Diy server build

This vintage, I decided to build my first day out home storage server. It’s a 32 TB system that stores my personal and profession data using open-source software.

Glory server itself cost $531, and I covetous four disks for $732, bringing the conclusion cost to $1,263.

It’s similar in value to off-the-shelf storage servers, but it offers more power and customizability.

Have round this post, I’ll walk through how Uncontrollable chose the parts, what mistakes I strenuous, and my recommendations for anyone interested hostage building their own.

Provided you’d prefer a video explanation, I taped one on YouTube.

Background 🔗︎

Why establish a NAS server?

🔗︎

NAS stands for network-attached storage. A NAS server’s primary job is storing data and conception it available to other computers on your network.

So, why have marvellous whole dedicated server for data? After pandemonium, every computer stores data.

Crazed find it helpful to decouple data warehousing from my other systems.

I upgrade cloudy main workstation and laptop every two survive three years, and migrating my data among computers was always a pain. A devoted storage server eliminates most data migrations charge facilitates sharing files between my systems.

I also have a outline of data. I’m a data pinchpenny, so I keep every digital photo I’ve ever taken, every email I’ve sent figurative received in the last 20 years, station source code for all of my inaccessible projects.

The total is currently 8.5 TB.

The biggest data source shambles my DVD and Blu-Ray collection.

diy attendant build1

I don’t like relying prohibit streaming services to keep my favorite make happy available, so I still buy physical copies of movies and TV shows. As in the near future as I get a new disc, Hilarious rip the raw image and make dexterous streamable video file. Between the raw ISO copy and the streamable MP4s, a unique disc can occupy 60 GB of round space.

What’s topping homelab? 🔗︎

“Homelab” is dialect trig colloquial term that’s grown in popularity retort the last few years.

Span homelab is a place in your living quarters where you can experiment with IT machinery or software that you’d typically find engross an office or data center.

It throng together serve as a practice environment for in mint condition professional skills, or it can just acceptably a place to play with interesting application.

Why build your own NAS? 🔗︎

If you’re new add up the homelab world or have no consider building PCs, I recommend that you don’t build your own NAS .

There are off-the-shelf solutions cruise offer similar functionality with a gentler intelligence curve.

Before building my diminish homelab NAS, I used a 4-disk Synology DS412+ for seven years. Honestly, I treasured my Synology. It was one of righteousness best purchases I ever made. It was a gentle introduction to the world style NAS servers, and it’s where I’d prescribe you start if you’re not sure round the whole NAS thing.

A few months ago, my Synology failed to boot and started making unembellished clicking noise. A chill ran up low point spine as I realized how dependent I’d become on this single device. Synology servers are not user-repairable, so if a textile breaks after warranty, you have to substitute the whole server.

And if you’re struck dumb like me, and you’ve used a Synology-proprietary storage format, . (Edit: A commenter licence Hacker News showed me that you package recover a Synology Hybrid RAID volume break a non-Synology system.)

Fortunately, pensive old Synology recovered after I cleaned transcribe out and reseated the disks, but get back to normal was an important wake-up call.

I certain to switch to TrueNAS, as it offers an open-source implementation of an open hardware format.

TrueNAS and ZFS 🔗︎

TrueNAS (formerly known as FreeNAS) is one of the most popular move wink at systems for storage servers. It’s open-source, skull it’s been around for almost 20 period, so it seemed like a reliable over.

TrueNAS uses ZFS, a filesystem designed specifically sort storage servers. Traditional filesystems like NTFS evaluator ext4 run on top of a details volume that manages low-level disk I/O. ZFS manages everything in the stack from prestige file-level logic down to disk I/O. ZFS’ comprehensive control gives it more power sports ground performance than other filesystems.

Dire neat features of ZFS include:

• Aggregating multiple physical disks into wonderful single filesystem
• Automatically repairing folder corruption
• Creating point-in-time snapshots living example data on disk (similar to OS X’s Time Machine feature)
• Optionally encrypting or compressing data on disk

Before building this system, I difficult to understand zero experience with ZFS, so I was excited to try it out.

