I have 5-6 year old TrueNAS Core running 13.3, on a Dell server with a flashed HBA.
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2623 v3 @ 3.00GHz
64 GB RAM
RAIDz2
6x 6TB Drives 7200 RPM
I have zero performance issues, but I have been out of space for a while and limping along. I am looking for more preferably cheap storage. I do not really need redundancy, 95% of the data is movies and TV shows. If I lost it all, I would rebuild it not a big deal.
How can I make this better? Back off of RAIDz2 and just to go JBOD? Switch to unRAID? Buy 6x 10 TB disks?
My server will not take any more disks alongside the 6, it would need to be a new server, which I have access to.
add a VDEV and double / triple available storage. You’d need to have the requisite available SATA ports, power capacity, and appetite for more power consumption.
Replace each drive one by one with a higher capacity one and resilver each time. Once every drive in the VDEV has been replaced, the pool will grow to the new capacity.
convert to SCALE and start adding drives to the VDEV.
Of the three, I’d consider option 2 simply because the rig meets your needs, the current hard drives may be approaching their replace-by date, and your current case / PSU will be able to accommodate it all.
In your case, the 24TB Z2 would grow to 40TB Z2. I’d consider that a worthwhile upgrade. If minimal power consumption is a design goal, consider using helium-filled HDDs like the He10 series from HGST.
I bought my latest batch of them (used) for $80 ea at goharddrive.com. All survived qualification without error and came with a 5-year warranty from goharddrive.com
Model
PowerEdge R450
RAM
64 GB
Processor
Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver @ 2.40GHz
SSDs
42x 960GB Solid State Drive SATA M ix Use MLC 6Gbps 2.5in Hot-plu g Drive,3.5in HYB CARR, SM863a
Controller
PERC H730 Integrated RAID Cont roller, 1GB Cache
Downside is it’s 8 years old. But 42x 1 tb SSD… Any reason to try to use this over what was proposed above and just migrate to a new box? I would have to learn and go SCALE.
It would likely consume more power? I’d expect it to be wicked fast, since 42 drives open up a lot of possibilities re: multiple VDEVs in a pool (i.e. five 8-drive Z2 VDEVs for ~30TB of capacity). Downside is likely ~200W of power for the drives alone.
The HDD-based system could be operating sub-100W since it would be running far fewer drives. Devil is in the details…
The existing system is a power hog, the downside of using spare server hardware from work.
Is it possible to get server like performance from a lower power unit? I also have some spare desktops and gaming machines, but I don’t think they have the chassy for 6 HDD and no raid card.
Actually, I just did some testing and this server when transcoding one stream from 4k to 1080p pings 100% CPU. So the more I think about it, the more I think I need a new system. The only thing this server runs is Plex + 7 or 8 rr’s.
What,s a good alternative that can transcode better, house 40+ TB of storage? Willing to go to Scale if thats what needs to happen.
Depends on part how you configure your system. I prefer not to transcode at the server level - I let the end points upscale / downscale / whatever. Other folk prefer their servers do the heavy lifting. I suppose it can be like debating whether the toilet paper roll should be oriented one way or the other.
You can create very performant systems with low power draws if it is a file server-only use case. The X10SDV-2C-7TP4F is a prime example of a excellent file server motherboard with low power consumption built for SOHO use. It won’t transcode like crazy, nor will it break speed records if you have a lot of users. But it does feature SFP+ on board and a decent HBA for up to 20 SATA devices.
Some folk here have had good success building low power Ryzen 5 boards using 5xxx-G and -GE processors - lots of PCIe lanes to play with, lots of CPU power, relatively low idle power consumption. That may get you the transcoding performance you crave without breaking the bank nor sacrificing low power consumption.
I agree with @Constantin on several things. Option 2 to just add larger drives is likely the easiest path for you, especially if the drives are pretty full right now.
Transcoding I feel is also best left for the unit playing the content and let the NAS simply be a NAS. At that point you could actually have a low power system. but everything draws power. And with your new hard drives, see if you can find a 5200/5400 RPM drive as they use slightly less power and generate less heat. But it seems like everything is 7200 RPM these days.
If your NAS is only used to serve up Plex for example, then you can pull out some of the 64GB RAM, drop it down to 16GB. this saves power.
My NVMe NAS pulls 42 watts while idle, a bit more if I have it actually doing something. Mine was not a low power build, well mostly. It was a quiet and low power build as it sits idle most of the time. You can get similar results from a HDD system as well using the correct motherboard/cpu setup. But these cost money.
I also think you should migrate to SCALE once you are ready to migrate to another system. If you just replace your drives with larger ones, keep using CORE. If it works, don’t break it.
With Scale it would be a new install, not able to migrate my jails. Not a problem though, and if I’m doing a new system with new drives that’s what’s in order. On the fence of just ditching TrueNas altogether and going with something just for Plex like mini PC + NAS + Proxmox/Etc.
The new system I have access to has dual 750 PSU and a PERC730. With 42 SSD’s this thing is gonna draw a lot of power. The more I think about it, the more I am leaning towards reducing power consumption and getting rid of these huge servers
SCALE vs. CORE is not an issue here.
If all you need is to host 6 HDDs you don’t need a HBA (and certainly not a RAID controller), just a motherboard with at least 6 SATA ports. Low power champions are the Xeon D-1500 (X10SDV boards) and Atom C3000 (A2SDi); if you want to transcode, you’d need a small ARC dGPU with these.
An alternative is to use consumer-style (but possibly server-grade!) motherboards with Intel Core/Xeon E or AMD Ryzen. These have low idle power, which is what matters for a NAS. If you want to transcode on the NAS, go for Intel—or add an Intel dGPU to a Ryzen system; Intel (i)GPUs are strongly optimsed for efficient transcoding.
VA USA. The Xeon D-1500 (X10SDV) are a bit expensive, even used on ebay- I assume because of what you stated about them being ideal. I do have one of these motherboards kicking around: Intel MB PBA H57532-350 S1200SP, with a SAS39341-8i PCI card.
It depends on your budget… but you’re on the right continent to have a good supply of used X10SDV—these are rare in the European market.
C236 board? If you can find a matching Xeon E3 v5/6 that would be good—but you might still need an ARC dGPU for transcoding the latest formats. 9341-8i sounds like a RAID controller rather than a HBA, but ideally you would just use the motherboard SATA ports and skip the HBA—less power, less complications.
It has a Processor E3-1220 v5, 8MB Cache, 3.00GHz, 8.00GT/s,
4-core. Would this be a good fit for Truenas?
I might even consider offloading Plex to BeeLink N200 and then use this system as TrueNAS storage only and present it over NFS, is this viable? If I did this would I need to add an ARC dCPU?
In a PCIe slot. We’re talking about the lowest end of the Arc range of discrete GPUs, to either add a media engine to a CPU which does not have one (D-1500, C3000, E3-1xx0, etc.) or add support for the latest codecs (H.265, AV1) which are not supported by old iGPUs (E3-1xx5).
For video encoding, I think that it is not useful to to use the full set of lanes.
