Let's Build Another Storage Server!

[@GregSalazar]

A new season of Fix or Flop starts this Friday! 👽

[@Manny_Playss]

cant wait!!

[@bryans8656]

Great, that's my favorite of your videos.

[@bryngriffiths1826]

Yeeeee

[@notrixamoris3318]

Thank you!!!

[@shishitkesarwani8062]

Finally

[@christopherprevost763]

As others have mentioned: - pass the drives through (or better yet the motherboard sata controller) to truenas and let the nas do what it's made to do. You'll enable more features, and generally have a much better and stable experience. It's a case of using the right tool for the job. - give that truenas instance all the ram you can spare - add more nvme so truenas has a write cache - since you already have two systems, consider running truenas bare metal (I do see the appeal of managing everything via the proxmox interface but what else were you going to run on that machine?) - finally, the dream machine se can serve your router. They call it a gateway, it's the same thing.

[@rickysargulesh1053]

I hope he reads this advice. Very important. I would also go Bare Metal for TrueNAS and passthrough of the drives seems very important to me as well.

[@Andreas-w]

passing through the controller to truenas is the recommended way to virtualize truenas, it needs direct access to the hdds, that is also why you shouldn't use a hardware raid card.

[@jgorres]

Yes, forget Proxmox for this server, and install TrueNAS natively. Also, get an HBA... An LSI 9207-8i, for example.

[@xabhax]

Why would you virtualize truenas? proxmox supports zfs.

[@elenaquerida]

@@xabhaxtruenas makes it easy to add an SMB/NSF share and an intuitive UI to manage it. Proxmox allows you to create a ZFS pool but not to easily share it across several containers

[@raulhidalgo6817]

I for one am loving these videos as I've been wanting to build my own home server so keep them coming!

[@GregSalazar]

Glad you like them!

[@jeremywiginton2502]

You are 100% correct in mounting the UPS to the bottom. And for the exact reason you mentioned. You don't want to have something that heavy near the top of the rack. Especially if you get a bigger rack.

[@brianhansen9578]

Before you fill those HDD's, please redo the config, TrueNAS needs baremetal access to drives, It's why the normal procedure when virtualizing is to passthrough an HBA to VM... with current setup you could potentially lose data, ZFS needs 100% control over when data is written to disk and it's status. that layer your setup removes from truenas

[@brianhansen9578]

Frankly this video and build seems very poorly planned and executed, given you are presenting the really wrong way of doing things... but hey now u have topic for a follow-up :)

[@ivanmaglica264]

I think Greg did ZFS on Proxmox, in that pool he then created a single big volume that is passed to TrueNAS VM. Better way would be to find which PCIe device is that SATA controller and pass the whole PCIe device to TrueNAS VM and set ZFS there. But that would be quite more involved process...

[@catalystguitarguy]

I prefer running Truenas on bare metal rather than in a VM. it works either way but troubleshooting is easier for me without the extra layer of software between my data and i. Glad to see you taking an interest in the more homelab/server side of things.

[@woe2you2]

This. Only time it makes more sense to virtualise TrueNAS is if you're trying to run both out of one box.

[@Kevin-vc5tn]

You should look into getting an HBA and using pci passthrough to your truenas vm so you can actually utilize truenas's features

[@heffe2001]

Absolutely... LSI 9207-4i4e was my suggestion, gives him a storage upgrade path with that external port as well.

[@samsamsamsamsamsamsam]

You can also passthrough the motherboard's SATA controller.

[@Kevin-vc5tn]

​@@samsamsamsamsamsamsamPossibly but alot of the time the onboard sata share an IOMMU group with other devices. If it does work that would be a good route to take but otherwise even a $20 4-port SATA expander card would work better than just passing through the ZFS volume.

[@ImARichard]

More server content is always welcome. We were all homelab noobs once, and I like to see other peoples journey into the hobby.

