I am looking to complete the build with the parts I have listed below. I need ram recommendations. Any other advice you might have would be most appreciated. The ram seems very expensive. I haven’t looked into this in a while but I was quite shocked. If 16gb x 2 would be ok give the requirements below that would be fine.
Motherboard: Supermicro X12STH-F
CPU: Intel Core i7-11700
Case: Fractal Design Node 804
SSD: Western Digital 2TB WD Red SA500 NAS (×2 initially)
These are the requirements I typed into chatgpt.
Build a TrueNAS SCALE server for a home network
Use a Supermicro Intel-based motherboard
Start with 64 GB ECC RAM, must be expandable to 128 GB minimum
System will be in a desktop case, preferably small
IPMI is required
CPU should support QuickSync for Plex transcoding
Initial storage: 2 × 2TB SSDs (NVMe or SATA)
Must be able to expand storage by 2 additional drives later
Micro-ATX case is acceptable if all other criteria are met
Motherboard must have at least 1 × 1 Gb NIC
Hardware should be proven/stable for TrueNAS SCALE, not cutting-edge
NAS usage: Plex streaming + VMs + family local storage
Home office / home lab environment
Over-specifying is fine; power usage is not a concern
Boot pool will use 2 small SATA SSDs (mirrored)
NVMe may be used for a separate VM pool, but must support mirroring
This motherboard requires a Xeon E-2300 (a ‘G’ model to have an iGPU); Core are NOT supported.
As for the cost of RAM you can… blame ChatGPT.
You have not specified how many HDDs you want. Or do you want an all-flash NAS? If so, the Node 804 is NOT a good choice for a case: Check how drives are installed.
If power use is really not a concern, you may look for an X11SRM or X11SPM motherboard, which would then use DDR4 RDIMM—this should still be available for cheap, second-hand. (And if you do want an all-flash NAS, a Xeon W-2000 or Xeon Scalable would have plenty of PCIe lanes for that!)
That’s next to no storage in a nice expensive case, get a rebuilt older machine preferably with a Xeon and all the ecc ram you can get your hands on. Should be fairly cheap. Look into used enterprise stuff like hp or Lenovo Xeon mini servers, Dell has some decent ones too.
One caveat. This all assumes you’re in the US. Big second hand market here that’s cheap. Europe pays through the nose.
Last note about the ram. That’s directly related to storage. Almost no storage means almost no ram is OK.
aside from not having IPMI (though there are solutions out there to achieve IPMI) .. for just a home NAS, I’ve switched to just using consumer grade components to Plex inside of TrueNAS Scale. It’s been running 24/7 for over 2 years now without issue
unless you are doing some thing extraordinary, 32gb is more than enough for hosting files and a few vm. My main nas is a SC440 with a dual core cpu + 4gb.
and I have a few machines running NAS servers with 16 - 64gb → not because of needs but because of what I have.
