Hi all,
Intro
I’m hoping to get some insights and tips from the community. I’ve been running TrueNAS (well FreeNAS back then) since 2016. From a software perspective it has been quite the journey but from a hardware perspective things didn’t change much in my system. I feel it’s about time I modernized it. I’m planning to move to TrueNAS scale soon™ too and I’d like to expand the capabilities of my NAS by putting a more modern mobo + CPU combo in it (and RAM as a result).
Current build and plans
I had to replace my motherboard because it fell victim to the C2000 bug and I installed a dedicated SSD for the boot pool and another one to have a dedicated flash volume.
My current build still uses the replacement ASRockRack C2550D4I with 16GB of ECC RAM. What I like about it is that it’s low power, relatively quiet, Mini-ITX, it has IPMI and ECC RAM. My pool consists of 6 x 4TB WD Red in Raid Z2, at some point these will need to be replaced too, but not necessarily right now.
I don’t mind hunting for something on the second hand market but I do want it to be power efficient and preferably not as loud as a regular server or I would need to move it out of my office into the garage.
Options
When looking at the recommendations these days I see a lot of home users seem to go for Intel N-series boards. I like the availability of M.2 and 10G networking and overall improved performance when comparing to my old board, but I seem to miss IPMI, ECC support and dual-channel memory.
Specs considerations
- Staying with Mini-ITX would mean that it’s a drop-in replacement in my Silverstone DS380 so that would be a bonus.
- IPMI I guess I could live without. I have used it to turn on the NAS without walking to it after a shutdown and also to avoid having to connect a screen via VGA for some maintenance work, but it’s not a must.
- The ECC memory story is still a bit unclear for me, I’ve read and watched some stuff about it and the messaging still confuses me. The TrueNAS podcast debate mentioned some options you can enable in ZFS to have extra checks being done before actually writing stuff to disk so I might have to take a look at that if I do move to a non-ECC system. I’m mainly worried about files on my NAS being/going bad without me realizing it.
- Dual-Channel memory is not a big issue if the new board uses DDR5 I suppose. Seems like the DDR5 architecture is dual channel by default.
I’d be very thankful for any thoughts, suggestions and links.
Thanks!