[@ImreBertalan86]

Yoou know Greg, I started watching LTT many many years ago mainly because they had so many server related videos. As I'm also a sucker for server hardware (sadly, I cannot afford any and my job is also not related to real servers, only VPSs) I enjoyed your video even more, than I used to. I wish I was there, helping and tinkering along with you. Can'T wait for the Fix or Flop series to come back too. Who knows, maybe you'll be able to accept servers for the series too. 😁

[@Inf666ipi]

I'm in the same server boat as well Greg...I love'em...Love building them!!! 645TBs across all my servers and going to build another one this summer. Thinking about going to a single Tower Rack setup this year. I'm overdue for one!!😉

[@Trylen]

Next on "Serv Your Right!" Greg is introduced to HBA cards and minisas SFF-8087 cables. I started years ago with IDE based, SATA was easier, but a PCIe 2.0/3.0 Host Bus Adapter with 2 or more minisas sff-8087 ports are your friend. Easy way to get 8 SATA drives on the go. Keep that first breakout cable in case you get such a card. If you find this addicting... wait till you get into dual CPU xeons/epyc. Move to walking distance to a MicroCenter and sell your car.. to afford that path.

[@JzJad]

As a long time home labber with a micro center just 10 minutes down the road this hits home lol how ever I recently grabbed 2 UM790 pros and may just swap out most of my servers for them. 100% Get an HBA and pass it through to Truenas though!

[@SLICKOMODE]

This reminds me of being back at work. It's really fun to build these servers and configure them to your needs!

[@loganlowder4137]

Bruh yes thank you iv watched you for years iv been waiting for you to get into server stuff. Glad you’re getting into it now. There’s a huge community for this kinda thing so all the support you could ask for.

[@SkylerB17]

as a gamer who doesnt know a lot about server stuff, this interests me a lot. In my own home one day id like to have a server rack like this, set up with large NAS that will act as a media server for movies, shows, music, videos, photos, etc, where me and my family can dump all of our favorite content and ditch streaming services. I would also set it up with remote HTPC, so that content can be accessed anywhere, especially the home theater. and would also like to incorporate gaming computers into the rack, as well as full house integrated networking. One day, maybe, if im ever able to afford a house that isnt 100 years old and falling apart

[@idan678]

Don't wait for one day, get yourself a cheap old PC and start messing around haha it's really fun I'm using mini pc with intel celeron as server right now

[@tomr3422]

a gamer too (mainly) You can start now with a decent older PC, It had a huge lerning curve for me, it took a while to pull the trigger for something really good, but now I got a media server (so I can watch stuff at work from it) a NAS and a pretty beefy gaming server that I can host games I play on for friends- It all started from a old gaming PC with a I7-4790k It made a great server and OK NAS, and would support me and a few friends on a week end gaming session.

[@Devastator0]

Pro tip Greg, for the PSU, you can actually stack the excess cables in the gap between the PSU & the mobo (alternatively, you can bundle up the cables right under where the modular cables connect to the PSU and cable tie the whole bundle together). I've done something similar and you just layer the excess cables over eachother and cable tie it all together and you're good. Not sure if that helps to try and tidy it up but I thought I'd put forward that idea. Love your work mate!

[@williammathies2998]

Thanks!

[@GregSalazar]

Thanks for the support!

[@Miniputt_999]

Think i saw Jayztwocent use a similar case for a server build. He went with 80mm noctua fans for less noise and more fresh air. Loving the vid, looking forward to more :D

[@kevinintheusa8984]

Too late my friend. I have built 6 servers after I purchased a 2-bay Terramaster then had to buy a 4-bay Terramaster when space filled up. I then built my next one and it was so large and efficient that I got hooked on making it bigger, adding a GPU for transcoding, and other bells and whistles. I have now built a total of 6 versions of my original build and each time, it gets a bit better. I am now building one for my son to store his games on and I put it in an Antec Silent Case with 8 bays in a mid-tower and it turned out great. He has 96Tb of space to store his games and plenty of redundancy if one or two of the drives fail.

[@MD2389]

A suggestion: Setup a share on your NAS to act as a redundant backup for your other network computer. Also: Truenas looooves RAM! It will use it as a read/write cache so if you use it a lot, or don't plan on installing an SSD, the more you install the better! I also would recommend giving Craft Computing's video tutorial a watch, so you can lock down the smb shares to only specific user accounts.

