Hi Folks
I am planning to setup a TrueNAS server using an old pc at home. I have 2 old PCs and need advice on which of these would be a better fit for the TrueNAS implemenation. I am planning a TrueNAS setup of 8 x 6TB HDD in RAID 1 Config giving me a usable storage space of approximately 24TB.
I was planning to increase the RAM in these old PCs to 32GB.
PC1 Configuration
CPU - Intel i5-6500, 3400 MHz
Motherboard Name - Asus H170 Pro Gaming
Motherboard Chipset - Intel Sunrise Point H170, Intel Skylake-S
RAM - 16GB DDR4 NON ECC
PC2 Configuration
CPU - Intel i7-4770K, 3500 MHz
Motherboard Name - Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5
Motherboard Chipset - Intel Lynx Point Z87, Intel Haswell
RAM - 16GB DDR3 NON ECC
Both of those machines are going to run it fine for home use I would have thought.
If they are both spare then use the i7, if you could use the i7 for something else that requires a little bit more power then use the i5. Minimum spec is 8gb RAM so I would leave it at 16 unless you specifically know you need more for some reason.
Thanks for the advice. I was thinking 16GB because of the rule of thumb i had read of 1GB Ram for every TB of storage. If that is not required then happy to stay with current configuration. My usecase for the NAS is file storage and one or two apps like transmission.
Actually i need both PCs one for TrueNAS and one for Pfsense, I am assuming that TrueNAS requires more processing power than Pfsense.
The additional advantage of the PC2 (i7 4770K) config is that the motherboard supports upto 10 SATA disks and i intend to use 8 of them, the PC1(i5 6500) config can support a max of 6 disks but it has a m.2 slot.
If just for bulk storage, either would be fine. If you are going to use it as backend storage for virtual machines, I would use the Skylake system and upgrade it to 32gb.
Not for Virutal Machines, but i wanted to replace the local hard disk on the other PCs in my house with a predefined shared drive/space from the NAS. The local PCs would have a SSD (500Gb) for the OS and program files. The rest of the data, active files etc which normally would have been stored in a Local Hard Disk will now be stored and accessed from the NAS