Scrapyard Server: Fastest all-SSD NAS!

[@mm8436]

Wendle, the tech support for tech support.

[@sutekhxaos]

thats a good tag line...

[@walterwhite2270]

Wendle definitely knows his stuff

[@unicodefox]

That asks me, is there anything Wendell doesn't know? (also, Wendle, good name for Wordle but all IT terms?)

[@NickF1227]

This

[@ilovefunnyamv2nd]

@@AZ-ze5xb yeah, he was in the room, off-camera ~ 7:24

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

This reminds me so much of the Intel Beverly Cove Intel Xeon D-1500 series development platform!

[@HardwareHaven]

I’m glad I’m not the only one that runs into very strange non-repeatable issues haha Great video, and even better montage music.

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha yeah, I was thinking of you when I was working through that, I think you had just posted your video about that motherboard failure! I spent about 4 hours trying to get the performance to degrade like it had initially... I reinstalled everything and made sure everything was plugged in exactly the same... still nothing. So who knows what happened that first time!

[@HardwareHaven]

@@JeffGeerling computers can just be weird sometimes haha Glad it’s working well for you!

[@boam2943]

@@JeffGeerling Couldn´t it be the initial resync. Mdadm does it after creating the 10 array. If you low level format one of the mirror drives (or replace it with a new blank one), you can probably duplicate it. Reinstalling the OS or moving drives around will not destroy the array so there is no resync from just that.

[@firenado4295]

hey is Hardware haven out in the wild lol

[@insu_na]

You wouldn't dream of how many weird performance issues crop up due to faulty connectors or connections. But incredibly it's mostly performance issues, for some reason data loss is still often avoided, which is kinda miraculous imo

[@cheeseburgerbeefcake]

Fantastic video about doing this on a solid budget (aside from the from the SSDs!), considerations for power and noise levels are really important for the home user. My poor ol NAS is still running spinning rust and sitting in HP N54L microservers, TrueNAS has been excellent for just throw it in and it works - aside from refusing to boot the installed OS from some USB SSDs, but that could equally be the board.

[@KS-wr8ub]

Love those old HPs. I ran my N40L with 6x 3,5” HDDs and 1x 2,5” SSD for 10+ years, without a hiccup. Mind you I ran it with unRAID, but it ran perfect. Just replaced it as my main server because I wanted more bays, but I’ll keep using as a offsite backup server. Throw in a Pico PSU and swap case fan and it is a silent little bugger. 😍

[@klemmonade]

7:34 EMOTIONAL DAMAGE

[@CharlieMartorelli]

Great video as always. Thanks for including the Kill a Watt reading in you segment. I wish more people on KZbin would measure this benchmark. I think it's important and is become more relevant as energy prices rise and the earth warms.

[@stuartfury3390]

If you were worried about the earth warming you wouldn't be bothering with home servers

[@Matando]

On the microcenter stores not having enough locations, I must say every time you mention going there whether sponsored or not I get so envious. I've been waiting very patiently for them to expand and open a store near me. I will quit my management job with Lowe's in a heartbeat to go work for them but even at that I'd love to just be able to walk into a store and buy these kinds of things. It an experience that just, sadly, doesn't really exist anymore.

[@TheChrimboEffect]

AHAHAHAHA you cant go , i think ill go this afternoon to both stores in my area just for spite . :)

[@growtoups]

@@TheChrimboEffect bro why u acting like a kid.

[@poot6365]

@@TheChrimboEffect if you were white you would have gone in his honor

[@jeremyjedynak]

Love the crossovers with Wendell @ L1T and Patrick @ STH.

[@joelcohen4353]

I have Truenas running on pretty similar hardware - a Supermicro X9SCM-F and Xeon E3 1270 V2, for a very low (65 W) power consumption setup. Stable as a rock.

[@jamieknight326]

This video was really useful & enjoyable. It’s got a darn near perfect mix of showing and telling, with a narrative structure that makes sense. Integrating the ad read into the narrative was very slick.

