New update: my current setup is a dell power edge t310 with 6x4tb SAS, zeon CPU, and 12gb ECC all parts stock. No hardware raid. 2.5gb network card. Should I just replace the 6 drives? With larger capacities? That will probably be more than $10/tb… I didn’t buy the 16 drives yet, they are used SAS drives 4tb each, turn to be about $40 each.
Current storage 8tb used out of 14… And lots of cold drives waiting to get copied… 10tb+ probably. Is it worth copying all the cold storage drives to the redundant nas.
Update: budget(200-600), the reason for the build is I found cheap 4tb drives for almost $10/Terabyte. So I want to use as much of them as I can
I am trying to build my final NAS build as a beginner.
I have a 6x4tb dell server, but it’s not enough.
I am currently trying to build the final boss of my nasses. 4x16tb with truenas with raid
I am unsure of what parts to buy as I am a complete beginner.
I found a case that can hold all 14 drives.
I need a motherboard, CPU, ram, PSU
I am on a budget, kind of.
What motherboard do you recommend? Pulled from a workstations with CPU and ram? A server board? Normal consumer with normal consumer CPU? Motherboard should have some pcie slots for 2 sata cards and one 2.5 GB card.
What CPU to run all these drives?
What ram and how much? 16? 32? Ecc, non ecc? Ddr4? Ddr3?
Power supply: 850w or more?
All parts should be able to support the 16 drives with headroom…
I would appreciate any help on this build, I want to build this as soon as possible.
Thanks
Why 16 drives? Do you already have 16 4tb drives?
I also went with 16 drives, but they were 20TB each. OP, if you don’t already have those 4tb drives, reconsider the amount and sizes. 4tb can’t be the price sweet spot for HDDs…
It would seem that the sweet spot for HDDs is as high as 16 to 24 TB at the moment (at least here in the Netherlands).
You can get a 24TB Seagate Barracuda for €479,- right now, which comes out to about €20 / TB.If you specifically want a NAS drive though the best “bang for the buck” appears to be a 28TB Seagate IronWolf Pro for €688,- coming out to about €25 / TB.
Edit: Personally I run 8TB drives in my server, which are currently €209,- (€26 / TB) for a regular Seagate Barracuda, and €289 (€36 / TB) for a Seagate IronWolf Pro. Funnily enough 4TB drives would actually be better for NAS drives at €132,90 (€33 / TB) for a WD Red Plus.
If I ever got a lucky Amazon mistake where I order one 4 TB drive but a box of 16 comes in, I would set up a full *arr stack.
Probably won’t be that lucky though.
Have a look at the guides in serverbuild.net forums such as https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-5-0/
The series of post that is Nas killer (4.0 5.0 6.0) etc. they list a bunch of CPUs and motherboards with approx eBay prices along with ram disks etc etc. I used it as a reference when building my cheap Nas for home, mainly the motherboard/CPU sections.
That sounds like a nightmare tbh. So many failure points, so much heat and power usage, and cables.
I have 6 out of 8 bays filled and still feel like it’s a lot to worry about and manage if something fails.
It’s better to buy 4x 16-20TB drives and expand storage instead of buying 16 4TB drives. Also 16 3.5 inch HDD drives draw around 200W of power alone.
Just in case you dont know most drives aren’t rated for this many in one case.
Also they aren’t rated to get screamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
Yeah earlier in my journey I had a bunch of cheap drives packed in close. They didn’t last. Heat kills drives.
Oh it’s the heat? I thought it was vibration (I actually don’t know).
My rudimentary understanding of physics suggests that vibrations will be more harmful as heat increases.
I would consider fewer, larger drives
I would seek the best price per terabyte while still allowing redundancy.
True, but I would factor in some kind of negative to cost/longevity from increasing number of drives. Even if 16x4 is a bit cheaper than 4x16 today, will it die faster?
At these scales, I don’t think it’s measurable, if statistically significant at all.
In any case, you should always be ready to replace a drive that fails. I buy used because they’re significantly cheaper (or at least they used to be) and I’ve never had any major failures.
