I want to build a TN Scale system for backups in an office.
I want to use a Jonsbo N1 or N2.
The NAS should at least support 2.5Gbps, the mainboard should support 5 SATA ports by itself or have a PCIe slot suitable for an HBA.
2 NICs would also be preferrable - only one would have to support 2.5Gbps though.
The system will for now only be used for backups via SMB.
I am not sure which platform to use.
The system should be very reliable without breaking the bank and also not use too much power.
I’ve just built a test system in a Jonsbo N1.
It was a bit wobbly standing up, but once fully loaded with drives it’s heavy enough to be stable. I swapped the fan for a Noctua NF-A14x12 G2, setup to exhaust from the top (front ) due to the vertical position. It’s keeping drives at a maximum of 38°C with badblocks running for over 24 hours, so I’m satisfied with cooling—I’d be less sure about the 15 mm thin fan of the N2.
Jonsbo strongly recommends right-angle SATA cables for the backplane, due to limited space. But the power connectors may interfere with a right-angle cable on SATA1… And while experimenting with different cables I quickly found that the backplane ports are quite fragile so I put epoxy glue to strengthen SATA1 before it broke.
With some patience (and luck), you may find second-hand X10SDV boards on eBay, STH forum or local small ads…
Considering that the board comes with CPU and NIC, and uses inexpensive DDR4 RDIMM, I think it’s worth chasing one.
There’s also a Datto-rebranded Gigabyte MB10 board that is roughly similar to X10SDV, but it has a Java-based IPMI
I also struggled to find an ITX motherboard with multiple SATA ports from a ‘brand name’ vendor at a price I was willing to pay. I wrote up a little of my experience with purchasing motherboards off Aliexpress.
For my uses case as a home media server, the outcome has been stable and reliable so far. Your requirements in a business context may make my experience not applicable.
I’m not so sure myself because I never tested the stock fan!
But I wanted to reverse the direction of air flow, so while I was at it I replaced the fan.
“very reliable” “not use too much power” and “cheap” aka “consumer price range” does not fit together. Forget this.
Sources of failure are:
Disk drives
Power supplies
(empty)
(empty)
everything else.
For “very reliable” you need redundant disks. You also need redundant power supplies to be “very reliable”, and one of the power supllies should be on an UPS. Redundant power supplies decrease the power efficiency but outage times cost real money, much more than a couple of watts.
For “very reliable” you need excellent cooling. Reducing temperature by 10°C doubles the lifespan of you components. This comes from the van-’t-Hoff rule in chemistry. You can google for that keyword. Excellent cooling means pumping cubic metres of air through the system and is noisy. Noise is not an issue for enterprise equipment that runs in temperature-controlled rooms. Crammed desktop cases will make your device die early.
Basically you need to make the choice if you want “very reliable” hardware or if you want more of a consumer toy.
I am aware that very high reliability and low price are hard to combine but it definitely is possible to build a NAS from consumer grade hardware that is more stable than others.
Of course data disks (and actually the boot optane modules as well) will be mirrored.
That is a gross oversimplification and I am quite sure that van’t hoffs law cannot be used verbatim on hardware lifespan as it does not rely only on chemical reactions within components. Especially for mechanical parts such as HDDs, fans, etc.
As far as I know HDD temps below about 45°C do not have any noticable effect on their lifespan.
I will probably use the Jonsbo N1 and a Noctua A14 G2 - that should be sufficient, especially while only using two drives.
Let me rephrase my initial question:
What would you recommend in the consumer price while maximizing efficiency, reliability and speed.
ok, not for mechanics, but for semiconductor and capacitor lifespan (number 1 failure cause for electronic components).
If you want to go the cheap route:
Odroid H4+ with 32G DDR5 RAM, 4 hard disks and a small NVME boot disk in the M.2 slot. Or, if you want the M.2 slot for other things then use an EMMC module as boot medium. Will work as well - I tried this with an Odroid H3+ and two 4T SSDs. Dont forget to order the SATA power/data cables.
Decent quality, silent, two 2.5G Intel ports. Still consumer ware for home usage.
Just for anyone reading this in the future: I’ll probably use a CWWK mainboard/cpu combo with an N305, 6 SATA ports via an ASM1166 (with a proper heatsink and, for now, only 2 drives attached this will be absolutely fine), 2 I225-V 2.5Gb ports and 2 M.2 slots for the optane boot modules.
I’ll use a Noctua NH-L9x65 and a be quiet SFX-L 80+ Gold PSU.
Some guys on the truenas subreddit brought my attention to cwwk.net, I hope the board will work well.
so I put epoxy glue to strengthen SATA1 before it broke.