I have an old gaming PC sitting in a corner and I wondered if I could make a NAS out of it.
Core–i7 6700 with Thermalright True Spirit 140 Power cooler
Asus B150 Pro Gaming
Crucial Ballistix BL2K16G26C16U4B 2x16Gb
WDS100T2B0B 1Tb M.2 SATA SSD
4x WD30EFRX hard drives
Palit Gamerock 1080 Ti
Corsair AX850
Antec P100 (2x140 intake fans, 1x120 exhaust fan)
My usecase is quite simple, just a remote storage, no fancy stuff like plex mediaserver or docker containers. Probably not even a back-up rig. Just smth to keep non-crucial data and run some experiments.
So, the questions are:
Considering the usecase, do I actually need to build a NAS or would I be better off with a basic remote controlled rig and a JBOD.
If I do, can I build it with what I have or do I need an HBA card?
What you listed should be able to run TrueNAS fine. I am guessing the 1TB SSD would be for your boot-pool. ( you could try to find a smaller M.2 and use the 1TB elsewhere. ) 4x HD would end up as whatever pool layout you decide on.
TrueNAS 25.10 doesn’t have built in support for the 1080 Ti due to NVIDIA driver changes.
Any small SSD will do fine as boot device. The only issue is preserve enough SATA ports for actual storage, so NVMe is generally preferred for boot. With 6 ports for 4 HDDs you are fine tough.
In NAS use, the GPU only serves to please the motherboard into booting.
i219V… at least that’s not Realtek.
I use older hardware, my advice at the moment is to research not using Truenas but just docker. Not that it won’t work but truenas is shifting away to need newer hardware by default. Mix and match what will run on your hardware for the longest time. Or be prepared do a lot of work after a future update or spend a lot of money. I’ll be moving to a basic docker setup soon because I can’t afford £1000s, my last purchase was a new GPU to get on to this Truenas verson but even then I only spend £130.
It amounts to the same thing and it is true or are you running Truenas on a Dell PowerEdge 1550 so how?. Even if the drivers are updated odds are the bios updates will stop and then something like PCIe gets a tweak and you server starts giving problems. Argue amongst yourselves because I’m not interested.
…Wtf are you talking about? Plenty of old cheap hardware out there that can support more than 4gb of ram that you could slap TrueNAS onto.
If you have an issue with driver support that isn’t natively included in TrueNAS, enable dev mode & go to town. I’m only half certain that folks have posted workarounds for older nvidia gpus that don’t even require going that far.
No clue what TrueNAS has to do with any (lack?) of bios updates, or what kind of PCIe tweaks we’re getting… especially considering PCIe generations are backwards compatible?
I’ll be happy to argue regardless of your interest because none of those statements made any sense.
I’d understand if your argument was that IX was making THEIR TrueNAS systems (the ones they sell) more expensive or whatever - but why would their goal be to make community users spend more money on things they don’t sell? Realistically, shit in general just got more expensive, especially recently.
Anyway, old hardware can bring its own challenges; none of them are unique to TrueNAS
Where have I blamed IX for anything? “PCIe generations are backwards compatible” never had to use pcie_aspm=off then
Totally agree, old hardware brings it’s challenges, that exactly what I said, and the sole reason I said it was I was talking to a newbie in terms they would understand. Anyone using old hardware on new software (updates) should understand it’s a challenge.
Glad to see it’s cooling off! There was a lot of heat on a single (non-)issue, namely old Nvidia GPUs, which is only of relevance if one has any use for a GPU in a storage server in the first place.
Then there was too much emphasis on the relative, and thus unclear, term “old”.
Archaic hardware may not be qualified for TrueNAS, support for enough RAM being the most obvious issue. But we do routinely recommend “old” hardware for builds, still down to Xeon D-1500.
Here the OP has “old” hardware in the consumer sense: It is a Skylake desktop with 32 GB of DDR4 RAM. This is certainly not too old for a NAS.
Think there’s a lot you could with truenas on this hardware like running 7-10 apps and a VM on the SSD besides the file server use case for the HDs. You might find the 24/7 power usage of the i7 and HDs is too costly for just a file server. I’ve been running TN in an old Antec mid-tower case for several years with only one 120mm case fan without any heat issues. And, yes, no need for a GPU.
Not a problem at all. The poster asked 3 questions the last one was general so to be honest I just typed what I was thinking at the time. I have no axe to grind with IX none at all.
