I’ve had an old Windows Home Server box then migrated to a Windows 10 Pro as a file share box. I’m redoing my whole home network, and I’m considering TrueNAS (or Synology). I’ve always enjoyed setting this stuff up and it seems a good way to go.
My case is home use with a small home office and five family members. I don’t like waiting for my computers, but in don’t want to waste money either. Can someone recommend or point me to where i can dis recommendations for hardware for my use case?
I’d prefer a small, quiet case. I just have zero concept how much CPU, RAM, etc I need. Will an old intel i3 4xxxx series I have sitting around work well enough? Or will I be waiting?
Thanks for any direction or experience you can offer so I can optimize my spending.
It ultimately depends on what you intend to do with it. If you just want to serve a few SMB shares for your family, an old PC with 8GB RAM will do. If you want to host jails on it, the requirements will of course increase, depending on the applications you host. For example, if you want to host Nextcloud on it, I would recommend a minimum of 16GB RAM. And in general, ZFS will of course benefit from more RAM. Whether you can use this extra performance depends again on your use case.
SMB shares for five users on a 4 disk RAIDZ1 connected to a 1Gbit NIC will hardly benefit from going beyond 16GB in your scenario. Iscsi or NFS shares running databases or VMs connected to a 10Gbit NIC most likely will. Although in that case SSDs instead of HDDs would probably be a better choice.
I would just test it, if you have the HW lying around anyway. You can always move the disks to a more powerful system later down the road or migrate the data to a new system using ZFS Send / Recive…