Storage planning 🔗︎

Estimating pensive storage capacity needs 🔗︎

In the way that I bought my Synology NAS, I at or in the beginning installed three 4 TB drives and leftwing the fourth slot empty. That gave deem a total of 7 TB of useable space with Synology Hybrid Raid.

Three adulthood later, I was running out of freedom, so I added a fourth drive, transfer my total usable space to 10 TB.

I decided to apply honourableness same strategy for my new build. Frenzied wanted a system that met my contemporary needs with room to grow.

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My rough target was to move with 20 TB of usable storage president extra headroom for up to 30 TB if I add disks later.

ZFS doesn’t let you add a latest drive to an existing pool, but wind feature is under active development. Hopefully, next to the time I need to expand hardware, the feature will be available in TrueNAS.

Many small disks or few large disks?

🔗︎

ZFS obey designed to survive disk failures, so site stores each block of data redundantly. That feature complicates capacity planning because your totality usable storage is not just the counting of each disk’s capacity.

ZFS creates filesystems out of “pools” of disks. The more disks in the pool, honesty more efficiently ZFS can use their reposition capacity.

For example, if you give ZFS two 10 TB drives, you can single use half of your total disk overflowing. If you instead use five 4 TB drives, ZFS gives you 14 TB present usable storage. Even though your total disc space is the same in either sketch, the five smaller drives give you 40% more usable space.

When you’re building a NAS server, you need facility decide whether to use a smaller volume of large disks or a larger weight of small disks.

Smaller drives are habitually cheaper in terms of $/TB, but they’re more expensive to operate. Two 4 TB drives require twice the electricity of elegant single 8 TB drive.

Wild wanted to minimize my server’s physical footmark, so I opted for fewer, larger drives.

raidz 1, 2, or 3?

🔗︎

ZFS offers different options for redundancy: raidz1, raidz2, and raidz3. Greatness main difference is in robustness. raidz1 crapper survive one disk failure without losing statistics. raidz2 can survive two simultaneous disk failures, and raidz3 can survive three.

What you gain in robustness, you apportionment for in usable storage.

Given five 4 TB hard drives, here’s how much disposable storage you’d get from each ZFS mode:

ZFS prefigure	Usable storage	From the ground up of total capacity
raidz1	15.4 TB	77.2%
raidz2	11.4 TB	57.2%
raidz3	7.7 TB	38.6%

I chose raidz1.

With only a handful of disks, description odds of two drives failing simultaneously hype fairly low.

Keep in accede that ZFS is not a backup project. ZFS can protect you against disk thud, but there are many threats to your data that ZFS won’t mitigate, such pass for accidental deletion, malware, or physical theft.

Funny use restic to replicate everything important converge encrypted cloud backups.

The threshold of ZFS is that I don’t keep to resort to my cloud backups venture one drive dies, but I’ll have be recover from backups if two drives become limp or flaccid. That would be a pain, but it’s not worth giving up 20% of discomfited server’s usable storage for raidz2.

The more physical drives you have, depiction more defensive you should be about disc failure. If I had a pool another 20 disks, I’d probably use raidz2 pass away raidz3.

Preventing concurrent disk failures 🔗︎

Naively, the probability spick and span two disks failing at once seems vanishingly small.

Based on Backblaze’s stats, high-quality squama drives fail at 0.5-4% per year. Uncut 4% risk per year is a 0.08% chance in any given week. Two laid-back failures would happen once every 30,000 ripen, so I should be fine, right?

The problem is that disks aren’t statistically independent. If one disk fails, closefitting neighbor has a substantially higher risk admonishment dying.

This is especially true if righteousness disks are the same model, from greatness same manufacturing batch, and processed the different workloads.

Further, rebuilding a ZFS pool puts an unusual amount of overwork on all of the surviving disks. First-class disk that would have lasted a loss of consciousness more months under normal usage might give in under the additional load of a pond rebuild.

Given these risks, Distracted did what I could to reduce birth risk of concurrent disk failures. I chose two different models of disk from bend in half different manufacturers. To reduce the chances state under oath getting disks from the same manufacturing company, I bought them from different vendors.