[@dw7444]

Looking at the motherboard manual it shows that the M.2 slot shares bandwidth with the SATA ports. It also appears that the SATA ports have two connections to the CPU... one of labeled as PCIe 3.0x1 and the other is labeled as SATA Gen3 but is likely also PCIe 3.0x1. This makes a lot of sense seeing your write tests max out at 700-800 MB/s on the SATA ports, since you're using a striped mirror you're writing double that plus overhead which puts you close to the limit of two PCIe 3.0 lanes... The HBA test seems to confirm this as well. Have you considered dropping in an inexpensive PCIe SATA controller instead of an HBA to avoid the cooling issues? It might also be worth trying RAID 5 since it would drastically reduce the write bandwidth, even an older Xeon like the D-1521 should do pretty well considering I used to get 200-300 MB/s out of an old Core 2 Duo and more than double that out of an i5-2500K while running Windows.

[@JeffGeerling]

I might go with a 5-port SATA controller-some of them do get quite toasty too, though! I still like the striped mirror for the more simple writes, even though (as you and Wendell both point out, it should probably not be an issue up to 10 Gbps).

[@wayland7150]

I am running TrueNAS Core from a pair of USB thumb drives in order to leave SATA ports free. Is there really any need to be using the M.2 slot if it steals bandwidth from the SATA? Might be worth a try.

[@walterwhite2270]

@D W on truenas you do not want to be using a hardware raid controller for the disk setups...best practice and reliability for the ZFS storage is not to use raid and let ZFS manage everything.....You can use the raid controller for the IO performance (if it gets you better than what you have onboard) but do not setup the disk in a raid within the controller. As you stated Jeff will get better performance with the striped mirror than just a raidz2. This is from the Truenas Hardware Guide about raid controllers: There are countless warnings against using hardware RAID cards with TrueNAS. ZFS and TrueNAS provide a built-in RAID that protects your data better than any hardware RAID card. You can use a hardware RAID card if it is all you have, but there are limitations. First and most importantly, do not use their RAID facility if your hardware RAID card supports HBA mode, also known as passthrough or JBOD mode (there is one caveat in the bullets below). When used, it allows it to perform indistinguishably from a standard HBA. If your RAID card does not have this mode, you can configure a RAID0 for every single disk in your system. While not the ideal setup, it works in a pinch. If repurposing hardware RAID cards with TrueNAS, be aware that some hardware RAID cards: Could mask disk serial number and S.M.A.R.T. health information Could perform slower than their HBA equivalents Could cause data loss if using a write cache with a dead battery backup unit (BBU))

[@dw7444]

@@walterwhite2270 My apologies for the misunderstanding Mr Heisenberg. I had suggested a SATA controller and not a RAID controller for those reasons as well as due to my own bad experiences with them over the years. I've been a big fan of software RAID for many years as I've had to recover far too many hardware RAID sets over the years. From the old 3ware cards that would drop multiple disks and require sending 3ware the metadata for the affected disks so they could modify it in order to force the disks back into the RAID set to all the failed motherboards with proprietary faux "hardware" raid controllers which customers were inevitably using without any backups... with the exception of enterprise class RAID controllers I generally avoid using hardware RAID. I guess I should have said RAIDZ instead of RAID5, but given their similarities I often refer to RAIDZ as RAID5 and RAIDZ2 as RAID6(I'm sure there's a hardcore ZFS folks out there losing their mind right about now). Funny thing is that I've been running ZFS for years, the only time I've lost data is when I've purposely deleted it. I setup cache and log devs on SSDs and run on a few SATA drives at home using an old workstation and never have any trouble. I tried the same thing with LVM and it worked great initially, but it turns out that LVM caching depends on dm-cache which was dropped from newer builds of Ubuntu for some reason and it rendered that system unbootable. Rather than go through the hassle of adding dm-cache back in I converted to ZFS and it's been trouble free ever since.

[@wayland7150]

@@walterwhite2270 If you're using a RAID card you may as well use it as a RAID card and make a one drive VDEV and tell TrueNAS to stop complaining.

