I am working on building my first NAS (getting spooked by rising RAM and HDD costs and whether they will eventually come down or just be very hard to come by for consumers). I am mainly trying to decide whether TrueNAS or Unraid would be better for my use case. If TrueNas, I am not even sure if my build will handle it (hearing mixed opinions on the total amount of RAM needed).
The components I have are a HKUXZR N100 Industrial NAS Motherboard, 1 stick of CORSAIR Vengeance SODIMM DDR5 RAM 32GB (1x32GB) @ 5600MHz, and 3 28TB SeaGate IronWolf HDDs.
The big concern I have is whether the 32GB of RAM is enough for a TrueNAS system running ZFS and how big a deal that it is non-ecc memory, as the MOBO does not support ECC.
I will be primarily using this as file storage for RAW photos and as a Jellyfin media server. If anyone has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it. I kinda just scooped up some HDDs because I was seeing them start to be hit by the AI hunger machine, but want to make sure this is something that will last and handle everything I throw at it.
Iâd argue itâll be fine - you could prolly even run some apps/a vm or two if you carefully manage their memory & limit arc a bit.
Non-ecc is debatable in the sense that there have been multiple argument in the past on if it should be mandatory on every OS, let alone TrueNAS. Iâd argue it should be, but then someone more paranoid than me will point out that I have UDIMM ecc without ipmi reporting instead of RDIMM ecc with ipmi reporting & that my ecc is not enough. Just a balance of risk tolerance vs budget. Nothing about TrueNAS specifically requires ecc more so than other OS - it frankly should be the standard.
If your budget/build canât handle it, mem test it & trust it as much as you can. Most folk prolly never have any issues within lifecycle of a build⌠but then again, we just had a wave of people getting ram failures on the forums & it isnât fun to figure out. ECC can also fail, but it is usually very noisy with alerts & tries to correct errors as it dies.
Will it last & handle everything you throw at it? Nothing lasts forever & scope creep is the killer of joy.
Ok, if you were me and had spent ~$600 on the mobo, cpu, and ram would you suggest re-thinking? If so, do you have a better CPU platform you would suggest? The big thing was that board had the N100 CPU integrated. But it only has one SODIMM slot and again, doesnât support ECC.
I want this thing to be legit. I have been saying my whole life I wanted to build a NAS and am kicking myself in the ass for not doing it sooner. Couldnât imagine we would be were we are with prices but I am finally in the position where I am comfortable doing so.
You have some design choices that may be questionable. You list 3x 28TB drives. Raid-Z1 isnât recommended for those large drives due to resilver time if a drive fails. Raid-Z2 would be better but that would need 4 drives to create the pool and VDEV in the GUI. Is this your only place to store your data? Where else are you backing up your data. Servers and pools have been lost before. If this is your only storage, are you able to lose it all?
I guess you could have other plans like a mirror VDEV of 2x 28TB drives and a spare?
Yes this is the only place I would be storing most of this data. It is mostly media files like our collection of movies. I would have family photos and things of that nature, so I would like to make this robust and scalable in the future.
What is a better size then? Something smaller like 12TB and just more of them? It seemed that the 28TB was the more cost effective per TB and it seems fairly hard to find drives at the moment. I am open to whatever makes the most sense though.
Items like family photos should be stored in at least two or three different places. One âoff siteâ. Regular data is recommended to keep the pool usage below 80%. Itâs below 50% if using block type storage, like databases and iSCSI. You need to figure out how much storage you will require and your plan for backing it all up. A usual setup is two TrueNAS servers and, maybe, offsite backup. Main server and a backup server. If your movie collection is easily replaceable, you could have just the main server and a plan for backup of âimportantâ data, elsewhere.
A usual setup is a mirror pair of SSD / NVMe for the Apps pool and the hard drives as the data pool. You might be able to get away with just Jellyfin app on the main pool but the more apps you add, the worse the performance.
When you are saying two true NAS servers, are you saying two totally different sets of hardware? Or could I run all this from the same box. Like assuming I use say 20 TB of actual storage and had another 20 TB in the same box, does that function as the backup you are referring to? I was planning on having enough overhead storage to be able to do backups, I just thought all this was happening in the same build.
I may re-think my mobo/cpu/ram and get one that I can easily run two NVMeâs because I would like to run docker containers for different apps, and really wasnât thinking of where that would be ran from. I have a single TB NVMe, but that mobo only has one slot.
Nope, not at all. My post is that if you already have those parts in hand, then life is good.
If you ignore budget & the fact you already have those parts; yes, it is not perfectly optimal. But it is also currently hardware appocalypse in terms of price atm.
If you live somewhere with cheap power & have a space where you donât mind some noise a used server may beat out on price & hardware resiliency while keeping the budget alive.
Barky brings a solid point about raidz1 not being optimal for drives that size (risk of additional failure while resilvering pool while replacing failed drive with only single redundancy) - might be best to bite the bullet and buy a 4th for raidz2 or lower capacity for increased total amount of drives.
You might want to browse the Resources section and look at a few builds listed. You can expand the signatures under some users posts to get ideas of how they have their servers set up. Fleshmauler has a âSee My freeNAS systemâ you can click on the triangle and expand. You should notice others also.
Resources List including Detailed Hardware and System Build Notes (plus new user advice / help)
Ok, yes thank you this is perfect. This helps a ton. Right away I see that it mentions I shouldnât do what I was intending to do (use it as a JellyFin server as well). So I need to do some more digging.
32 GB is enough for ZFS. ECC is recommended but not mandatory.
Your biggest issue is that N100 is known to be picky with RAM, and officially supports only 16 GB so your 32 GB stick may be too much already.
Then, as discussed, youâd need a good backup plan, especially if youâre going for raidz1.
And, unfortunately, now is a terrible time to go shopping for parts and build a NAS.
Or any other available Xeon D-1500 boardâŚ
Provided that second-hand DDR4 RDIMM can still be found at decent prices, this is certainly a safer alternative to N100. If âJellyfinâ includes transcoding, the PCIe slot can take an Arc A310 dGPU (and possibly further a pair of M.2 with a x8x4x4 riser).
I know this can be an unpopular opinion but youâll be fine. Even with less if needed. Of course there are ideal configurations but I can tell you from my own experience that it is more important to have a place to store your data (and maybe even a second one as a backup) than to have no place because you are waiting for the âperfect configurationâ. My humble opinion: Look at old systems, other peoples systems in the forums, and your budget. Get what you can afford now - maybe even what hurts a little but is still possible - and build your system(s). If you check compatibilities and such, you will be fine.
Personally, I have a mix of different systems. From very old ones that are nowhere near the recommended specs (but working fine) to newer ones that are kinda in the sweet spot. And yes, in a perfect world you have a 3-2-1 backup solution with one being off-site and in climate controlled environments, and with spares, and UPS, and redundant backup power supplies, and backup power lines, and backup Internet, and service agreements⌠But having your photos stored on a NAS and not only your phone/computer is already many times better than not. We enthusiasts tend to forget that.
Edit: Look at this thread and youâll see examples of people running old systems that are just fine. And you can always use a MiniPC or old stuff for Jellyfin if your NAS is only good as a NAS.