I think this all depends on what sort of experiments you want to run.
If they are not truenas or enables solely by the storage of truenas you may want to go a different route with the software. Like a linux install or proxmox etc.
First, If anybody wants you to spend money buying stuff saying it’s to old. Ask them to vemo you the cash. The only thing I would suggest you buy are NAS drives I recommend WD Reds.
1- It should be fine, My TrueNAS is from 2010 vintage and I use it in it’s basic form with full encryption, only 12GB memory and 10 odd TB of drives. Older PC 2008 didn’t have native CPU encryption and it also ran fine well below the then I think recommended memory. I don’t even have ECC memory. I hope I haven’t just cursed myself, knock on wood spit three times and turn counter clockwise twice whilst jumping on one leg and praising the data gods.
2- I use 2X16GB or 2X32GB (don’t remember) mirrored USB3s in USB2 ports as the boot pool (Shock Horror, not USB’s). Been like that since TN9.1 and no issues, reserving SATA ports for drives. I used to replace the USB’s on apparent failure until the following point. Point to note: Every few years I may get boot pool corruption or other. All you do is shutdown and cycle the USBs on the ports, in and out in and out a few times. Electrical contacts get tired especially with soft pressure ones as USB’s. Boot and it should re-silver itself. All you may have to do then is zfs clear to clear the errors. Been quite a while so don’t quite remember.
3- If you want to go beyond then you need to be aware of what you have. Example, to run virtual boxes then you will need a CPU that has virtualisation capability, it’s specs will tell you or TN will tell if it can or can’t run Virtualisation.
4- Start with what you have. Upgrading PC is easy in general. Backup Configs and drive contents as you always should > Shutdown > pull all drives out > Plug all drives onto new PC > Boot new PC and it should all work out. Knock on wood it has for me so far, though that was with Core, I haven’t tried a PC change with Scale yet.
5- O’ and yes you may run into some old hardware issue that TN/Linux Kernel will not support or not fix due age. Example, Since changing over to Scale last year my TN randomly fails to finish boot about once every few weeks, 1 in 20 odd fail (I auto shutdown when TN is not in use) It’s no issue to me I just press reset. They say my Hardware is old but it’s not constant so I reckon it’s just a glitch. Possibly tired electrical contact. I haven’t touched it in years.
6- If you use USBs as I and other hold outs do, save the system dataset to an actual disk. It will boot and shutdown quicker at least that’s what I found.
Indeed. I have a Skylake processor on a Union Point motherboard, that was pulled from my desktop rig, when I upgraded years ago. It runs TrueNAS quite decently, even with a VM for HomeAssistant and more than a handful of containers. Given the current hardware prices I’m leaving it as is for the time being.
So go ahead and try. The only thing you can lose is the time you spent trying. But then again, you’ll inevitably learn something.
As mentioned by others. The kernel in the latest TrueNAS Scale builds do not include drivers for your GPU and nothing in your use-cases seems to warrant it, so I’d suggest you pull it to save power.
If you have more than 4 SATA connectors on your motherboard, then get any small SSD to use as boot device. Anything more than 32GB will be fine. If you make backups of the configuration, it’s not a big deal to replace it. If you have sufficient SATA connectors there’s no need for a HBA card.
You obviously won’t get enterprise grade performance, but the four spindles will likely be able to saturate the 1Gbps NIC anyway, and then the rest doesn’t matter. With TrueNAS you still get instantaneous snapshots of your filesystem(s) via ZFS and many other goodies, that you’ll appreciate down the road.
Your spindles are CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), which is what you want for ZFS, so they’re perfect. Before you start using it seriously consider the layout. Off the top of my head I see two options:
One RAIDZ1 VDEV of all four drives
Two Mirror VDEVs in a stripe
I’ll leave it up to you to weigh the options and choose.
PS. Don’t forget to configure some kind of scheduled off-site backup.
Third option: 4-wide raidz2. Same capacity as stripe of mirrors, with less IOPS but arguably slightly better redundancy (can lose any two drives).
The difference is in further upgrade paths. Beside replacing drives with larger drives, a stripe of mirrors can expand by adding a further pair of drives while raidz# would use expansion (with its caveats…) to increase width—but as you move towards larger drives and/or wider raidz you’d want raidz2 over raidz1.