[@ganniterix]

With that music during the montage I half expected the 8bit guy to pop out :)

[@JeffGeerling]

lol the whole time I was working on that I was like "8 bit guy... hmm I should probably retrobrite something here"

[@btraker]

Definitely sounds like an Anders Jensen piece, the guy who did a lot of music for 8-Bit Guy :)

[@ganniterix]

@@JeffGeerling I used to run a 2x20 node cassandra clusters on a similar platform (ie anaemic CPU) to that mainboard (www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04760473.pdf?jumpid=in_lit-psnow-getpdf). Your video sent some cold shivers down my spine! 😀

[@leopold7562]

You and I have very different ideas on what “scrapyard” means. I paid half this for my entire home lab. Which is now decommissioned, because it’s costing me this much in electricity…

[@fredklapetzky2698]

Love Microcenter, have probably seen you in the Brentwood store. Really wished they had an Orlando, FL site this week when tech died while traveling…. Maybe they will listen to you and expand.

[@theangryintern]

Captions for the build montage are fantastic! "Incredible 80s vibes"

[@tyxeros]

A few recommendations and info. You can replace the Delta cpu fan with a Noctua. I know that the Delta is a little noisy. Also I have Qnap TS-453d with 10G sfp+ card(The pcie slot is 2.0 x2) and 4 x 4TB Sandisk Ultra 3D, so in raid 10 i get 650-680mb/sec sustain reads/writes. And the consumption in idle is only 12 watt, during write 28watt and reading 16 watt. Measured on the wall socket.

[@Manguitom]

May I ask if you sticked with QTS? I'm thinking of switching over to TrueNAS, last time, I tried booting Scale from USB and I couldn't get the ethernet adapter working over 1Gbps

[@tyxeros]

I am sorry i don't know what is Scale. Although i used the the Qnap Nas above with the specific setup , for power efficiency, disk speed and its apps. I also have a TVS-873e for 2ndish backup so i am familiar with QTS. I have tried TrueNas (almost 2 years ago) on custom hardware but i find it a little too complex to use for my needs.

[@SeverityOne]

That reminds me, when I first connected a SCSI hard drive to my Amiga 500, and it managed a whopping 1 MB/s. Crazy speeds. Then there's the Yamaha EX5 synth, which manages maybe 2 MB/m (minute). That's crazy, too.

[@SeeTheWholeTruth]

I want one of these for my wife the love of my life... She needs this. Never a more deserving person of tools for her trade and storage of her wondrous works of art for others. A publisher, of UNBELIEVABLE ability for others at barely living wage. And every single one.. a work of art making the world a better place. She works on such old hardware and is thankful, never a complaint to God. People who make content like yours, never realize the wonders that the human spirit can manage with the least of things, but you give them the tools to seek and use. Its a wonderful synergy. Thank you for sharing your work!

[@patrickjoseph3412]

Awesome video, Mr. Geerling and Micro Center Please come to Arizona !!!!

[@rickycastro3210]

DUDE!!!!!! $4000 on SSD's? That is radically crazy! Awesome of course....but CRAZY! That is sick!

[@JosephFrietze]

"Will I upgrade in the future?" Really? OF COURSE YOU WILL! You are a computer nerd! Great work on the project and the video.

[@johannnn]

Could you make a video about building an affordable home server for Plex, docker and a bit of headroom for stuff like game servers. The emphasis should lay on power efficiency, since the energy prices in Germany are pretty high at the moment. That would be greatly appreciated.

[@DE4DLY]

YOU HAVE to make more "montages" like this in the future, you really did well haha !

[@chloeleedow7250]

As an avid sponsor block user love that you have timer in your sospmer Sponsored segment I didn't even want to skip it because I could see it count down form a mere ten seconds. I hope more content creators pinch this idea because it really made me resent it less and not mind hearing it. Great video as usual. Love this build would be a great plex build even since the ssds would last ages because I'm not witting huge amounts just incremental updates. 😊

[@JeffGeerling]

Glad you appreciate it! I have been experimenting with how I do it. At minimum I want to always have some sort of overlay (usually top left) that says "Sponsored" during that portion. The countdown is handy for viewers to right-arrow through it. Some sponsors get shifty if I have it in but most are okay with it!

