What would be the ideal system if money wasn't a huge constraint?

TrueNAS General
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I am upgrading my home Truenas server and want to futureproof myself. I have built my own PC’s for years and so am not intimitated by putting hardware together, but I am quite a novice when it comes to what to put together.

For my home computers, I usually look at Alienware Area 51 machines and match their parts – but I don’t have a model here to do that.

I consulted ChatGPT and then Gemini to provide me a list of components for a Truenas server – and that’s all I know about the components that I selected.

I posted a thread about my hardware to see whether people here thought it looked right… but I think I was asking the wrong question.

I should have asked this community rather than ChatGPT.

So, what would you put together for someone that money wasn’t an object, but that wanted to futureproof his Truenas server. Within reason, I mean 3k tops before drives. It is a home system that I share with some friends.

Its probably the last one I will build and I would like it to work as long as my last one did (12 years) before it’s obsolete.

I mostly Plex, nzbget, sonarr, radarr, and mycloud. I think in the future, I may want to VM some …I heard of Proxmox while reseaching this project and it sounds cool.

My “ChatGBT informed” starting build was:
i7-14700
ASUS Pro WS W680M-ACE SE
ECC memory to match

I like this case: HL15 by 45Drives

But if 2-3k before drives is a budget, what would you do?

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:100:

“Futureproof” doesn’t mean anything.
You must define the use case and requirements before going for “ideal”…

For instance, a rack server with 1 PB of NVMe drives powered by an EPYC 9000 and few terabytes of RAM (you said that money was no objection…) is absolutely NOT ideal if you want a quiet machine that sips power.

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Quiet is good – and I have no issue with swapping out loud fans for quiet ones. Sipping power is nice, but that isn’t a major consideration. I explained my use-case. Besides what I said, I also just generally lean towards more powerful, capable, and stable. (I mostly Plex, nzbget, sonarr, radarr, and mycloud. I think in the future, I may want to VM some …I heard of Proxmox while reseaching this project and it sounds cool.)

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There is a TrueNAS Enterprise Hardware link at the top of the forum. You can click on that an look at the TrueNAS Mini line, TrueNAS R Series or their Recommendation tool.

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I couldn’t get much there, the mini-series was all Octa-core C3758 Intel CPU. I think that is too small for what I ultimately want. I don’t want an all-flash solution.
The H class is clearly too big and expensive. So the one left is the R series. I can’t tell anything about the actual hardware from the website or available pdfs. I think I must be missing something. I presume that with the help of the community I can build something faster, better, cheaper and more targeted to my plex/decoding needs …
I’m starting to consider something like:
Motherboard: ASRock ROMED8-2T
Processor: EPYC 7282
Memory: 128GB
With an added video card for the snapsync or whatever its called.

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My recommendation would be to first chose platform, then a suitable motherboard, then add the rest from there. Assuming that you’d like to build yourself (perfectly doable).

I find Intel’s Xeon highly confusing but more familiar with AMD, so with that said:

AMD Epyc 9000-series (currently in 5th gen i.e. CPU model numbers 9xx5) for shedloads of PCI lanes and CPU cores (up to 192). Useful if you want to run petabytes of NVMe or 8 full bandwidth GPU cards or several 200Gbit NICs in your server. Assume power consumption in the hundreds of watts at low load. Definitely overkill for your case by an order of magnitude.

Epyc 8000-series more modest in comparison with ”only” 96 PCI lanes and six parallel DDR5 memory channels. Up to 64 cores. Maybe the sweetspot for ”way overkill but only because I can” homelab.

Epyc 7000-series is the predecessor to 9000 and only goes up to 3rd gen AMD cores (CPU model numbers 7xx3). Hugely I/O expandable (like 9000), lots of memory bandwidth, max core count 64 per CPU but some motherboards take multiple CPUs. Again expect high power draw.

Epyc 4000-series is basically server-branded Ryzen CPUs with guaranteed ECC RAM support etc. Limited PCI lanes so expect only a couple of PCIe slots. Highly clocked so very fast per core but lacking the huge horizontal scalability with cores and memory bandwidth from the highend Epycs. Can be tuned to be power efficient.

So think about your current and future hardware needs in terms of NICs, HBAs, GPUs or whatnot and let that drive your platform decision and choice of motherboard. Check out SuperMicro, ASRock Rack, MSI, Gigabyte. Read on this forum and ServeTheHome and pick up recommendations.

Then size your CPU and RAM according to what you can afford. If you go with any of the above, the CPU will likely be overkill almost no matter what you choose. Don’t skimp on RAM (at least 64GB, 128GB preferable, even more would be better).

Proxmox will run very fine on all of these alternatives, make sure you fit a dedicated HBA which can be passed through to TrueNAS for direct access to disks.

Edit: oh, and the real fun begins when you have a cluster of 3 or more nodes. :wink:

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It has to be futureproof, but not be all flash … that implies you are leaning towards more RAM, expandability (PCIE slots), faster/more cores, and a moderately (but not superbly) fast network like 10G that can be saturated by a reasonable number of HDDs?

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To have the best performance from the apps and any VMs, you need an SSD pool. So if cost is not an issue and future proofing is important, then suggest that you use only SSDs.

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Having just rebuilt my TrueNAS server, I would only touch motherboard which have both: A) ECC memory support (critical) and B) IPMI support for remote console access.

I did a TrueNAS rebuild recently, and upgraded to a i7-14700K processor which supports ECC memory. The motherboard cost almost $500, but supports both ECC memory and IPMI access. I have docker apps installed for remote access to my media.

Right now, I’m testing the ProxMox Virtual enviroment. I would rather spend the money on a good ProxMox machine than trying to make TrueNAS an all-in-one machine.

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I am leaning towards a strong Proxmox setup for sure. ECC has always been essential, even 12 years ago on my first ‘Freenas’ server I had ECC.