[@BraaiMeester]

Most servers I've setup is with windows server 2012 and 2016 and I love it as I can setup what I need when I need it

[@RukhWhitefang]

I use Truenas Scale for my server. Run a NAS, VMs and several apps with it. Was able to reuse my old 8700k hardware to build it.

[@Yuriel1981]

Doing the same with my old R5 3600. Hoping to find a good 3950x to upgrade it with. Ryzen supporting ecc dimms is a big plus as well. HA running in a VM on top of several of the official apps like Jellyfin and Tailscale as well.

[@knowledgeispower17]

Welcome to the other side my friend. I think that there is a big home lab on the way. :D

[@mikegolfaviation6340]

16:39 why not just get PCI-E SAS controller?

[@mspencerl87]

Before you get too crazy. Instead of proxmox managing the HDDs you should pass the disks through directly to the Truenas VM. Let Truenas manage them. That way managing failed disks will be easier, or should you decide to upgrade a disk etc. You can use the truenas gui and for all intents and purposes proxmox never really touches these HDDs. This setup is more common and recommended Otherwise great vid I love it when ppl try something outside their comfort zones and grow

[@michaeljaques77]

This!!!! Otherwise running TrueNAS is pretty much pointless. Might as well just have a Debian or Ubuntu Server managing the disk. The point of TrueNAS is having it actually act as a RAID. with TrueNAS thinking its one disk its not truly redundant in any sense.

[@enspist5305]

honestly if Greg is only running a nas using this server he should just run Truenas straight up on the hardware and not even worry about proxmox

[@squeezy9011]

Greg and not turning on power strips. Name a more memorable couple.

[@dirtybrokkoli]

Just a tip, since i haven't seen it in the comments yet. Get used to labeling the drive information like the S/N on the handle of the drive sled so when a drive gets into a failing state you actually know which drive to pull out, happens to the best of us. :D

[@bothellkenmore]

As someone who was never officially IT at my workplaces, I did find myself standing in front of rack servers and typing in command lines in Unix or just learning from our outside contracted engineer about our setups several times. I'll always be fascinated with networking.

[@douglaslindsey6]

Just tore out my company's datacenter equipment today, we merged everything with AWS. It's nice to see this in a home application!

[@SwaggerMeister72]

A fun project that I think you'd enjoy is getting jellyfin/plex working in a docker VM. Lots of fun stuff to dig into with transcoding and GPU/hardware passthrough that I find super fun.

[@gustavhoo]

According to (at least) Razer, MOLEX delivers more power than SATA. That’s probably why your HDD-thing came with molex. That is at least what they are telling us when we ask why their argb-controller came with molex instead of sata.

[@matthewlewington2470]

Holy cow I was 100% gonna buy a Sata to SAS connector insted of the other way round. You just saved me

[@Kromaswow]

One suggestion. Remote management is absolutely key for running a home server and some automation. Maybe look into a PiKVM system or even the BliKVM that runs internally. Really make managing your servers a breeze.

[@carlv8415]

Would recommend throwing in an SSD or NVME and assigning it as a cache drive on the storage pool. Will increase performance when writing data to the NAS. Apart from that, keep up the good work.

[@richardcarlson127]

A couple notes from experience as a layperson in networking. First: I never understood the need for power strips with switches in network applications. Too much potential for impolite power shutdowns, accidentally turning off a switch etc. Your server has a power switch on it, use that instead. Second: Consider casters and a closed cabinet instead of the open rack for a residential space. The doors are removable for easy access or if cooling is an issue, but closing it up can really reduce the noise floor. The casters make it easy to pull the whole shebang out for access to the rear, just leave enough cable to do so. In my case I let the cables develop a natural coil so that when I pushed the cabinet back they tended to coil together as a unit, a few velcro straps kept the cables together. Third: Good call on leaving the UPS at the bottom and the heavy servers just above, that provides better stability of the unit. Fourth: Consider ventilated blank panels to fill in the spaces if airflow is an issue. They look good but still allow for air movement as needed. I prefer to fill in the blanks as well!