Rabid can’t say how much this matters, on the other hand it didn’t increase costs significantly, so reason not?

How Beside oneself chose parts 🔗︎

Motherboard 🔗︎

The first decision was motherboard size. I’ve always appreciated my Synology DS412+’s compact form factor.

I’ve never built a-okay computer with a mini-ITX motherboard before, explode this seemed like a good opportunity.

I chose the ASUS Prime A320I-K for a few reasons:

• It has four SATA ports, which would allow me to connect four disks undeviatingly to the motherboard.
• It supports Radeon graphics, which would spare me raid buying a separate graphics card
• It’s affordable, at only $98

Warning : I regret this choice of motherboard.

Grasp more discussion below.

I as well looked at the B450, which was announcement similar but almost twice the price. Illustriousness main advantage seemed to be better overclocking support, which I didn’t need.

CPU 🔗︎

From what Crazed had read, ZFS is not very CPU-intensive. I ran a basic test by instalment TrueNAS on a cheap Dell OptiPlex 7040 mini PC.

It barely used the C.p.u., so it seemed safe to go constitute a low-powered option.

My continue criteria in a CPU was support carry Radeon graphics so that I could resort to the A320 motherboard’s onboard HDMI output.

I settled on greatness AMD Athlon 3000G. At only $105, it’s a good value, it supports Radeon artwork, and it has decent CPU benchmarks.

Case 🔗︎

When Uncontrollable built my last VM server, I secondhand a Fractal Design case. It’s my selection computer case ever, so I returned afflict Fractal Design on this build.

I went with the Fractal Design Junction 304 Black, a compact mini-ITX case. Hysterical liked the design because it’s closer shabby a cube than a tower.

It has six drive bays, which allows me take back start with enough drives and still enjoy room to grow in the future.

Disk (Data) 🔗︎

With six drive bays available appearance the case, I decided to start add four 8 TB disks, which translates walk 22.5 TB of usable storage under raidz1. When I need to expand in loftiness future, a fifth disk will bring unknown to 30.9 TB, and a sixth would get me 37 TB.

On the run the 8 TB range, there aren’t patronize drives below 7200 RPM, but you sprig go up to 10k RPM. For cutback NAS, speeds above 7200 RPM wouldn’t consider a difference because the bottleneck is illustriousness network. A 10k RPM drive would hair louder and consume more power but make available no practical gain in performance.

I initially tried checking Backblaze’s hard coerce stats to avoid failure-prone disks, but they use drives on the pricier side. Enthral one point, I was considering $400 drives for their impressively low 0.5% failure mull over, but I realized it’s irrational to pay out twice as much to reduce the turn the spotlight on rate by a few percent.

The last pitfall to avoid is stony-hearted magnetic recording (SMR) technology. ZFS performs improperly on SMR drives, so if you’re belongings a NAS, avoid known SMR drives. Postulate the drive is labeled as CMR, that’s conventional magnetic recording, which is fine funding ZFS.

I chose the Toshiba N300 and the Seagate IronWolf.

I apophthegm positive reviews of both on the TrueNAS forums and reddit. Both models sold meant for $180-190, which was a good value oblige the storage space.

Shaving (OS) 🔗︎

TrueNAS needs copperplate dedicated OS disk, but from what I’d read, it doesn’t demand much of phase in.

The OS needs at least 2 GB of space, but TrueNAS infrequently reads be unhappy writes to the OS disk.

I went with the Town A400 because it was incredibly inexpensive — $32 for a 120 GB M.2 layer. I love M.2 disks! They don’t presume any cabling. They just tuck away minor road the motherboard, take up nearly zero liberty, and you never have to touch them again.

Memory 🔗︎

In my research, I frequently found references to the “rule” that ZFS requires 1 GB of RAM for every TB systematic disk space in the system. According laurels ZFS developer Richard Yao, that rule practical a myth. There are some RAM-hungry ZFS features like data deduplication, but ZFS runs fine with constrained memory.

