Morning all
Is there anywhere where I can see example builds? Initially I’m just starting out with very basic file storage to get started so looking probably for a very basic build to get started.
Thanks in advance!
You could check the spec on Truenas Mini - kinda give you an idea… doesn’t have to be an Embedded CPU. (support many SATA or a HBA, have decent amount of RAM, INTEL NIC, decent amount of PCI lanes? - IPMI would be nice.)
There have been a number of these discussions lately. You will have to search them out
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Just a regular file server? Is it for home or work? Give us some details and we can point you in the right direction. I think ECC ram is a must. I have an intel build and an amd build both running ECC ram. One system has 10gb nic while the other only has 1gb nic since it’s a remote backup and is bottlenecked by the ethernet plan.
I run plex and started dabbling with some other apps. I was totally new to truenas until about 6 months ago and it’s absolutely awesome!!! I do have some hardware regrets which have me wishing I got a motherboard with full bifurcation. Any questions please let me know!
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There is a section of the documentation for this.
Probably lots more information than you need 
Any hardware that meets the requirements in the doc should be good. I use an old HP MicroProliant (N54L CPU and 16GiB ECC RAM) for my backup TrueNAS server, it has no trouble saturating the 1 Gbe network connection.
Nope, everyone should read the entire thing otherwise they will still have questions. It may be a lot of information but it is all important. If someone wants to have little knowledge invested into a NAS, go buy a QNAP or similar. TrueNAS is one of those where you need to know what you are doing, or risk data loss or poor performance. Just my opinion.
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Just my opinion
You need to have the answers to these questions for a “basic” system:
- How much storage do you need, now double it. Almost everyone underestimates what they will end up using.
- How much redundancy do you want? 2 Drive failure is standard (RAIDZ2 or 3-way Mirrors).
- Are you planning to run any VM’s? Yes=32GB to 64GB (or more) RAM and a fast CPU, No=16GB to 32GB RAM and any basic CPU.
- Depending on your storage, you can use HDD, SSD, or possibly NVMe. Since you said Basic, I will assume HDD. More cost effective and you can get your feet wet.
As mentioned above, there are a lot to threads discussing people wanting to build a system and they ask a lot of questions. Do you reading, answer those questions above, and you should have a good idea where to start. If you have some special requirements, this stuff changes however for a basic system where you will be learning and storing data, this is it.
If you are unfamiliar with how to build a system, that is a completely other problem. While you can just slap things together, I don’t advise it. Do it right, educate yourself and you will benefit more than you know.
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Hi all, this is amazing. Thank you for all the helpful responses.
At the moment I just want to “dip my toe”. By basic, all I want is an area where all myself and maybe my family members (if possible) can store all our photos. I will store my files on there too. I’ve been reading the app to use is Immich?
I came here as after some research everyone seems to be very happy going TrueNAS as I was originally looking at Synology. If ideally if I can do a build for cheaper than DS923 and a couple of drives thats where I’d want to be. From what I see it seems quite possible!
Hi all
I’ve read the hardware guide - very informative! It seems so much more capable than what I will need it for.
One of the threads I’ve been reading has the following parts list:
Parts list:
Case: Fractal Design Node 804
CPU: Ryzen 7 Pro 5750G
MoBo: Asrock X570M
RAM: Micron 32 GB DDR4-3200 UDIMM ECC x 4
Boot drive: Patriot P220 128GB SATA SSD
NVMe riser: Asrock Hyper Quad PCIe to 4x M.2
NVMe: WD SN850X 2TB NVME x 4
Power supply: Corsair HX750
HDD: Seagate Exos X18 14TB (OEM) x 6
Alot of people seem to be using the Fractal case for its small form factor. This might be a silly question but if you opt for 6 x HDD’s in this scenario, how are they all housed? Is it in some sort of seperate container that you buy? Any information would be appreciated!
Thank you.
One thing I think you should think about is what you might want to do in the future.
The main focus of TrueNAS is data storage. But it’s capable of quite a bit more. Have a look through the apps that are available.
You may end up wanting to turn it into a media server using Plex, Jellyfin or Emby.
Got some Ubiquiti devices? There’s a Unifi Controller app to manage them.
Minecraft servers, home automation, personal cloud, video surveillance. There’s heaps.
So check that out before you go ahead an purchase hardware.
As for the build you’ve listed, that Fractal case looks to be a dual chamber design. So the guts of the system will be in one chamber, the drives and PSU are in the other side. I can see on the product page that is has 2x 3 bay drive cages for 3.5" drives, so that should be enough.