[@mikegrok]

Until your sponsor read with a map view I thought micro center was a UK business. The only business near me to source computer parts is Walmart and best buy. Next server I build may be worth an overnight in Atlanta to work out the kinks without a 3 day wait for parts, ie longer standoff screws, or 90 degree sata cables that bend the other way.

[@tractorman7733]

2:29- I agree; I would love to go to one of their stores, but the closest one is several hours away

[@eugeneware3296]

Full props for 80s montage music and the emotional damage clip!

[@at-boy]

You should use a chunk of that nvme for ZIL and enable sync again that will make your writes way better and secure. Also take a look at Redfish module for Ansible for IPMI, you can automate everything.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yeah; I'm working on incorporating this server into my homelab Ansible playbooks. I didn't find anything simple on TrueNAS, but maybe I can manage certain aspects via SSH/FreeBSD directly. It would be cool if there were management APIs for TrueNAS Core itself.

[@jonathanbuzzard1376]

For cooling you can probably replace the heatsink with a passive 2U heatsink. I have in a very similar setup and it only needs the airflow from the case fan for cooling. CPU temps maxed out at about 60-65°C depending on the room temperature and stay there even over several hours spinning all the cores. When it is sitting at idle it is around 40°C. I am also a big fan of using a standard 12V 4"x2" open frame PSU mounted inside a "standard" ATX/SFX/FlexATX etc. PSU case. It can then power the motherboard directly via the 4pin header (you should not be using both the 24 pin ATX and the 4 pin header at the same time) and derive the SDD power from the molex connector on the motherboard with a custom wiring harness that will really help with cooling. I am sure that red shirt Jeff could manage it 🙂

[@JeffGeerling]

Might try that at some point. I didn't even realize the 4-pin was a separate power source!

[@jonathanbuzzard1376]

@@JeffGeerling The other advantage is that you can get >90% efficient open frame PSU's. I used an ECP180PS12 from XP Power. Gives 120W convection cooled or 180W forced with about ~93% efficiency at the load I used it at. Less power to pay for which is always good but even more important less heat to get rid of which is super important. I just gut the donor PSU and cut a bit of FR4 to match the PSU PCB and mount the 4"x2" PSU on the FR4 with some headers. The main downside is the price and it is a bit of work especially making up the wiring harness, however the results are worth it IMHO.

[@JeffGeerling]

@@jonathanbuzzard1376 The PSU is definitely the loudest part at this point (I stuck a Noctua 60mm on the 50mm mount with a bracket on the CPU cooler and now that's silent and still very cool). I might have to hack into it. At minimum, put a little Noctua with a duct on the front, and just run it at like 1500 rpm. The PSU is a 180W and doesn't need to put out more than 40W most of the time.

[@TechnoTim]

2.5 Gb/s looks promising!

[@numerounotg]

Great video. Thanks Jeff🙏

[@ProDigit80]

Jeff, you don't really need an SSD fan, if your PSU has a built in fan. Just utilize the PSU's ability to extract air, and let the cold air come in the SSD space to cool the drives. I hardly doubt they need cooling though. But if you want even more cooling, just remove the casing, and run the SSD boards bare.

[@SudheeraPalihakkara]

Supermicro X9scm board and low RPM Noctua fans made me crazy with the random fan speed fluctuations when I built a similar system a year ago. Took me a good few days to realize that low RPM fans are an alien concept for server boards like this.

[@JeffGeerling]

Haha yeah, they're like "less than 2000 rpm, what is wrong with that fan!?"

[@HoboVibingToMusic]

"Scrapyard Server" Me: oh cool, I could maybe use thi- Jeff: 4250$ Me: uhhh. Never mind XD

[@JeffGeerling]

Hehe, well, drop in 1TB SSDs instead, and the price is well under $1000 for the same performance.

[@ad5000donnell]

You aren’t kidding about more locations we only have two in Atlanta. I used to live on the south side and was almost impossible to drive up there with traffic.

[@p3chv0gel22]

I always love when i see someone have a microcenter sponsorship and the comments go nuts I honestly want Something like microcenter here in Germany. Going around and just look at Hardware seems really cool, but the best i have is our old Media Markt, where you are happy, if you see a GT730 in a thrashed Box

[@scottdcarter]

Love that the CC show "incredible 80s vibes"

[@benjamintrathen6119]

Nice job Jeff, beautiful case!