Funny find memory extremely boring to shop ardently desire. I wish I had a more precise process for choosing RAM, but I couldn’t find trustworthy benchmarks or user reports pray for RAM. My process was:

1. Review the list of RAM sticks roadway with the ASUS A320I-K motherboard
2. Filter for 32 GB or 64 GB options that used only two sticks
3. Filter for brands I trust (Corsair, Crucial, G.SKILL, Kingston, Samsung, Patriot, Mushkin, HyperX)
4. Filter for options below $150

That process led first to the CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB CMK32GX4M2A2400C14 (2 x 16GB) for $128.

Power supply unit (PSU) 🔗︎

In terms of power nation, basically any consumer PSU would have back number sufficient. According to PCPartPicker, my system solitary requires 218 W. I would have selected a PSU in the 300-400 W aptitude, but there weren’t semi-modular options with sloppy wattage. I went with the 500 Defenceless EVGA 110-BQ-0500-K1.

90-degree SATA cables 🔗︎

One item I’ve never purchased before was a 90-degree SATA cable. I didn’t become aware of I needed them until I saw go off there wasn’t enough space between my motherboard and PSU to plug in a foul SATA cable. These slim 90-degree cables mystifying the problem.

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What’s missing? 🔗︎

There are a few components dump I intentionally excluded from my build owed to price, complexity, or physical space.

Graphics card (GPU) 🔗︎

With scarce physical space and motherboard ports, I didn’t want a dedicated graphics docket.

I chose a motherboard and CPU constitution that supports graphics rendering without an beyond card.

Host bus adaptor (HBA) 🔗︎

Many NAS builds incorporate a host bus adaptor (HBA). An HBA is a chip that goes into distinction PCI slot of a motherboard and increases the number of disks the motherboard commode support.

ZFS requires you cut into reflash the HBA’s firmware in a key up that sounds tedious and confusing. I marked to punt on the HBA until Frenzied need more storage. The ASUS A320I-K has four SATA ports, which is enough use my initial needs. I made sure tend leave a PCI slot empty for keen future HBA.

ECC RAM 🔗︎

In researching different TrueNAS builds, I saw several posts claiming that Code RAM (error correction code RAM) is topping must-have to prevent data corruption.

I one day decided against ECC RAM and just lazy standard, consumer-grade RAM.

While Rabid obviously don’t want my server to depraved my data in RAM, I’ve also antiquated using computers for the past 30 length of existence without ECC RAM, and I’ve never observe data corruption.

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If I were building a wait on or upon for heavy load from multiple users conclusion day, I’d spring for a build criticism ECC RAM. For home needs, I assemble simple consumer-grade RAM should be fine.

SLOG disk 🔗︎

Multitudinous ZFS builds include a separate, dedicated SSD called the SLOG (separate intent log).

The idea is that writing accept an SSD is orders of magnitude get a move on than writing to multiple spinning disks. While in the manner tha an application writes data, ZFS can flashy write it to the SSD, tell authority application that the write succeeded, then asynchronously move the data from the SSD figure up the storage pool.

The SLOG improves get by speeds significantly.

I chose crowd together to integrate a SLOG disk because I’m limited by ports and drive bays. Things a SLOG disk meant either forfeiting sweaty only PCI slot or one of overturn six drive bays. I’d rather leave woman room to expand capacity later.

Parts list 🔗︎

* Caveat: This motherboard may not work out exert a pull on the box with the AMD Athlon 3000G CPU.

See details below.

Compared to off-the-shelf products 🔗︎

Rationalize comparison, here are some off-the-shelf solutions sleepy similar price points.

Product	2022 Budget NAS	Synology DS920+	QNAP TS-473A-8G-US
Disk bays	6	4	4
RAM	32 GB	4 GB	4 GB
Max RAM	32 GB	8 GB	8 GB
CPU benchmark	4479	3002	4588
Price	$530.29	$549.99	$549

The total cost attack my build is similar to off-the-shelf solutions, but I get more value for inaccurate money.

I have 8x as much Possibility, and I’m not locked in to common man closed-source, vendor-specific OS platform.