[@deepspacecow2644]

Switches turn on as soon as power is received, servers like to do that as well

[@arjayabad1337]

These server videos are very interesting and uniquely fun to watch!

[@KrastyoKrastev]

Yes, please keep those coming and more info on the software that you use on them :) Thanks

[@Mouseketier85]

You are 100% correct it gets fun and addictive. I have a soft spot for networking and servers. Old of lease enterprise servers catch my eye too much lol. I currently have a dell c6100 which is 2u but 4 nodes each with 2 cpu and 4 drives. Older but way cool lol. Keep it up its a whole new side that once you get going in the house you will no doubt grow

[@TheMostaba]

As someone who worked server support, I try to sway away from calling drives a backup to another even in a mirror because of my time working at a company that rhymes with bell. RAID IS NOT A BACKUP...just redundancy. great video!!

[@walterbkeen]

Building a home lab, and coincidentally repurposing a pair of old gaming rigs into servers. Love the video and would definitely like to see more server builds.

[@Yeabuddy720]

Can’t wait for the install into the new house and all the cameras and access points to get hooked up and all the Ethernet cables. I know it sounds still but I love this stuff ❤️ keep it up Greg!

[@dash8brj]

Agree with everyone else. Give polaris a hba and pass it through to truenas. You'll get better performance and security of your data this way. I have Unraid running on bare metal and truenas running under proxmox with an LSI HBA and quad NVME card passed through. With my new server (dual xeons totalling 72 threads) I am slowly migrating all my seperate bare metal machines to it. Presently it is hosting truenas, pi-hole, opnsense, a PXE server, wireguard and jellyfin along with a Time Machine "capsule" to handle the backup of 2 mac computers Make sure when getting a HBA, to get one that is preflashed to IT mode, or be prepared to do it yourself either through dos commands, or EFI shell commands..

[@theironangel767]

Nice work Man! There are nice cheap RAID/SAS Breakout boards that are HH for 2U cases which will let you use SAS drives as well - the cheapest ones will be listed as IT Mode (Initiator-Target Mode) or HBA (Host Bus Adaptor) I think I mentioned this on the last NAS video but Kimbrer IT is a GREAT place to get 2nd hand server parts, look for old SuperMicro HBAs - about ~90euro and its RAID and IT Mode supported. Personally I would have picked the 8 bay unit from Silverstone since most RAID cards are 8i (8 drive ports aka, 2SAS cables)

[@nerds-nonsense]

this series is hella cool (all the stuff you do is) but this really feels like we're learning with you

[@typicalthrill]

Nice rack! Giggity. For real though, it's looking great! Just built my first NAS a few months back and was pretty surprised at how easy it was to get it set up with TrueNAS. I just used an old pc with some SAS drives from old servers. Set it up with RAIDz because of the old drives. Wanted to be able to swap them if I had a failure. Thanks for the video!

[@mj1s735]

A lot of that stuff your are doing is way above my knowledge level, so all I can say is keep up the good work and at least add a heatsink to the NVMe SSD that doesn't have one.

[@KyleGas-zb7kp]

I took an old barracuda and turned it into a storage server, 5 hot swap bays with windows 11 using local UAC...has been a stable file server for a few years now. Unless you have a lot of users reading/writing data you don't need much of a system for file storage. You mentioned you might be video editing files from the server, as a rule of thumb for an enterprise environment, you should never run from the network, always pull the file local.

[@olandersnake]

What I think would be good on the gamer side would be setting up any online server. Your own personal server for something like WOW or anything really.

[@antoniom.andersen6704]

Love these videos. Built my own server and homelab a long time ago but I need to upgrade so these videos come in handy.

[@GamerSpencer]

I've only just noticed, you're an F1 fan! Nice to see more American's enjoying F1! I noticed Senna's helmet 1/2 scale!

[@kay_a_s]

Such coincidence. I was planning to upgrade my mini NAS/server from a Fractal Node 304 to RM21-308 (similar model as what you got, but 8 bays instead of 4), but both RM21-304 and RM21-308 are not available in my country and cost half of the case just for shipping if I buy it overseas (server case are really hard to find here, both in store or online). Silverstone did have the CS382, which is a tower type server and still fits in the rack, so I got that instead. You probably might wanna try building on this one too.

