TrueNAS Scale First Home / Small Business Build

TrueNAS General
1

Hello all,

I’m hoping you might offer your expertise / feedback / advice on my proposed TrueNAS build please. I have done much reading / thought on the matter and been a bit torn between TrueNAS and Unraid.

I am planning a build of a TrueNAS Scale machine to be used as a backup target for a home / small family business environment - around 15 people. The machine is anticiaped to see fairly light use, and only to be used as backup storage for workstations, media, and another server - no VMs etc planned at this point.

My build list is based on advice I have read here and elsewhere, and availability / affordability of components.

  • OS: TrueNAS Scale.
  • Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL (ATX).
  • Case Cooling: 3 x Fractal Design Dynamic X2 GP-14 140mm Fans (2 x front, 1 x rear).
  • Mainboard: Supermicro MBD-X11SSH-F.
  • CPU: Intel i3-7320.
  • CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 Mini CPU Air Cooler for Intel LGA 1151.
  • RAM: 4 x 16Gb Kingston DDR4 PC4-21300 2666MHz 288-pin UDIMM ECC Unbuffered.
  • OS Disks: ?
  • Data Disks: ? (8-wide RaidZ1)
  • HBA: ?
  • PSU: Corsair RM850x (2021) 850W 80+ Gold (ATX).

Questions:

  1. Any glaring errors / omisssons with the above.

  2. Case chose might seem odd for this use, however chosen for drive bay capacity and to fit in where it will be located.

  3. CPU: Could go with an i3-7100 or i3-7300 if of any significant difference?

  4. OS Disk: Intending to use 128Gb (or thereby) NMVE SSD in the M2 slot to allow use of 8 x SATA ports on the mainboard for Data Disks. I do have some Micron 512Gb SATA SSDs lying about I could use if preferable?

  5. Data Disks: Not sure on data disks yet, looking at Ebay for CMR HDDs around 16TB - any suggestions / favourites? Is an 8-wide RaidZ1 VDEV reasonable, this is based on number of ports on main board and capacity needed? I am happy with risk / resilience of RaidZ1 as will have other copies of this data.

  6. HBA: Not required as yet, but any suggested / favourite models? I have read the SASsy Primer :grinning:.

7: PSU: Perhaps not a traditional choice for such builds, but had it anyway.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts / guidance.

Take care.

2
  1. No significant difference to be expected.
  2. Go for any cheap M.2 NVMe drive to keep all your SATA ports.
  3. Raidz1 is advised against with large drives: Too much data at risk after a single drive failure. Make that raidz2.
  4. Anything you saw in the SAS primer: LSI 2008, 2308, 3008 and clones (M1015, HBA330,…).
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3

I would use RaidZ2.

If I’m reading this right, this is your only backup of some other systems, which means if you have a drive failure, you are just one failure away from having no backups.

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4

Thanks both for your feedback. I accept your points on RaidZ levels and will use RaidZ2, rather than Z1, as you suggest (I know it makes sense). :slight_smile:

5

Hello again,

After some digging about I’m looking at going with the below disks.

OS Disk: Kioxia KBG40ZNV256G BG4 NVME M.2 2280 256GB SSD.

Data Disks WD Ultrastar HC550 WUH721816ALE604 0F38456 16TB 7.2K SATA 6Gb/s HDD (as far as I can tell these are CMR and are sutiable).

Thanks.

6

All fine. Mind, however, that the Ultrastar drives likely implement “3.3V power disable”, and if so you may need to power them from old-style 4-pin Molex using adapters.

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7

Thanks for the confirmation and heads up for the 3.3V Power Disable, I had seen that in some of my reading but it had slipped my mind again :exploding_head:. Good to know.