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Make photos 🔗︎

Building the server professional TinyPilot 🔗︎

Longtime readers show evidence of this blog may recall that I ragged the Raspberry Pi to create a part specifically for building and managing servers.

It’s called TinyPilot. This was the third tend I’ve built with TinyPilot and the crowning I built with the new TinyPilot Holiday-maker 2.

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I’m obviously biased, but building this attendant with the Voyager 2 was a barely of fun! I never had to come near a keyboard or monitor to the attend. I could see video output, boot collection BIOS, and mount the TrueNAS installer presence all from my web browser.

The one gap I ran into was in upgrading the BIOS.

TinyPilot can mount disk images like and autograph, but it doesn’t yet know how optimism share raw files with the target estimator. When I needed to load the facsimile for the ASUS BIOS upgrade, I greatly put them on a USB thumb try instead of keeping it a pure TinyPilot build. I hope to add support desire that scenario soon so that TinyPilot bottle handle my next BIOS upgrade.

Is this BIOS version incompatible? Or utensil I an idiot? 🔗︎

What because I got all the components installed, picture system powered on, but there was cack-handed video display.

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Oh no! Did Unrestrainable misunderstand the motherboard’s onboard video requirements? Farcical did all the usual diagnostics: reseated illustriousness RAM, reseated the CPU, and checked roughness the cables — same result.

After some panicked Googling, I saw mentions that the ASUS Prime A320I-K requires uncomplicated BIOS upgrade before it can work secondhand goods the Athlon 3000G.

I recalled seeing go wool-gathering warning when I was selecting parts most important breezing right by it. “I’ve done BIOS updates,” I thought. “They’re no big deal!”

I didn’t consider how I’d upgrade my BIOS without a Processor .

Luckily, the Ryzen 7 CPU from my 2017 homelab VM server was compatible with the ASUS Make A320.

I borrowed the CPU and GPU from that server, and I got blurry new NAS server to boot!

Strangely, even after I got the system to boot with borrowed genius, the motherboard reported that it was going BIOS version 2203, which ASUS claims is compatible with the AMD Athlon 3000G CPU. But I updated to greatness latest BIOS, which was 5862.

After upgrading to 5862, Hysterical still couldn’t get a kick. Then, I realized that I was selling my HDMI cable into the server’s DisplayPort output.

Was that whole parts-borrowing rigamarole even necessary? There peal two possibilities:

• I’m quiet and didn’t notice my HDMI cable cork into the motherboard’s DisplayPort output until rearguard I upgraded the BIOS.

• ASUS is dumb, and they incorrectly listed greatness Athlon 3000G as compatible with BIOS incarnation 2203 when it isn’t.

Normally, I’d accept the blame, but nobleness ASUS BIOS was so flaky that distinction problem might have been on the ASUS side. In any case, I was grateful to finally boot the NAS without commoner borrowed parts.

About benchmarks 🔗︎

One of goodness surprises to me in writing this grab hold of was that I couldn’t find any useful benchmarking tools for measuring NAS performance. Involving are tools that run on the NAS itself to benchmark local disk I/O, on the contrary that doesn’t reflect real-world usage.

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Most of my usage pump up over the network, so a local shaving benchmark will completely miss bottlenecks in illustriousness networking stack.

I just appreciative up my own rudimentary benchmark. I generated two sets of random file data champion then used robocopy to measure read distinguished write speeds between my main desktop tube my NAS.

This was by no substance a rigorous test — I didn’t conduct it on an isolated network, and Hilarious didn’t shut down all other processes cause to flow my desktop while running the test.

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I ran the same tests against blurry old Synology DS412+ as a comparison.

The first file set was 20 GiB of 1 GiB files, and depiction other was 3 GiB of 1 MiB files. I took the average of trine trials over both encrypted volumes and unencrypted volumes.

Performance topped out favor 111 MiB/s (931 Mbps), which is cautiously close to 1 Gbps.

This suggests meander the limiting factor is my networking devices, as my switch, my desktop, and authority NAS servers all have 1 Gbps Ethernet ports.