And while more drives means more failure opportunity, it also means when a failed drive is replaced, it’s likely of a different manufacture period.
I have a 5-drive NAS that I’ve been upgrading single drives every 6 months. This has the benefit of slowly increasing capacity while also ensuring drives are of different ages so less likely to fail simultaneously. (Now I’m waiting for prices to come back down, dammit).
Take a look at https://diskprices.com/ for the best price per TB. Backblaze has been pretty great about sharing their hardware specs and builds. Maybe get some ideas from them https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/
They already have the disks, they are looking for the rest of the build.
You really want the ECC ram and the motherboard/cpu combo that supports it.
Ehhh one thing I’ve learned over the years, it doesn’t matter how much storage I buy. Within a few weeks it’ll be full.
No more Storage Full warnings.
Is that a challenge?
Just one more drive bro. Please one just one more
Fix it by simply turning off “Low Disk Space” warnings in System Settings.
Mix that with keeping your/and your home cache, local, share etc directories in a non-data drive and you get no warnings. Only errors when a write fails.
Hey, you basically defined my system.
Truenas scale machine running 4x 16TB drives. I use a cheap rosewill 4u server rack case. It has hot swap drive bays in front. Big plus.
The brain is an amd 5950x running on an asrock x570 steel legend w/ 128GB of the cheapest crucial DDR4 ECC I could find. Also running an rtx 2080 for jellyfin transcoding.
My consumer mobo is the bottleneck. Given how my end goal is to have a 10gb nic and an LSI card for more sata ports, I’m going to have to get creative with m.2 ports. I might plug a 10gb nic into an m.2 port.
PSU was a 1kW fractal platinum rated. Way overkill, but the high efficiency is key.
You’ll notice my build uses a lot of gaming parts - i simply harvested my old parts when I upgraded my gaming PC. Despite this, it still idles under 200 watts. My point is not that you should seek out gaming parts, but if you happen to have any on hand, they could be effectively leveraged given price increases on new parts.
The biggest thing is: Use ECC. This is non negotiable for your setup. ECC saved me a couple weeks ago when my 5950x shot craps, randomly. So far no issues after increasing to a set voltage. ZFS and ECC go together like peas in a pod.
Honestly, I bet it would be cheaper to replace a few or even all of the 4 TB drives in your current set up with larger drives.
ABSOLUTELY ECC memory, 32gb or higher if you can afford it these days as TrueNAS does benefit from a decent cache space, especially with so many drives to spread data slices across.
Realistically unless you expect multiple concurrent users, any 4 core or higher CPU from 2015-on will be plenty of power to manage the array. No need for dedicated server hardware unless the price is right
I have a Dell PowerEdge t3 SOHO/small business server tower that I gutted and turned into a 5x8tb config. It only has a middling 4 core Xeon 1225v5 and I never get above 50% CPU usage when maxing the drives out. More CPU is needed if you’re doing filesystem compression or need multiple concurrent users.
I’ve never run into issues running desktop hardware without ECC as servers - since the 90’s.
I just don’t think the extra cost is worthwhile - I’m not running systems/services that will have catastrophic failures without ECC (or have weird bitflips that would corrupt some transaction).
I’ve never ran into issues either, but generally in any situation where data integrity is somewhat important, ECC is a very good idea. Its never a problem until suddenly it is.
I don’t give a crap about my Minecraft server having ECC, but a storage server where cached data gets written to disk, I’d rather have ECC ensure nothing gets corrupted.
Honestly, you might want to look into proper server hardware. There are many out there that support dozens of drives, assuming you’re willing to go with a blade. Even if you explicitly want a tower, server hardware is where you’re going to get the best support.
You’ll most likely also want to increase the size of your drives. Assuming you’re being smart and utilizing RAID, you’re going to be losing a bunch of that storage.
What’s the case? Does it has the ability to hot-swap drives (even with a side panel off)? It can come really handy if one of your drives fails.