[@RealitySetsIn]

Yeah lets see more of these. I'm currently attending college for cybersecurity and networking is a big part of that. My only knowledge is of building gaming PC's. Thanks for the video.

[@cracklingice]

If it's a dedicated NAS - why Proxmox?

[@xXDarthBagginsXx]

UPS is always at the bottom of a rack, that's how we have ours here that deal with ours on an enterprise config center level.

[@CraigLillie]

This sounds like an idea for a British computer networking show, "Are You Being Server-ed"! 😸

[@tomr3422]

great reference

[@lewworthem8483]

I was looking forward to another short about how to tighten a screw.

[@RemyL75]

Welcome, Greg. Here at Server Anonymous, we welcome all and judge no one. I'm Remy and i have ... checks notes... 8 (!?) servers. Admitting the problem is step one of the journey lol.

[@walkinzorochi9461]

Fix or Flop more more more. I love that series. I live in Canada so no way i could send u a rig if i wanted. I love the series as it shows alot of stuff that you may not know. Cheers

[@AD-rl4jv]

I enjoy the server builds I am new to it as well.

[@DeclanBirmingham]

It’s good to see you again, Greg. Thanks for the video.

[@GregSalazar]

Thanks for watching!

[@joshman5217]

Awesome! Love a good server video.

[@Thomahawk7209]

Cool to see the server coming together

[@cardsfanbj]

I've been contemplating building a storage server for myself. Ideally, I'd like to upgrade my gaming rig case (to an 011 or something similar) so I can use my Fractal Define R6 for the server because of its capacity for hard drives. I'm no professional, but my mom and I both like to do some amateur photography, and I'd like something to keep my data safe and run my Plex server. Currently I've got a 6TB HDD for Plex and an old 1TB HDD for the photos on my parents' desktop PC but the 6TB is nearly out of space and I have more Blu Rays to rip, and the 1 TB is pretty old at this point.

[@Winnekeueu1985]

I do not know if the iron wolfs are cheaper there but it is generally better to use Enterprise drives like the Seagate Exos they are usually cheaper. They also have a longer lifespan.

[@Nosjamesmenzer]

Hey what you should have done about the sas port is get a sas card so you can pass the card through to truenas and then do a raid

[@reece2080]

I love seeing the server content!

[@fallenphoenixfilms]

I don't know much about server stuff but it's still interesting to watch. Maybe one day I'll set up a server, who knows?! Gotta build my first PC... first. Slowly but surely!

[@kevinintheusa8984]

You should build your own computer. I did it way back in 1990 with the help of a guy in our graduate school since I needed a much faster rig to edit my data images. I learned so much from him about building one and I have never purchased a pre-built one except for a gaming rig for my son in 2016 that was too cheap not to buy. I have since rebuilt that one into the rig he is running now but I also built my own servers since then and it is a great hobby to have along with being able to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

[@fallenphoenixfilms]

That's my plan. Just gonna take time to get all the parts. I have some already.@@kevinintheusa8984

[@HummyGG]

oh I see.... you are going down the rabbit hole with this server stuff

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I always follow Greg Salazar down the Rabbit Hole.

[@jefferyG499]

3:30 I'm not sure what you're talking about... get a cheap single-port HBA (LSI 9211-4i or similar) and use the correct plug if you're concerned about bandwidth. You don't need a "server motherboard." It's... not a concern, but I digress. 7:00, pop the ring off the Wraith Stealth for an extra ~1- 1.5mm of clearance. 9:30 You don't know the difference between terabytes and tebibytes so you ignorantly call it "28 terabytes". Yikes. 16:30 "Throughput is massively superior with SAS"... yeah, that 6Gb/s is on single-channel SAS is like, totes majorly bigly better than the measly 6Gb/s that SATA plods long with. "SATA to SAS to SATA again" They're all using AHCI. You're conflating physical standards with protocols. There is no overhead in this configuration.