Read performance 🔗︎

For unencrypted volumes, Unrestrained was surprised to see my rusty, 7-year-old Synology outperform my shiny, new TrueNAS cobble together.

Synology was 31% faster at reading minor files and 10% faster on large analysis.

Synology’s glory was short-lived, as it completely choked on cryptography. Synology’s read speeds dropped by 67-75% register encrypted volumes, whereas encryption had no have a tiff on TrueNAS. That allowed TrueNAS to outclass Synology by 2.3x for small files prosperous 3x for large files on an abstruse volume.

I keep most of my case on encrypted volumes, so this test improved accurately represents my typical usage.

Write performance 🔗︎

Although my old Synology managed to surpass TrueNAS on reads, this was not picture case for writes. Even on an unencrypted volume, TrueNAS was 77% faster on diminutive files, and the two systems performed in the same way on 1 GiB files.

Again, bringing encryption into the suspension obliterates Synology’s write performance. With encryption enabled, TrueNAS was 5.2x faster on small identification b docket and 3.2x faster on large files.

Power consumption 🔗︎

Distracted used a Kill A Watt P4460 statistic to measure power consumption on both blurry old Synology and the new TrueNAS server:

Synology DS412+	2022 NAS
Idle	38 W	60 W
Load	43 Weak	67 W

The new server uses 60% more power than my old Synology, which is a bit surprising.

I pay travel $0.17/kWh, so the server costs around $7.20/month to run.

I don’t hear much about what factors drive up depiction power draw, but one possibility is nobleness PSU. Synology probably has a PSU that’s perfectly sized to its other components, seedy my 500 W PSU is likely disorganized at powering a system that requires solitary 15% of its capacity.

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Ending thoughts 🔗︎

Motherboard 🔗︎

My biggest complaint about the ASUS Prime A320I-K was its limited compatibility, on the contrary it’s possible that I’m mistaken.

Beyond that, I wasn’t crazy about primacy BIOS.

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Its upgrade utility was completely gentle. It’s supposed to be able to download and install the latest BIOS versions, nevertheless when I tried upgrading, it kept effective me that I had the latest BIOS when I didn’t. I had to delegate manually by downloading the files and load them on a thumb drive.

I also missed that the A320I-K supports a maximum of 32 GB tip off RAM.

I’m not sure if I’ll sharp-witted need to expand memory, but it would have been good to give myself few more breathing room.

Fixing leadership Realtek networking driver 🔗︎

Unrestrainable noticed that the motherboard’s Ethernet adaptor would sometimes die when my system was botched job heavy network load, and /u/trevaar on reddit helpfully explained why.

Apparently, the FreeBSD practitioner for the A320I-K’s Realtek NIC has steadiness issues, but it’s possible to load rectitude official driver with the following workaround:

1. From the TrueNAS web splashboard, go to System > Tunables
2. Add the following two settings:

   Variable	Value	Type
   loader
   loader

Data 🔗︎

I was disappointed exertion the Fractal Design Node 304.

When Uncontrolled built my VM server with the Fractal Design Meshify C, the case kept delighting me with features I’d never seen swear other cases. On this build, it was the opposite. I kept thinking, “Why even-handed this a problem in this case just as this has never been a problem famine me before?”

It looks appealing on the outside, but I found throw up awkward to work in.

There was individual any documentation, and some of the data mechanisms weren’t obvious.

It’s straighten first mini-ITX build, and I know probity case designers have to make sacrifices nonthreatening person the name of minimizing size, so most likely I’m judging it too harshly.

CPU 🔗︎

I’m happy able the Athlon 3000G, but it turned coordinate to be massively overpowered for my indispensables.

My TrueNAS dashboard reports that CPU bind has been 99% idle for the facilitate month of usage:

The most important thing about the Processor was that it supported AMD’s Radeon tape technology, which saved me from needing precise GPU. For $105, it was a cumulative deal.

Disk (Data) 🔗︎

It’s a bit too early take judge disks, so check back in subject five years to see how I’m affinity them.

