommend a 50gb+ optane drive; not sure what is a good fit that is in current production these days though.
Ryzen 7 Pro 8845HS: looks fancy, possibly ECC-enabled (though with punishing DDR5 SO-DIMM), but ultimately yet another case of a flashy consumer-oriented device with an excessively new and excessively powerful CPU for mere NAS use
Yeah, I’d recommend just getting an AM4 AMD CPU, maybe even secondhand, and getting 32GB (or more) of DDR4 ECC RAM for it. The prices will probably be much lower, even with the current pricing. You don’t need the latest CPU for this.
No such thing as a write cache and I suspect that a read cache (L2ARC) will be of limited use. Also you only need 1 disk for this as L2ARC is not pool critical and is only a cache
So, bit awkward (and I hope this did not offend) but I am the host of the YouTube channel NASCompares (no, me neither!) and I have been working on a long overdue comparison of UnRAID and TrueNAS, but from the perspective of someone migrating away from turn-key (Synology, QNAP, etc) and a big, BIG part of the intimidation those users have is the ‘Support’. I think it’s fair to say that a decent chunk of TrueNAS is the general reliance on community-backed support and advice (LLMs and AI Agents are making it easier of course, but we all know where that data is getting crawled and ripped from!!!) so for the video I wanted to show a slice of what the community support for a green NAS DIY’er would be - and to be frank, you guys f’ing NAILED IT (as did the UnRAID community too in their respective post here - forums(dot)unraid(dot)net/topic/200045-new-unraid-user-looking-for-some-light-in-the-darkness/ ). I genuinely and sincerely hope none of you were offended by this light subterfuge, and for wasting your time a bit. But dan, witewulf ,somethingweird , etorix ,dak180, dwolsten,Nugent$, TheColin21 - You guys are 10/10 pillars of your community! Here is an unlisted ad-free link to the video I am working on and it’s linked to the specific section about your community - youtu(dot)be/OKm_Movd9P4?si=eaWrde4Q11jDnw-_&t=1038
Cheers for being BLOODY BRILLIANT!!!
IMPORTANT - I am unable to @ more than 2 users and cannot submit links (new user limit?), so apologies for the horrible ‘dot’ urls!
That’s a neat platform though the architecture may limit you to PCIe 4.0 components if they’re supposed to be used as a SLOG or other “fast” device. At minimum, it’ll cost you.
For example, the 100GB p4801x is a great SLOG device for small file-server NAS’ like this one but it’s a 3.0x4 device.
Data center quality SSDs that can run on PCIe 4.0 and which feature power loss protection (PLP) are pricey. Most are not available in “SLOG capacities” either.
That said, an inexpensive 32GB Optane NVME or like PLP SSD at PCIe 3.0x2 is better than nothing if sync writes are anticipated. Such SSDs also make great boot drives.
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