[@blindtechh]

Please do more of the server content, I’m planning on building my new homelab when my dad finished building my new apartment

[@coffeeyummm]

Love seeing these server builds even though I know nothing about servers and what their purpose are😂

[@garrettwilde2798]

That rack is pretty knarly greg! Great video!!

[@taskinyucekurt]

Smiles You have to move those pieces up, You are running a server rack on the carpet and you will feel very sad about that mistake in close future.

[@itshoddtowardd]

I think maybe having a sata ssd for boot and using the nvme drives as read/write cache could be good if you need to as ZFS can use lv2 arc

[@TheTrulyInsane]

I'm surprised that @45Drives hasn't reached out to you to give you a server considering your subscriber base

[@jb4608s]

Also at 22:15 in the video: is that strip coming loose from the server? I have the same case and that shouldn't happen.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I think we should name this machine the Greg SaNASar

[@AustinWirl]

That setup is goals

[@johnqsak]

0:05 BRO SAME. I have 1x 24 TB TrueNAS Core Server, 2 other servers awaiting me to get money for the 6x 8TB HDDs and other 6x 16 TB HDD's lol 2 of the servers are an old Xeon E3-1220, 24gb ECC and 32 GB Ecc.... the 3rd is dual XEON lil newer, 96 GB ECC

[@berserkenjoyer7886]

Man I have no idea how any of this stuff works but damn it must be fun to build

[@NIXIEPIXIE]

i recently built my server using dual socket 2011 cpus and a fractal define 7xl case the case has room for 15-20 drives and has sound dampening material in it

[@EastAngliaUK]

I would add one for media fro films and tvs shows as well 100tb would be nice for that maybe another for games to. and music

[@FluxStage]

All these Windows key website are so sketchy and weird. But today I found myself needing a key since apparantly I got too many devices activated. And it acually worked! not bad.

[@RonaldMedia]

Server building with Greg Tech Tips.

[@fyrentinnimar]

should probably your drives in parity mode instead of RAID 1

[@chris_hertford]

Uk electricity bills have turned me off from home servers, I built a tiny low power nas but literally unplug everything these days!

[@MaheerKibria]

So first are those graded Yu-gi-oh cards in the background? Have those always been in the sets and I just didn't notice? Next server building can be as costly or cheap as you want it to be. At the end of the day, any computer can be a server. The biggest place you can save money is not the gaming hardware but the case. That case probably costs as much as the CPU, MB, and RAM put together. It''s a nice case with hot-swap but since cases don't affect performance you could literally save like $250-300 and have the same performance.

[@GrumpyWolfTech]

I honestly don't understand the hate for windows. I run a server with windows server 2022 on it. It is super simple, reliable, and I don't need to mess around with command prompts. I use it as a file server, a plex server, hyper v for virtualization and do editing on it if I have a very big project like a vr 360 video that will take a while to render and I don't want to use up all the resources on my desktop.

[@wodn184fn8]

now, you need a 10Gbit card and you are golden(ofc and hardware to support that). Also, unifi sells the brand new small cables which is muuuch nicer if you want to add that

[@Kurzei]

I was trying to think of an eloquent way to say more server videos, but instead I'll just go with MOAR!!!!! xD

[@GruntyGame]

When I first started my home NAS, I gave into the temptation of Windows Storage Spaces. It was pain the entire way, and a massive waste of time.

[@zXMOSZXz]

Loving these videos

[@MrAphexcloud]

i would recomend a sas hba (somthing cheap from ebay) as you are best to pass through the entire HBA using iommu to the truenas zfs loves ram so i would as others mentioned give it as much as you can spare. i have not done much research into ddr5 as it has some ecc features but ECC memory is best to be used with truenas as a best practice.

[@mikisan3501]

Great video to learn something new 👍

[@leeksoup3199]

love server content!

[@rastafarride]

keep them up!

[@russell_szabados]

Yes, more videos like this please.

[@tevez101x]

I’m building a home server myself and it’s really addicting

[@dano8308]

If this is an nas wouldn't you want Intel to use quick sync for transcoding ?

[@dday8321]

Why do you run Truenas under Proxmox? Wouldn't Proxmox handle all of the storage presentation itself? Or if you like Truenas, it can run standalone also, correct?