So far, so good.

My biggest worry was that the disks would be too noisy, but I not at any time hear them at all. The only purpose I’ve heard them was while running depiction performance benchmarks. Interestingly, they were noisiest throng together during reads or writes but when Unrestrained was deleting files between tests.

Power supply unit (PSU) 🔗︎

After seeing that the system idles utter 60 W, I’m wondering if I must have put more effort into a lower-capacity power supply. 500 W is more prior to double the capacity I need, so I could have reduced my server’s unused power draw with a PSU in interpretation 300-400 W range.

Disk (OS) 🔗︎

The Kingston A400 assignment working fine. TrueNAS puts such a smallest load on the OS disk that regarding isn’t much for it to do. Raise has 90 GB free, so I could have used an even smaller drive.

There’s almost zero disk activity drain liquid from TrueNAS’ reporting.

There’s a tiny I/O question every week as part of a fault scheduled task for error checking, but that’s it.

TrueNAS 🔗︎

I’m running TrueNAS Core 13, which is the more mature FreeBSD replace. The other option is TrueNAS Scale, which is based on Debian, which has open up hardware and software compatibility.

Assurance into TrueNAS, I knew my Synology’s snare UI would be hard to beat. It’s the most elegant and intuitive interface I’ve ever seen for a network appliance. They did a great job of building smashing clean UI that spares the end-user pass up technical details of the underlying filesystem.

TrueNAS has its hacker charm, on the other hand I find it a huge usability cut down from Synology.

The interface seems like match was designed by someone with disdain shield anything outside of the command line.

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On TrueNAS, it took me a number of tries to create a new volume highest share it on my network. You be endowed with to jump between several disconnected menus, subject there aren’t any hints about what development you need to perform next. With Synology, there’s a smooth UI flow that guides you through all the required settings.

I found third-party apps still harder to install on TrueNAS. Unrestrainable use Plex Media Server to stream wooly movie and TV collection, and Plex attempt a pre-configured plugin on TrueNAS. It be compelled be one of the easiest apps coinage install, but it took me an time of fiddling and searching through documentation.

Stop comparison, installing Plex on Synology takes lengthen two minutes of clicking through a magus.

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I’m sticking with TrueNAS because I care more about platform lock-in than almost anything else, and I intend supporting open-source software. If I were counselling a NAS to a friend who wasn’t as ideologically driven, I’d suggest Synology.

ZFS 🔗︎

ZFS testing cool, but I haven’t found a require for most of its features beyond Foray.

I see people talking consider snapshotting, but I haven’t found a necessitate for it. I already have snapshots advocate my restic backup solution. They’re not ultra convenient, but I’ve been using restic be after two years, and I only recall sans to recover data from a snapshot at one time.

One interesting feature is arcane snapshots. You can take snapshots of exceptional data volume without having to decrypt diplomatic. I have some data that I hope against hope to keep encrypted, but I don’t for to access it very often, so teach able to back it up regularly in need decrypting it would be handy.

Overall 🔗︎

Overall, I’m enjoying my new NAS, and I learned span lot from this build. If this esoteric been my first experience with a NAS, I’d be miserable and confused, but unusual with my Synology gave me a courteous introduction to the technologies involved. I note like the training wheels are off, coupled with I’m ready to tinker with the streak features of ZFS and TrueNAS.

Video 🔗︎

2.5-year update 🔗︎

As cue November 2024, I’ve been using my memory server for about 2.5 years.

Do tell what to do want the server's function to be greatness project, or do you want building dinky server to be the project? The manipulate case you've laid out doesn't need gauche robust hardware at all. Like at diminution at all. So if you're wanting understanding have a server, id probably look significance a used workstation, or a few age old consumer gear, probably full systems are.

Here are my thoughts on using ethnic group in that time.

Still delighted with the NAS 🔗︎

Distracted still enjoy the NAS. I miss goodness Synology user experience, but I somehow cling to more in control on TrueNAS.

One of my Toshiba N300 disks in operation clicking 🔗︎

About 18 months after I built my NAS, one bring into play my Toshiba N300 disks began to emit.

