Hi all,
I am hoping I can get peoples input to help with my analysis paralysis over NAS hardware. I have been researching and reading forum posts for months now but am still struggling to figure out what would work best for my use case.
My main goal for the system would be to operate as a NAS, ideally not consume ‘too’ much power, and run some small applications within Truenas (syncthing as an example).
My current storage requirements (with buffer) are: 10TB for Time Machine backups, 5TB for shared documents, 5TB for Plex storage, and 10TB for family photos and videos.
I have been looking at prebuilt / customizing options from IX systems (Truenas MiniX+), 45Homelab (HL8 or HL15), or something like the Aoostar WRT MAX. I have also been looking at trying to build something more custom based on peoples forum posts but keep getting caught up in trying to find something low power but with hopefully long term performance.
My thought has been to use 6x12TB HDDs (WD Ultrastar or Red Pro) in 3 VDEVs of 2 mirrored drives each, and have the option for 2 SSDs for some faster storage for video editing. This will then get backed up to Backblaze.
My only real hardware requirements are:
ECC ram support (keep going back and forth on this)
SFP+ for networking
Trying to keep it low power since it will be running 24/7
I greatly appreciate peoples experience here or feedback on builds of theirs! And apologies for the long message.
Here’s what I run. It draws 40 watts at idle. Its not just a NAS though, it is primarily a Proxmox server, and I run a virtualized instance of TrueNAS scale:
Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX
AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 5650-GE
Nemix RAM 2X32GB DDR4 3200 ECC Uunbuffered
M.2 to SATA 6 port adapter, ASM1166
Noctua NH-L12Sx77 CPU fan
Corsair RM Series RM650
Fractal Design Node 304
10Gtek 10Gb PCI-E NIC
It runs rock stable, and is plenty fast for what I need. I run two Wordpress websites and a Discourse forum in VMs. I also have a VM for running docker containers and a VM for TrueNAS. For docker containers I have Nextcloud, PaperlessNGX, Vaultwarden, and some other similar stuff.
I copied my config from the HL4/HL8 basically but I didn’t need a hot swap back plane. Without any drives bbut with the NIC installed, it draws about 18-20 watts at idle. You could probably get by with less memory and less CPU if you don’t need as much compute power. I am very happy with it.
If you have the space a prebuilt HL15 is a really good base. You can order it with SFP+ config, has plenty of space for future expansion. (Both HDDs and PCI-E.)
I used it at work (the prebuilt).
Minisforum N5 Pro looks promising, but I don’t think it is out.
Thanks so much for the reply! What do you use for the caching drives? Do you use them for a read/ write cache or metadata? I know it’s not a direct substitution but what was your thought on the 3 caching drives vs adding more Ram?
Hi hunor, I have been looking a lot at the prebuilt units from 45 drives. My main issue with the hl15 is from everything I’ve watched about it, at idle it draws close to 150watts without drives. I haven’t been able to find out why the system runs that high other than maybe the Xeon processor they use. I know that comes with some benefits (lots of PCIe lanes, high max cap on ram) but for a system running 24/7 at home it’s a tough pill to swallow considering energy costs. I wish there was a low power version they offered!
I am using generic consumer NVMes that I had around. Not the best solution, but I can live with it. I have two in a SLOG and one in an L2ARC. I won’t trust metadata to consumer drives.
As far as RAM, I am maxed out on this motherboard. I only dedicate 24gb to the TrueNAS VM, and the rest goes to Proxmox and other VMs.
If you were to build your server again do you think you would stick with the same motherboard with the cap on ram or chose something different with a higher ram cap?
For my situation? Yeah I would stay the same. Performance is fine and TBH, I still have a lot of unused resources. But my situation may not be the same as yours. I split my NAS workloads into three parts really. I have a Synology that is my main storage for family photos and important family docs. My wife needs to be able to access it regardless of what “experiments” I am messing with in my home lab. This is a non-negotiable requirement. My TrueNAS instance mostly provides NFS shares for VM attached storage, docker volumes, Proxmox backups and Kubernetes storage. I have a third virtualized NAS running on an N100 based NUC style computer (openmediavault) that simply acts as a backup location for the other two NAS boxes. As you can see below, with 24GB of memory dedicated to my TrueNAS instance, I still have plenty of RAM free. I don’t use ballooning in Proxmox, so all of my VMs have all of the RAM they need already dedicated to them. I am very satisfied with the system performance.
