Still using an ancient Synology DS409, running 24/7 for nearly 16 years. Currently hosting a 3TB mirrored set of wd reds for docs, backups and some media files I don’t want to lose, and then a single 4TB wd red for downloaded movies and series. We’re a 3 people household and it’s extremely rare to have 2 concurrent users accessing a share.
I don’t need much more for NAS, but speed is pretty low (seeing 50MB/s read speeds at best, writes half that) and I’m limited to 4TB drives max, so that won’t do forever.
Network is only 1Gb, I can drop another line from the main switch (unifi) for LACP if that becomes the bottleneck eventually.
I need the NAS for cifs and nfs shared storage only, everything else is happening on a small two node proxmox cluster. I might want to move the torrent client to NAS, but that’s it.
Ideally, I would like to go another 15+ years with the next box.
For storage media I’m thinking about starting out with what I currently have, then add one as big as I can afford spinner (12GB+) and then gradually start moving towards a raid5-ish configuration. I don’t really have a plan for that and don’t even know if there’s a feasible path to that with truenas… But I could make it work somehow.
I’m eyeing ugreen DXP4800 (non plus) and it seems to offer everything I need, for a very attractive price. Another 3.5" bay would be even better, but I’d have at least one m.2 to use for storage, so that’s cool too.
Can this be the box for me? Do I need to max out ram to 16GB from the get-go? Everyone is talking about the plus model, but I’d rather have a quieter and cooler running box if it is sufficient.
8GB is bare min RAM per TrueNAS docs, 16GB is recommended min. You can’t change a Mirror VDEV to a Raid-Z. It requires backing up data, destroying the pool, recreating new VDEV / pool and replacing data. Raid-Z1 isn’t recommended with larger drives so that puts you at 4 drives to get Raid-Z2 or doing a 2 VDEV of 2 wide mirrors. You need a separate drive for the boot device, also.
You didn’t mention any backup of your data elsewhere. You want a second copy of your data apart from your NAS setup in case of a pool failure or malware / ransomware.
ZFS really wants you to have a plan upfront.
You can now expand the width of raidz vdev (with caveats) but you cannot change a mirror into a raidz1 or a raidz1 into raidz2. So you’d need 3 drives upfront for raidz1.
If you’re in Europe you can find on eBay the equivalent of a TrueNAS Mini: X10SDV motherboard with 10G in a 4-bay Supermicro enclosure.
I see, so I could set it up at 8GB and then upgrade asap when I can.
How large is too large for z1?
Regarding backups, I have proxmox guests covered (pbs to nas + usb drive synced to an offsite hetzner bucket). I will need to rsync a couple of directories off what’s now on mirrored nas partition in the future, but nothing there is really life or death critical.
Raidz1 - I know I can look it up (and I will), but still - can I utilize all the space if I have different size disks? Like start with the 3+3+4 and add a new big(ger) one, like at least 8GB… Then have a 4x 3TB raidz1 on there and utilize the leftover 1+4 for something else?
Supermicro stuff - too rich and too big for what I’m looking for, the box I’m looking at is 450eur with base 8GB ram. The main question I’d love to get an answer to is whether the DXP4800 can do the job or not.
Raid-Z and Mirrors will be decided from the size of the smallest disk.
1 + 2 mirror would be 1 in raw space
3 + 3 + 8 Raid-Z would be the same as a 3 + 3 + 3 Raid-Z.
Another issue is all members of a VDEV would need to be replaced with larger drives to get more capacity and expand the VDEV
Try searching the forum for that model and see what others have said or search Ugreen.
Resources may have some sample builds also with features you desire
Resources List including Detailed Hardware and System Build Notes (plus new user advice / help)
That is surprisingly affordable… But I fear it would be loud, rattly and twice as power hungry compared to the ugreen… And I don’t have the room for it right now. Why would I want the bigger box realistically?
Yeah not much about that exact model (not the more expensive Plus variant), unfortunately. And everyone wants to run ai models and transcode videos and whatnot on the nas, so every discussion veers off to passing through iGPU to VMs and how to load up tons of ram and how 9 pcie lanes isn’t enough. I need a NAS for a couple of sata spinners and that’s it.
I see, that’s not ideal then… Can I combine e.g. 2x 3GB as one 6GB member of a raidz1 array? So I would start out with (3+3) + 4 + 12 for an 8GB usable single parity array? Then switch out the 4 with a new 12 next, then last the 3+3 cobo… Am I making any sense?
This is a real server board bundle with IPMI for an extremely good price. 4 standard SATA port plus M.2 for a small boot SSD plus a SlimSAS for PCIe or another 4 SATA drives in Mini-ITX size. The bundle with 32GB of RAM will get you very far.
Neat combo, essentially what I have in a different case, and very pleased. One thing in the pix, they have the ATX24pin and a 4pn 12 power connected at the same time. I thought it was one or the other.
Kind people, I do appreciate the ideas for hardware setup, but I’m currently trying to confirm that the 450 EUR box I’ve found is sufficient for my usecase. N100 platform, yes or no?
If the answer is no - then I’ll definitely look for something along the lines of recommended systems.
N100 itself is ok for TrueNAS, but not with only 8GB. You will definitely need more. And the EMMC system drive soldered onto the mainboard is also not ideal. Just like any Flash media EMMC has got limited write cycles, and Tesla got bitten by them in the main unit of the Model S (?) where the constant writing of logs exhausted the 32G EMMC flash. This was a very expensive mistake.
Short answer , no. There are lots of little HP and Lenovo mini servers that are better suited to this task and not expensive or noisy. Those little n100 boxes are better off as routers or some other appliances that are on all day.
And to dispel further ways to cheat raidz1, they must all match. Minimum of 3 drives, so a 3tb 3 way raidz1 will give you the capacity of 2 drives and burn one for parity. Get a paycheck and you can start replacing every drive one by one for 6tb models or 8tb or whatever, but you will be doing all of them. Only after all the drives have resilvered, then your new capacity will be revealed. That’s how it works. I’ve done it many times.
To your point about networking. If your array can’t even sustain 50Mb/s on the wire, your network isn’t the bottleneck and you’ll see nothing improve there.
Also, I’m running 8 18tb drives in 2 pools , both raidz1. Not recommended because if one drive dies in either pool , I’ll be waiting a while for new drives to resilver. But it works and I’m willing to risk it. This is all in one box that’s not too loud and obnoxious because Fractal Node cases are sweet.
They tend to be just a little bigger than a 3.5" sata drive. Some don’t even have sata ports. Kinda hard to populate a nas without ports for storage. Even some have nvme but not more than few ports there either.
It is a 4-bay NAS…
Somewhat short in RAM for ZFS (officially 16 GB max.), and no ECC. eMMC is probably best avoided for TrueNAS, due to logging activity, so one might have to use one of the two M.2 slots for boot, or a SSD on USB adapter.
I would personally NOT consider it (ECC), but it is minimally capable.
