Planning a TrueNAS build with some hardware I have lying around, I have a Ryzen 9600X but will need a motherboard, looking at a B850 as some of these support ECC RAM, also need ECC ram. Really looking for 4 spinning drives, an nvme and maybe 2 ssd for container loads.
Snippet of specs below.
Chipset
AMD B850 Chipset
Memory
4 x DIMM slots, max. 192GB, DDR5
Supports up to 8000+MT/s (OC) with Ryzen™ 9000 & 8000 & 7000 Series Processors, ECC and Non-ECC Un-buffered DIMM*
Dual channel memory architecture
Storage
Total supports 3 x M.2 slots and 4 x SATA 6Gb/s ports
Check ECC memory prices for what you want. Check motherboard specs on memory speed. If you fill 4 memory slots, the speeds may be slower. Don’t waste money on fast RAM if you can’t use it.
I would try to get a motherboard with more SATA ports. Having spare ports can help with drive replacements. Maybe go with a SATA SSD for the boot_pool, It shouldn’t be big as it is just for the boot pool. 64-128 GB is fine. Filling only two M.2 slots can also help if you need to do an NVMe replacement in place.
Figure out everything you may need to add to motherboard. NIC or HBA or Graphics card. You have limited slots on ‘gamer’ motherboards. Consider looking at server motherboards. They also have the advantage of getting away from RealTek NICs.
What pool setup do you have for 4x 1TB drives? Do you need to keep that or could you get by with a Mirror pair of larger drives?
Are you passing the disk controller through Proxmox to TrueNAS? You may also have to have it blacklisted so Proxmox doesn’t try to use it. There are conflicts if Proxmox tries to mount TrueNAS pools and it can turn into data loss.
I think these following motherboards will give you 3 x M.2, 4 x SATA and ECC support. Double check the manufacturer specs.
ASUS B850-PLUS TUF Gaming Wifi AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard
ASUS B850M-PLUS TUF Gaming Wifi AMD AM5 microATX Motherboard
ASRock B850M Steel Legend WiFi AMD AM5 microATX Motherboard
ASRock B850M Riptide WiFi AMD AM5 microATX Motherboard
Not long ago I bought the following from Scorptec in Victoria/Clayton
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
ASRock B650D4U-2L2T/BCM
2 x Micron - MTC20C2085S1EC48BR (Micron 32GB DDR5-4800 ECC UDIMM)
Thermalright AXP90-X53 Full Copper Low Profile CPU Cooler
At the time they didn’t have the 5600 speed ddr5 but if you put more than 2 sticks in these Ryzen systems the memory will drop down in speed anyways.
Plus 5600 is more expensive, however in saying that currently they only have stock of the 5600 version… its not easy to find on their website though…
Here is the link to micron website, it allows to choose the speed and size to get the correct model number. its easier to find the memory by searching for the model number, be warned, udimm DDR5 ECC is hideously expensive…
My needs were specific, it was for Proxmox with zfs but in a 2U server case… with an out of band management interface (IPMI / BMC)
Later on if TrueNAS sorts out their virtualization infrastructure I might migrate to TrueNAS instead of using Proxmox
That is not very specific with respect to what you expect it to perform.
Do yourself a favor and write down answers to these kinds of questions:
How much storage capacity do you want to have, think 3 years from now since a drive warranty it typically 3 to 5 years. Remember, drives are consumables.
What kind of redundancy do you need, one drive failure, two drives, more? If the data is important then make sure yo have redundancy, same with if the drives are huge capacity (18TB+) as these take a very long time to resilver.
What do you think you will be doing with the system? It sounds like you may want to make some containers. This can affect how much RAM you will need.
How fast of an Ethernet connection do you need/want and the throughput?
As for Ryzen, I am using one as well, no complaints, and with 64GB ECC RAM.
You can slap together a system and run it for months without issue, then something bad will happen and you realize you lost some important data. Take your time to build a good system, it will matter when you need it.
Note that ryzen supports non registered ecc ram only (aka udimm/unbuffered) and the ecc functionality won’t even work. All of the dirt cheap high capacity server ram is 99.95% registered/buffered/rdimm and will not be recognized and therefore not work. Only threadripper and epyc support the full server grade rdimm ecc shebang.
Note that ryzen supports non registered ecc ram only (aka udimm/unbuffered) and the ecc functionality won’t even work
This is wrong. The ECC functionality absolutely works, if you get UDIMMs and your motherboard and BIOS support it. Any ASUS or AsRock board should work fine. Not all MB manufacturers support it however (I’m pretty sure MSI does not), so watch out.
Otherwise, you’re correct that only UDIMMs (UNregistered) work on these systems, and that RDIMMs (registered) should be avoided.
Good point… but B650 and B850 only provide 4 ports; “more” means stupidly expensive X670 or a HBA. B550 did provide 6 slots, so the previous AM4 generation was better suited for a NAS (and this trend is coming to Intel as well).
This may be a case where “saving” by using parts that are lying around may end up costing more than going for older hardware.
What you didn’t appear to provide is information on what you want to use this for. Is this just for storage? If so then your build may be overkill.
The performance cap will likely be you network and your drives.
If you are virtualizing applications (containers) they are usually pretty light weight, and the motherboard and ram speed will make little to no difference from what I have seen.
If you are virtualizing virtual machines, then you will have a lot of different questions to answer.
For a couple of containers and storage the only things to worry about are the network connection, capacity and storage arrangement, and a sufficient amount of RAM (32GB is nice 64GB is overkill for now but if the price is right). Maybe a cheap GPU for hardware transcoding if you will be doing that and the igpu is not sufficient for your needs.
I have built the similar configuration:
Ryzen 5 PRO 4655G
Asus PRIME B450M-A II
2 * 16 GB Kingston 9965745-026.A00G ECC RAM
4 * WD60EFRX + 2 SSD
5 gbit Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)
Attention: some mainboards support ECC memory in non-ECC mode only!
dmidecode output of my mainboard:
Handle 0x002B, DMI type 16, 23 bytes
Physical Memory Array
Location: System Board Or Motherboard
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 128 GB
Error Information Handle: 0x002A
Number Of Devices: 4
Thanks, I went a different road, not sure what I will do with that motherboard and cpu. Next will be a cml/eve-ng server, hopefully the parts I ordered will show up.