You would need to think about expansion in the future though. Adding more drives could be messy.
One thing a lot of people do is buy used server equipment. I recall Wendel from Level1 making a video about Universities in the US auctioning off old hardware for really cheap.
If that’s you, night be something to check in on. Particularly for a disk shelf/JBOD.
I managed to pick up a 24 bay Supermicro disk shelf. If you have something like that, it gives you the extra slots available to add more drives to expand your pool if you’re running out of space.
Which is another thing to consider. With ZFS, you can’t create a pool, then at a later date, add an additional drive to increase capacity. You have to create an identical VDEV, or ‘group’ of disks, to add to the pool to increase its capacity.
So if you have a Pool consisting of a single VDEV that has 3 disks in a RAIDz1 (One disk redundancy), you would need to get 3 more disks of the same or higher capacity and create another RAIDz1 VDEV for the Pool. This will effectively double your useable capacity.
Just remember that each VDEV is it’s own ‘RAID array’. It doesn’t become a 6 disk VDEV with 2 disk redundancy. Each VDEV can only lose a single drive while keeping your data in tact, in this scenario.
So if you were to create a single VDEV using all 6 drives, then you start running out of space and need to expand, you would need to purchase an additional 6 drives.
If you were to split up the 6 drives into 2 VDEVs of 3 disks, your total usable space would be lower, but if you need to expand, you would only need to buy 3 disks. The other trade off there would be you’d only increase your capacity by 1/3, as opposed to doubling it in the first scenario.
In a RAIDz1, your data is parity written across all drives and you have the ability to lose 1 drive. So you effectively end up with a capacity of all drives minus 1. There’s some additional overhead involved, but we don’t really need to go over that.
So if you had 3x 1TB drives in a RAIDz1, you’d have a usable capacity of 2TB.
If you like to live life on the edge and create a 6 drive RAIDz1, you’d have 5TB.
If you create 2 VDEVs, to make it easier on the wallet to expand in the future, You’d have 2x RAIDz1 3x 1TB. Each one giving 2TB, combined to give 4TB total. You add another 3 drives down the line to expand, create another RAIDz1, you get a total of 6TB.
Your space efficiency goes down, but your redundancy goes up (As long as you don’t lose more than 1 drive in a single VDEV), and you can get better performance as well. Although probably not something you’d notice in a home scenario.
The other method to increase capacity if you’re running low is to swap our your existing drives with larger ones. Take a disk offline, pull it out and install the new larger disk. Replace the offline disk with the newly installed one and let ZFS resilver (rebuild) the array. Once it’s finished, repeat the process with the next disk. Once you’ve replaced them all, the Pool size will increase to reflect the available space. So swap out 1TB drives with 2TB drives in a 6 drive RAIDz1, pool capacity goes from 5TB to 10TB.
Here’s a couple of builds that I’ve done. One for my own server at home. I use it for storing and streaming media.
Its a single 24 disk RAIDz2 VDEV with 6TB drives. It has just over 110TB of usable capacity. Most people will tell you that you should only have a max of 12 disks in a single VDEV. In a business use case, sure, but at home, I’ve been using it for many years without issue.
The other was for a VMware ESX cluster used for hosting our internal servers. Domain controllers, mail server, database servers, application servers etc etc.
So it needed to be robust, performant, and be able to store our existing 30TB of data.
Used 44x 1.92TB SSDs. Created a pool consisting of 14x RAIDz1 3 disk VDEVs, for a total capacity of 47TB. The remaining 2 disks were added to the pool as hot spares, in case a drive died.
The best performance scenario is a pool consisting of 2 disk mirror VDEVs, but that wouldn’t have given us the capacity we required.
It still gave us excellent performance however. And I definitely wouldn’t have used my personal configuration in this case.
Sorry for the long winded ramble, but hope that gives you an idea of some things you should consider when putting together a shopping list!
Might I suggest you run a virtual TrueNAS on you r main computer for a while, just to get accustom to the GUI and the functions you will be using. It will help you understand how to create datasets, SMB shares, Permissions, all that fun stuff. I would not use this for real saving of data but it gets that big toe wet.
The parts list you provided is not a basic setup of hardware. 128GB RAM, six 14TB HDDs, four 2TB NVMe drives? NOT BASIC, NOT DIPPING TOE. This is diving off the high board into the pool. And nothing wrong with that at all.
