Overwhelmed with hardware options

TrueNAS General
21

I cannot be certain (not having used a T6-423 myself) but I have been pretty happy with my F5-221 which has far less CPU power.

You will need the 32GB upgrade - memory is probably more important for TrueNAS than CPU.

The key thing about TerraMaster units is that they come with an internal USB socket / Flash drive that has a special install O/S to allow you to install their NAS over a network onto a SATA drive in one of the bays. This is not needed (and should be removed) if you are going to run TrueNAS.

You then need to decide whether you are going to use one of your SATA ports/bays for a boot drive or (do as I did and) break an iX support rule and use a USB SSD (NOTE: not a USB flash drive - a proper SSD) for your boot drive.

22

Thanks, so I could use a m.2 ssd for truenas, think I would need the smallest possibly which is 500gb.
Memory wise the Terramaster memory is extortionate, they say you can upgrade to 32gb if you use Terramasters own but the main board only shows (on intel) as supporting 16gb. I am sure if I am using Truenas I can use whichever brand possible and might be work a try.
On the note of m.2 ssd and memory upgrades, would you recommend any particular brands or are they a bit of a muchness or any I should avoid?
Thanks

23

Ah - I didn’t realise it has an M.2 slot. So yes, use that for boot - and smallest possible drive.

You then need to decide whether you want to break another support rule and use only part (say 32GB) for the boot-pool and use the rest for e.g. an apps-pool. Unless you have a second M.2 slot, you won’t be able to mirror it without using a SATA port, but you can replicate it to your HDD-pool as a backup.

Alternatively, you will need to dedicate the full 500GB for the boot pool, 95% of which will never be used.

For memory, if the MB supports ECC then definitely buy ECC - otherwise I would personally use a reputable brand such as Crucial or Kingston bought from a reputable (i.e. non-fake) source. (This is not an area to save a handful of $$ on.)

24

Thanks it does have a second m.2 slot so if this is the case, what is the best way to set this up from the start, are you suggesting I would have one m.2 ssd for boot and a second for apps pool and would I only need two two small m.2?
Seems a bit of a waste of two m.2 slots but if this is the correct way to do it then so be it.

25

There is no single “correct” way to do this - though there are certainly incorrect ways to do this.

You should probably check whether using m.2 drives is going to use I/O lanes and result in SATA ports not working (some MBs do this).

You could (for example) use both m.2 slots for a mirrored boot drive and put an apps pool on the same devices.

  • Pro: You get mirrors for both boot and apps pools.
  • Con: Unsupported (but it works for me unmirrored - but middleware code for mirroring might not work correctly).

Or as you suggest, use one for boot-pool and one for apps-pool.

  • Pro: Supported
  • Con: Neither boot nor apps pools are mirrored

Personally I would go for your proposal and live with them being unmirrored, but replicate the apps-pool to your HDD pool every night.

26

Great, im starting to get the picture now. So if I get one ssd that is 256GB for the operating system, what size would you suggest for the apps pool, maybe the same or 1tb?

I do have another question in preparation for it arriving.
As I only have apple MacBooks can you suggest how to create bootable ssd, I have read about Rufus but its not available on Mac and im nervous just downloading some random software. I was thinking that I might need a NVMe enclosure as well or if you can suggest another way.

Thanks again for your help, I really appreciate it.

27

P.S. If you want to run VMs, then replication is not a good solution because the virtual disks will not replicate nicely. You will really need a mirrored pool for VMs.

The apps-pool is probably mis-named - perhaps better called an ssd-pool (by comparison to the hdd-pool) because you will want to store on it all the apps data as well (which for Plex / Jellyfin will be all the metadata they build to index the videos you store). But so long as TrueNAS can see each file individually (and they are not hidden in virtual disks), then it should replicate for backup ok.

The size of you ssd-pool disk will depend on what you need to do with it, but I suspect that a 256GB or 512GB drive should be quite adequate in many cases.

(And sorry, I cannot advise on how to create a bootable flash drive for TrueNAS install on a Mac as I haven’t used one of those for c. 35 years.)

28

In my experience Zvols for VM disks, incremental snapshots, and replication work very well together. The destination will consume as much ZFS space as the source.

Or I am missing something different that you are hinting at?

29

Thank you, all ordered. I will put another post on regarding creating boot disk on a Mac.

30

Balena Etcher works on Mac.

BUT if you have access to a windows box (or vm on your Mac) use VenToy instead to make a VenToy USB.

Then you can just copy the iso (and shasum) to the USB and boot off it.

31

Is a good way to backup the VM.

Ideally the VM should be quiesced, but a VM in a crash state (ie if snapped while running) is better than no backup.

32

The new F4-424 etc… models have NVMe internally haven’t tried booting from one but I bet they would. In which case you could go back to a supported boot method on those models.

33

Yes - if they have 1 or 2 NVMe slots then booting from one of them is definitely a preferred solution.

And you should try to put your apps pool on NVMe as well.