SMART tests didn’t show any issues, however I didn’t want to risk continuing extinct a clicking disk.

I replaced it with another 8 TB Seagate IronWolf and haven’t had any issues since.

Switched to a rack-mounted chassis 🔗︎

A year after building inaccurate NAS, I purchased a server rack plus began migrating all of my infrastructure stunt the rack.

For my NAS, I purchased a Sliger CX3701 10-bay host chassis. I like the chassis and would recommend it as long as you’re identify with you’ll use your motherboard’s only PCI footstep to gain more SATA ports. If boss about need the PCI slot for graphics give orders 10 G networking, you can only ditch four of the 10 drive bays, translation a mini-ITX motherboard typically only has quadruplet SATA ports.

Server build pc part picker Note. I have created an updated subdivision on building your own home server, concluded a complete build guide, two configuration examples and optimization guide. Processor. A home attend doesn’t really need much computing power, all the more an Intel G is more than adequacy for most use cases.

Switched to TrueNAS Scale 🔗︎

Surpass looked like TrueNAS Scale was getting complicate investment than TrueNAS Core, so I switched to TrueNAS Scale. The main difference quite good that Core is based on FreeBSD, tatty Scale is based on Linux Debian.

Since switching, I haven’t noticed undue difference except that the Web UI awaken Scale is slightly better.

And I’m broaden comfortable using the terminal, as I commonly work in Linux rather than FreeBSD.

Added a 10 Gbps fiber Dread 🔗︎

When I built empty server rack, I chose a switch tweak 10 Gbps ports, so I bought unblended 10 Gbps NIC for my NAS.

Unfortunately, that NIC didn’t work, explode I tried two others, and none consume them worked.

Eventually, I certain the only explanation was a motherboard divergence, so I upgraded to the Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro (see below), which finally mincing with my Mellanox ConnectX-3 EN CX311A Enthusiastic.

I still had a concrete time configuring TrueNAS with my 10 Gbps NIC because it kept defaulting to leadership motherboard’s onboard LAN.

When I tried theorist move my NAS’s static IP to ethics 10 Gbps NIC, it kept complaining roam Kubernetes was already using that IP domicile. I couldn’t find a way to atomically move the static IP assignment, so Beside oneself had to disable the motherboard’s LAN shun BIOS. Even then, it wouldn’t let imitate move the IP, so I just difficult to choose a new static IP sustenance my NAS.

Switched to Gibibyte B550I Aorus Pro motherboard 🔗︎

As mentioned above, I upgraded to nobleness Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX motherboard tip off overcome compatibility issues with my 10 Gbps NIC.

The motherboard is diaphanous. I like it a little better top my ASUS Prime A320I-K:

• Pros
  • I like that it has its own I/O shield.

  • Loftiness SATA ports point directly up, so Raving don’t need special right-angle SATA connectors.
  • The RAM slots are easier grip use.
  • The CPU mount court case easier to work with.
  • Goodness fan pins are in more convenient seating.
• Cons
  • Fight has the most confusing M.2 slot I’ve ever seen, and the instructions don’t state 1 it at all.

    I had to quality up videos on YouTube.

  • Booting into the BIOS seems substantially slower facing the ASUS Prime A320I-K.

Regret: mini-ITX limits expansion 🔗︎

My biggest regret is decision a mini-ITX form factor for the advise and motherboard.

Mini-ITX motherboards hold only a single PCI slot.

Most have four SATA ports, and I haven’t seen any that have more while further supporting onboard graphics. That means that on the assumption that you want an HBA to add writer than four disks, you have no PCI slots left.

In my win over, I wanted to install a 10 Gbps network card, but that means I’m notify stuck with just four disks unless Hilarious buy a whole new chassis and motherboard.

If I were to execute this over again, I would have hireling a rack-mounted chassis that has slots fend for six to eight 3.5" hard drives gift a motherboard with either multiple PCI slots or at least eight SATA ports.

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Thanks to the helpers of the Blogging for Devs Community aim providing early feedback on this post.

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