After 1st purchasing a 4-bay TerraMaster NAS and being disappointed w it, I returned it and dragged out a 2011 vintage GB MOBO. I had tried previously to give it away w the GB GPU, but no one wanted it, thankfully! It already had 16Gb DDR3 RAM. I put it in a new compact ASUS AP201 case, put in four 10Tb HGST data center pulls (@ $75/ea), used a pair of 256Mb M.2 drives for TruNAS Core, and the on board GPU in the Intel CPU (2011 vintage). I had a new spare PS which had plenty of capacity. It’s been running great for three or four years, and I’m happy w it running the last Core release. I have an internally (i.e., LAN only) accessible FTP server running and SMTP server. I can access my NAS via my WireGuard VPN remotely from ALL my mobile devices, Android, Linux, and W11 as well as on my local net. I regularly backup the TruNAS data to a large-ish external USB drive attached to my main PC. Except for evetual off-site backup, I don’t forsee the need for any changes. I only wish I’d thought to grab a couple of spare matching HDs back when they were so cheap.
If i may say, i would not consider ECC an over spec… IMHO instead something where Is worth put budget (but i repeat, IMHO).
I totally agree here; which is why I quoted the overspec part in my post. Personally for me, it is a non-negotiable, at least for a system whose sole purpose is to host storage; I’d be a lot more lenient on the ECC requirement if it was more compute node that doesn’t really have much valuable data.
- waste big disks for boot pool
- adding l2arc or slog just to sit somewhere unused NVME
Agreed on this also. Either waste big disk or worse, have some elaborate mirroring setup, which in my opinion, kinda’ defeats the purpose of TrueNAS being built like a hybrid immutable firmware with a simple reproducible config file that can easily be saved and restored. I can understand people running it for business use case that requires 100% uptime, but for 99% of home users, it is overkill and totally unnecessary.
Mine is the secondary server in my signature. It’s the oldest and ran core, then some of the first Scale versions.
It’s a Mac Pro, where the drive connectors are on the board and the drives are in trays that snug them up to the board, so no cabling to speak of. But I reseated them anyway and ran some tests. After a long 19-hour SMART test, it said it completed with a read failure. So drive really is bad.
Hooray for mirrors.
Several Dell PowerEdge x20 version servers from around 2012/13. Running just fine. 
HP ML350P gen8 here. (Second hand server) I’ve added 2 xeons (the highest that the system can hold), 256Gb DDR3, Several pools (about 20tb total, mix of HDDs, SSDs and NVME (on extension cards)), Tesla P40 for my virtual environment running ComfyUI, 10Gb NIC with a direct link to my desktop, 4 1Gbit network connections to the rest of the network here. (With two dedicated to NAS, one for Plex, one for other stuff I’m running on it). Also an extra usb 2 extension card (need it for external disk for backup of the main pool, that disk is in a protected enclosure in case of external disaster) Oh and a 1650 for plex transcoding… Yup, it’s a workhorse.
… and during winter it also heats the house? 
My collection of 24/7 IT equipment definitely does…
My oldest is a second generation FreeNAS mini (C2750). Funnily enough, IIRC it was one of early prototypes that even lacks proper branding on it. A no-fuss system that I keep forgetting about (which is probably the best sort of server). I’ve installed FreeNAS on some really old janky stuff in the past, but now those servers are in the alternate “rack” (metric shelving in the garage waiting to be donated or recycled).
Currently has around 300 days of uptime and hosts time machine backups, and a share that kids use to throw around files.
Is this the processor, by any chance? If so, it should have been from around 2014, I guess.
In general, we seem to clump a bit around 2010-2014 with the old systems. Quite interesting. 12 to 16 years is about 3-4 lifespans in business use in my experience. This can be a very useful metric when searching for used enterprise gear and when recommending HW to new users. As long as they stick to the NAS functionality of the NAS, of course.
Yes. That’s the processor. https://www.truenas.com/docs/files/MiniFamily2.0.pdf
Yes, I remember them. No idea when they were released. The documentation is from 2019 but I guess the box itself has been released earlier. Do you still remember when you got it?
“Second generation” being recent enough to have the AVR54 fix? Otherwise you have a nice ticking timebomb…
Yeah, it has been fixed.
Mine got fixed too… it’s still running as well though in a Lian Li q26b, likely the best 10-drive NAS case ever shipped. Meanwhile, the original MiniXL hard-drive sous-vide roasting enclosure sits abandoned. Think anyone would want it?
I built my TrueNAS server with a few new and old parts but the motherboard that’s underneath it all is pretty freaking old. It’s an ASUS KGPE-D16 from around 2012 and when I got it from eBay it had 2 x Opteron 6380 CPUs in there, but no RAM. Picked up 32GB ECC for nice and cheap, $40 which was great to get started with and ensure everything worked well. After it passed a number of tests I decided to go back and order another 32GB for it so now it’s at 64GB and should be good for a while.
I picked up a new case that I had to jump through a few hoops for since tariffs were becoming a thing then and the case fell under that umbrella. It has 3x5 hot swap bays in it for a total of 15 3.5” drive trays. Pretty perfect setup for TrueNAS and the case was also made to support server sized motherboards so it all worked out pretty freaking well.
I don’t cringe at the fact the motherboard is old, it’s proven itself over time and has been extremely solid in it’s role. I put a few key PCIe cards in there, 2 Intel based NICs where one of them is a 40G QSFP+ connected card that is used to serve storage to Proxmox via iSCSI and the other is a “backup” card that has 2 x 10G RJ45 connections. Ohh! And another really welcome part of this motherboard is that it supports iKVM out of the box with a little $15 expansion board that plugs directly into the mobo. I picked up the iKVM setup and it’s pretty sweet that I don’t even need to have a KB+Monitor near the box anymore, if it’s plugged in to power and network, the iKVM is accessible. 
Originally I had a nice Adaptec 71605 Raid card I was going to go with but I actually grabbed a new LSI 9300 16 port card just to keep it simple and keep hardware raid out of the mix.
Not gonna win any awards for having the oldest setup, but I built all of that minus the HDDs that I put in there for well under $1000 USD and I feel like I got a pretty good setup for what I spent.