Older Workstations as TrueNAS hardware for home users

TrueNAS General
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Recently, I decided to get rid of some underutilized hardware at home, so I sold my HPE MicroServer, which was my TrueNAS machine.

I also had an unused workstation that I had tried to sell at a very low price without success, so I decided to repurpose it as my new TrueNAS machine.

The workstation is an HP Z2 G4 Tower with an i3 8100 CPU. I removed the graphics card and managed to find a 16 GB ECC unbuffered DDR4 DIMM at a reasonable price, so I replaced my previous non-ECC DDR4 memory.

There was plenty of space for my two mirrored pools (2 Ă— 4 TB HDDs and 2 Ă— 256 GB SSDs).

The motherboard has four SATA ports and two NVMe slots. I used one of the NVMe slots for the boot drive. This setup was mainly based on the drives I already had available.

Power consumption at idle is just 22 watts at the above configuration.

The temperature of both HDDs is 37°C with an ambient temperature of 26°C. I mention this because it was something I was concerned about beforehand.

An additional bonus for me is that I can configure the BIOS to automatically power it on at a schedule, since I use it only as a NAS not alaways ON.

For the few VMs and services that I want to run 24/7, I use a miniPC running Proxmox.

So far, I cannot see any disadvantages for my use case apart from the larger case size.

In the future, I plan to upgrade the RAM, but for now it meets my needs. I could also upgrade the CPU and move some or all of my services to VMs on this TrueNAS machine and run it 24/7.

I think used branded workstations are a good solution for home users who want a NAS with only a few drives. They are well-built systems of decent quality, designed for continuous operation, and typically offer low power consumption and noise levels. They can often be found at low prices, even in Europe.

One should look for models that can take ECC RAM. In almost all cases, they require unbuffered ECC memory. The downside is that unbuffered ECC DDR4 RAM is generally more expensive and harder to find than registered ECC memory.

Another option is to look at older hardware that uses DDR3 ECC RAM. These systems are often extremely cheap, and DDR3 ECC memory is usually inexpensive as well. However, power consumption tends to be higher.

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I’m on my second version at least of using old redundant hardware for my server. I’m learnt a lot, don’t come here much because, well lets say, I only stay where I’m wanted :wink:

Current setup - Hardware:

  • MB: Asrock X99m EXtream4
  • CPU: Xeon E5-2697 v3 @ 2.60GHz
  • RAM: 62 GB ECC
  • GPU ARC 380 6gb - recent update, ÂŁ120 direct from Asrock great price - was GTX 1630

I mainly use it for streaming to the TV but I also like doing little projects and making notes. One of the projects was seeing if I could use AI on my GTX with only 4gb, amazingly it wasn’t too bad so I’ll be doing something more permanent with AI for personal use. Because I’m dylexic I use AI a lot for coding & its solved lots of small problems. Most recently helpping me create playlists of my 20,000 tracks rather than “put up” with Jellyfin’s random play. I also run a websevers and email server in a VM.

Biggest issues with old hardware is combiing it with new hardware. It’s important to try and get a MB that has maintained bios updates as long as possible. It’s one thing using a 2015 MB but if the bios is also 2015 and the is not updates that’s a big problem.

Also I tend to go my own way with things like backups, I don’t back anything up I can replace so my 2 X HD are just a stripe which allows more storage and faster access speeds.