After finding out my old PC is not really usable for a DIY TrueNAS build, I looked at building one out of new parts.
However building a new system seems way too expensive.
The motherboards I could find which were ECC capable easily are 250 euros.
After looking around some more I came across a server webshop with a Dell PowerEdge T40 for sale.
It has 3 bays, which seems to be enough for me.
I was thinking of setting up a pool with 1 vdev made out of 2x 8TB HDDs mirrored. And even if I want more slots, I could add a PCIe card I assume.
So I wonder if the Dell PowerEdge T40 is even compatible with TrueNAS.
Especially the NIC is unclear to me. Here are the specs:
The purpose of the build is really just data safety. I don’t need the whole build to be quick, maybe only energy efficient. But I can perhaps use Wake On LAN or something similar for that. The majority I will store will be personal data like pictures, videos. Together with storing my c/c++ projects on there and backups of my games.
Another concern about this configuration are the HDDs. The shop says on the website they are new, but they seem a bit cheap for helium filled HDDs.
The Seagate disks I was planning to buy, from somewhere else, were 180 euros each. These HGST Ultrastar helium filled HDDs of 10TB are just 95 euros each.
So if those are indeed not a good option, would the Seagate 12TB (ST12000NM0127) be okay? That would push me up to 12TB for the same price as those 8TB disks I saw somewhere else.
The rest seems okay, like I said I don’t care about speed. It just needs to work and my data needs to be safe. Hopefully someone would love to give some feedback on this.
Thank you in advance!
Odds are these are “refurbished” and is about the correct price for those. Think about Warranty when buying a drive. There are a few reputable use hard drive companies and they honor the warranty. For this specific drive they offer a 5 year warranty. You will need to ensure what the warranty is for these drives and if you need to replace one under warranty, how you go about it. If they tell you to use the WD RMA, then you can verify the warranty as soon as you have the serial numbers. I would do that. Also, these drives are 7200 RPM, they generate heat. A 5200/5400 RPM drive would stay cooler if they provided you that option.
Others have used the T40 however I would have to say that they grew out of it for the most part. As long as you are aware of what you really want to do, that is will help you choose the correct setup.
Power efficient, well… the specs are not bad but it will not be “low power”. But it will be a good starting platform.
As for storage amount, those three 10TB drives will get you either (rough numbers) a 9.5TB 3-way mirror, or 2-way mirror with a spare (leave it unplugged), or a 19TB RAIDZ1, or what I would not recommend is a Stripe and get about 28TB of storage. You need to figure out what you really desire the most, is it redundancy because the data you are storing it very important to not loose? Or is it capacity. You already said speed was not an issue and in reality, speed is not an issue for most home users. The 3-way mirror provides the best redundancy using three drives, it also allows much faster drive replacement as it is a copy, not a RAIDZ configuration.
You have 32GB RAM, that is very good.
The NIC, you need a name brand and model number to find out what works and what doesn’t work very well.
What I do not know, does the system have a fourth SATA port? For a small SSD boot drive?
I’ve ran a small T30 based server, with similar specs for a few years with light to moderate use. it will serve your needs well though it won’t be the quietest (as the case will let seek noises echo a bit)
as for power use, Xeon E3 will be inherently lower power than Xeon E5… it is just a desktop platform with ECC after all.
but it won’t be as low power as something like a synology/terramaster/ugreen/zima/etc… but the truth of the matter is that most of these use some crappy embedded CPU that is usually already several generations old in current products. they will often be stuck with 1 measly channel of memory, and about a sneezes worth of PCIe lanes that they may or may not try to workaround with a PLX chip (which will just cause more contention).
I expect it to be refurbished indeed as the warranty also says only 12 months. However they do have actual refurbished drives (and other parts) but they are not marked as “NEW” so I will message them tomorrow to make sure these drives are new.
Unfortunately they do not offer any new 5400rpm 8TB+ drives.
So unless I can find them somewhere for around 180 euros, I may go for those Seagate 12TB drives, since it’s just too good of a deal (if they are new)…
I am aware these systems are easily double the amount of Watts than a prebuilt synology system. But I guess that is the trade off. I do see the T40 supports other CPUs. So maybe I can look into that and get a lower power CPU with it. But I think the difference won’t be that big in the end.
However, I can just go with the 300W PSU instead of the 750W upgrade, even if I run it with 5 drives right?
The math: 75W for CPU + 30W per drive * 5 drives = 225W
Or would that be too close to the limit?
I would go with a 2-way mirror, with the third drive as backup. Using 2x 8TB drives I could easily use a 1x 8TB drive as backup correct?
But I would then use the third SATA port as boot drive, which I already bought. A simple 256GB Verbatim SSD.
Luckily the NIC is an intel: Integrated Intel® I219 Gigabit Ethernet LAN 10/100/1000.
So I trust on that and @RetroG 's post that the T40 will work fine with TrueNAS
EDIT: The technical guide of the T40 mentions that the maximum capacity would be 3x 4TB. Is that really a thing or did they only test it up to 4TB? Did you run it with 6TB+ drives @RetroG ?
I have been told, several times in these forums, that this company honors the warranty and I have not heard a bad word about them. I do not know if this is an option you would consider, but just thought I’d mention it: https://www.goharddrive.com/
you will be more than fine with a 300w PSU… drives only draw about a 20w when spinning up, and beyond that it’s ~5w.
for the rest of the system, you can estimate 10-25w during idle, to upwards of 75-80w if and only if you are completely maxing the CPU in every way. you will only see numbers higher than 50w really only when you are doing lots of AVX nonsense continuously, not transcoding or the like.
just remember, if your CPU is twice as fast as the Celeron J4125, the work it does takes half has long, so the CPU will be idling much more often, and the overall consumption is closer than one would think.
(according to passmark the CPU you already have is more than twice as fast as the J4125… and this is what Synology is currently using along with the Ryzen Embedded R1600 which is only slightly faster, but as you would guess has a higher TDP)
I ran 4x Seagate Exos 16TB on the T30, the spec’s max just what Dell chose to sell it with (and the T40 is not a high end server so they probably only sold it with up to 4TB disks)
I would honestly say, use a 3x RAIDz1. you might as well make the best of what you have while still having self-healing.
if you want some faster storage for VMs/databases/etc you could also put in some M.2 pcie adapter cards. personally I ran the T30 with 2x U.2 3.84TB Sandisk Skyhawks… but you probably don’t need something that overkill lol.
regarding the boot drive, using the 4th SATA port is a good idea, you can get an adapter that turns the laptop DVD drive bay into a 2.5 bay, that way it isn’t just free-floating in the case.
That’s a great idea to replace the DVD drive with the boot drive!
I will think about using all three slots instead of just two.
If I would want to add more drives I need a pcie card anyway.
Currently I am looking for 5400rpm drives. I think I’ll simply settle with the Seagate Ironwolf 8TB drives. They seem to be the cheapest option.