With that said, have you downloaded the user manual for the motherboard to see what it can and cannot do? Qualified RAM List, SATA connections, etc. This motherboard is not a Server motherboard but more of a high end gaming motherboard. You are missing IPMI, which is very valuable. Once you have used it a few times, you will never buy another motherboard without it. No need for a keyboard or monitor, fantastic, and remote access.
My advice here is to contact the person who built this system and find out what they liked and didn’t like. What would they have done differently and why. It is the little things that really matter.
I guess one question I would have for you is what do you plan to do with all that storage space? Do not say the NVMe drives are log drives, you are not there yet.
As for the boot drive, while I use to like Patriot, I do not anymore. I prefer a Samsung SSD. But as a boot drive, the Patriot should be fine.
Regardless of what you do, do your best to educate yourself on this stuff. It isn’t rocket science (trust me, I know).
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Guilty as charged. 
He can’t yet ask me what I like/don’t like since that thread is only a couple days old and I’m still waiting for all my parts. But I did end up switching to the X570D4U mobo and 5950X CPU. So I guess an even higher high board?
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The answer is in the case manual: Drives are hanged in two cages, which take four drives each.
So the Node 804 somewhat favours configurations with an 8-wide raidz2 vdev, or two striped 4- or 5-wide vdev (with the fifth drive screwed to the bottom of the CPU chamber).
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It is a server board so yes, an upgrade in my opinion. Does it support 4x4x4x4 bifurcation?
Look at my NVMe build, it is a similar build. What I wish I could change: The motherboard to a different model as the IPMI sucks during a reboot as it try’s to connect. A firmware update has made it connect faster but it is still there and I never had that on a Supermicro motherboard. I wish I had built-in 10GbE.
I never thought I’d want it but now I do and that is just another added cost.
One more PCIe x4 slot. I could definitely use it since I had to remove something to install the 10GbE card. The PCIe x1 slot is almost useless.
While I do not need it yet, USB 3.2 (20Gbit) would be nice. You cannot really use it natively in TrueNAS but I understand that can be worked around.
My usage would be to transfer my data to an NVMe storage drive via USB, but again, I really do not need it.
Otherwise my system seems to be rock solid, well for over a year now.
It supports 4x4x4x4 as long as it’s not an APU (even the Pro versions only support 8x4x4) - one of the motivations to change to the server board + non-APU CPU.
I wanted 10GbE, but I couldn’t find the Intel version anywhere here in Germany, only the Broadcom was an option. My plan is to use that PCIe x1 slot with a riser for an AQC113 based NIC, since it supports a single 10GbE over PCIe 4.0 x 1 and I can’t think of any other purpose for the x1 slot.
M.2 boot drive on cheap adapter.
Two points about the above.
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A new feature of OpenZFS (and TrueNAS) allows adding a drive to a RAIDzn vdev to increase capacity. There are a bunch of caveats, but it does permit capacity growth.
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All of the top level vdevs in a zpool do not have to be identical, but that is the best practice and I’m pretty sure no one supports differing vdevs in one zpool (and TrueNAS prevents you from doing this). The reason for this is performance predicatability. Each vdev type has a different performance profile, by mixing them up you cannot predict what the performance of the zpool will be.
As one simple example, if you have a zpool of six 2-way mirrors and you want to go to 3-way mirrors you can easily do so by attaching a 3rd device to each existing mirror. While you are doing this some of the six vdevs will be a 2-way mirror and the others will be a 3-way mirror. ZFS keeps going with no outage during all of this. TrueNAS did permit me to do this.
I once had a system (not a FreeNAS/TrueNAS system, it was a FreeBSD server) with a single RAIDz2 vdev of 4 HDD. I needed to add more space immediately (yes, I ran over 95% and there was no data there I was willing to delete), I had 2 more drives and slots so I added a 2-way mirror. It got me the space (and time) I needed. Yes, I eventually moved the data to a server with more slots and went with 2-way mirrors to make growth easier, but it ran fine with the mixed top level vdevs for months (performance was not a concern).
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Hi all
Any thoughts on this parts list please? Like I say, initial start to a basic build?
AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G 3.70GHz 8MB Hexa Core CPU Processor AM4
ASRock B550 Pro4 ATX Motherboard for AMD AM4 CPUs
Micron MTA18ASF4G72AZ-3G2B1 32GB PC4-25600AA-E 2RX8 DDR4-3200MHz ECC
650W Corsair RM650e Modular PSU
Solely hosted for storage of files/photos etc.
Thank you!
Thank you for this. Really interesting information!
Thank you! Can I run TrueNAS say on my Windows machine using something like VMWare to check it out?