TrueNAS as VM on Proxmox on MikroTik CCR2116. Now to get this working on the RDS2216…
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And it works on the RDS2216 too. It looks the same, albeit with 32GB of RAM instead of 16GB, so I didn’t post another screenshot.
It’s still a work in progress. Without access to the Marvell NDA-protected tools to get the onboard Prestera chips working, external adapters have to be used to get 10G-40G networking up and running. MikroTik specs the AL73400 as being able to move about 50Gbps of traffic, so a single 4x10, 2x25, or 2x40 card is sufficient. I have external cards working on the CCR2116, but my adapter for the RDS doesn’t work (yet).
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Suite!, I just got a used 96core Ampere Altra Max and the ASRock Rack board.
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I’m definitely interested in this. I have a DH4300 plus here with 8 cores, 8GB of RAM, 4 bays, and 2.5GbE connectivity which I think could be a prime candidate for this port. I might buy another one of these just to experiment with for this. As far as I know this has a 128GB MMC drive. I have managed to root my current one so i know it’s entirely possible to replace it with TrueNAS. I am not sure at the moment how it boots, I need to look into that but I can’t risk my current one hence the plans to purchase another one for experimenting with. I
It is a Rockchip 3588 SOC.
You’d think a year later - and even FreeBSD supporting ARM64 as a Tier 1 Architecture - and Nvidia moving towards ARM64 too this could become a supported platform.
Then again I heard that “will be supported somewhen” story since like … 8 years now in many packages, not tied to TrueNAS / IX when it comes to ARM64.
And I’ve been trough all the downs and downers with these SBCs not just RasPi …
But I always come back to them for some odd reason (maybe I like pain).
Somehow ARM64 seems to split into Raspi <> SuperCluster (and the odd child from Apple) and something in the middle is totally ignored. No wonder: ITX form factor won’t deal away with all the random problems this brings.
I totally love the idea of <= 5W idle backup servers - then again, I’ve seen the arguments against HDD Spin-Down Bugfixing from changed Smart Reporting also a year ago …
If the Team ever decides to do something like Unraid like licenses to add things like that I’d totally pay for that …
That’s called “TrueNAS Connect.” Though perhaps not for the same features you want.
The likely biggest issue is that there are very few hardware platforms out there that somehow cater to ARM-based NAS enthusiasts. The best example yet is likely the UBNT series of ‘pro’ NAS.
I doubt we can expect ixsystems to make a whole build for an architecture whose serious NAS implementations can be counted on two hands?
To me, the big question is how big an advantage ARM has over Intel or AMD in a NAS setting. I care a lot about the power consumption of my NAS, but the majority is via the HDDs, not the CPU.
For low power applications, there are chip options on the market already that offer oodles of PCIe lanes, extant motherboards, etc. and low power (ie Ryzen 4&5 -GE PRO chips, for example). Add a newish LSI HBA (74xx and on) plus a recent Intel SFP+ (700 series or so) optical NIC and you have a kicking NAS motherboard at very low power consumption. Same thing can be done on the Intel side also, with the right CPUs.
On the cost & supply side, there isn’t a huge incentive either. The vast cost is now in the RAM and storage, not the motherboard or the CPU. The UBNT solution is certainly NOT budget-conscious. It looks nice though.
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I have succeeded in getting the network ports on my lab MikroTik CCR2116 working with kernels 5.10 and 6.12.74, and it boots Debian (with Proxmox 8, PXVirt port).
Inside of that, I have a TrueNAS VM with 8GB of RAM and three 4TB SATA SDD’s that I’ve passed through via “qm set.” (There isn’t a way to pass the HBA through, yet. The SMMU is disabled.)
I did some basic BlackMagic Design disk testing via SMB from my Mac Studio.
RAID0: 3x0 = 475MB/s write, 250MB/s read
RAID1: 1x3 = 400MB/s write, 200MB/s read
RAIDZ1: 3 = 400MB/s write, 200MB/s read
The next test is with an RDS2216. Since I put my first one into production, I bought a second one for redundancy, which will start out in the lab for a little while.
If there was a way to boot TrueNAS without UEFI onto the RDS2216, that would be sweet.
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