For almost 10 years now, through from freenas to now I’ve had a trusty SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SSH-F-O Motherboard with an Intel Xeon E3-1230 V6 and 32gb DDR4 ECC, that sports a LSI SAS3008 9300-8I to connect to a 12-bay backplane and a Intel X520-DA1 NIC. Currently there is only 8 drives.
It has run solid and still does, however I’m asking more of it now than the initial task of just storage and plex. Now wanting to branch into using it for other tasks such as Immich, Paperless, Minecraft servers for the kids, and it’s doing its best but I need to bite the bullet and upgrade to something a bit more capable and probably a GPU, as I’d like to play with AI too.
I’ve been looking around at different options new, or second hand, but haven’t come across anything that jumps out at me yet… ideally it would be great if I could stay with secondhand and save some $$.
Does anyone have any ‘go-to’ mobo+cpu recommendations for this kind of setup?
Anything you can find at this point.
You need to write out your minimum and target specifications. Requirements are about the same as before. Take a look at the Hardware Guide in the TrueNAS Online documents.
It’s not clear if you just want to upgrade the motherboard, cpu and RAM and keep everything else. Look at the current requirements for videocards and what it will take to ‘play with AI’. You may be better off with a different choice as TrueNAS will not be running the latest and greatest for drivers, etc. If you need that, a plain Linux system would be a better choice.
Plan out what you need for boot-pool, apps pool and your data pool. That should give you an idea of what kind of connections and how many are requirements for you.
Terrible time to upgrade sadly - I’d consider getting a separate system for virtualization exclusively & keep the old boy just for the NAS. I might work out cheaper & since it wouldn’t have mission critical data you could at least save a few by not needing ECC
I know right, I was looking at the invoice for the X11 and wanted to cry, even kept meaning to buy more ram for it before the boom Ideally I’d like to keep everything to one machine rather than run more, and in terms of AI it would be entry level playing, and also to help process with Immich & Paperless.
I’d be happy to keep running the 32gb DDR4 ECC (and add to it), along with the 9300-8I, drives, case, NVME boot, etc. But I’d probably eventually want to make use of the extra bays for a SSD pool and replace the 9300.
One possibility I was looking at is the ASRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T but at best from my research I’d get 8 cores max unless theres another compatible cpu I’ve missed. Would be interested to hear other’s perspective and if 8 has been enough for similar use, or need to look at 16.
In terms of GPU so far I’ve looked at something like a Nvidia A2000, low power and slim.
Struggling with more or less your same considerations, i have take the route to build a dedicated machine to delegate most intensive tasks “outside” the nas (at least, this was the purpose).
Yep, i was able to keep budget pretty low (without even renounce to ECC), but at the end IMHO
i really would advice you to stick on this direction I have quite regret my decision because i have objectively overestimated my needs (maybe not your case!).
In your place i would probably just add a GPU with at least 8gb nvram and enjoy the benefits on immich (as far i know, maybe i’m wrong), paperless (if you want to use paperless ai), and play randomly with small LLM instead of use the CPU for that.
Squeeze your system until situation will not calm a little, unless you are willing to invest a lot of money
Ideally I’d like to keep everything to one machine rather than run more, and in terms of AI it would be entry level playing, and also to help process with Immich & Paperless.
I have quite regret my decision because i have objectively overestimated my needs (maybe not your case!).