[@ShawnBird]

Great video Jeff! It's so cool to see you take on more and more advanced challenges; you just keep learning

[@JeffGeerling]

It's always fun to have a new challenge. Especially when it's something I'll be using day-to-day and not a one-off project!

[@lucasew]

You can use the boot SSD or one of those nvme SSDs as a {write,read}ahead cache. ZFS support that. I think the ZFS name is L2ARC

[@ericfalkenberry2908]

Great video, Jeff! My next build is going to be something similar - Mini ITX and SSD RAID, but I may be using a RAID controller on the PCIe slot. Anyway, thanks for putting out this video.

[@diegodevops4151]

Great video and nice tips for tweaking my Truenas settings.

[@siberx4]

Keystone jacks in a rackmount case; brilliant! How have I not come across this before?!

[@JeffGeerling]

And so many of them :D Though the placement on the front isn't perfect, especially near the PSU. They're working on the design so keystone cables internally won't bump into anything!

[@joeg3950]

I’m jealous. Here in Montana, there are NO good retail establishments like Microcenter. Seattle and Denver: 12 hour drive. Salt Lake City: 8 hrs! This is tiring. Yes, we have the internet. However, we all know that it is a good thing to actually see the physical product.

[@ScottPlude]

Nice setup! You weren't clear about accomplishing your backup goals but if you have the bandwidth, backblaze has great pricing and the "cloud sync" task built into truenas is really simple to set up. I use that combo on almost all my customers.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yeah; in this case I already have a setup where I back up from one NAS to another locally through a Raspberry Pi, then after that, it runs a weekly `rclone` script that syncs all the backups to an Amazon Glacier bucket.

[@javaman2883]

I wish I could use backblaze or similar for backup. Alas the fastest internet providers in my area provide either "gigabit" with 10mbit up, for cable, or 100mbit down 5 mbit up, for DSL.

[@ph33lix]

I have the same motherboard from a cast-off Ubiquiti UAS-XG server. With updated BIOS, you can set that M.2 slot to be PCIE, which would then allow use (and boot) from NVMe (I have a WD Red 2TB NVME that's serving as edit pool). That would then also free up that orange SATA port for a 6th SATA SSD. The BIOS update also adds support for bifurcation of that single x16 slot so that you can fill up those expansion bays with NICs and the like. I'm currently experimenting around and may stick to TrueNAS Core as opposed to Scale since SMB share speeds are way better on the more mature Core software.

[@jfkastner]

Performance is probably bus saturation, all SATA ports are directly connected to the SoC Xeon QLC it is for the 870 QVO, and the writes may be slow past the "turbowrite" cache (samsung lingo) - the previous model 860 QVO has sustained write speeds of only 160 MBps past cache, also looking at the writes it's rated for 360x capacity only (*edit) also possible the slow inconsistent write speed gets better once the drive has been used a bit (like 'conditioning') to weed out the weak cells

[@ChrisgammaDE]

All those small references absolutly cought me off guard. Greetings from the floor. My stomach hurts

[@paulwratt]

Fun Fact: the 2008 Cray XT3 had a Apple Macbook Pro build into the front panel. It did what all good Apple products should do, showed the spinning 3D logo, thats it, yep nothing else, not even email, not terminal frontend, not web browser, just spinning 3D logo :)

[@gannas42]

I converted an old Compellent SC8000-series array to a TrueNAS system. Not only is it faster with the same hardware but it has saved me power usage as well - allowing the controllers (Dell R810's) to run in a lower power consumption mode and reducing the number of disks I need to run to achieve the same capacity and disk performance footprint.

[@whatthefunction9140]

Wow this music is great. Hope you're happy with yourself

[@derekp6636]

nice build, been really happy with ZFS myself as well. Next up we will see a HDD version for your backup server ;).

[@Foiliagegaming]

I love how the closed caption says "incredible 80s vibe". Can't argue with that

[@davidquirk8097]

Because of recent rising energy costs I've reconfigured my NAS (running XigmaNAS) based on the way I normally use it, to auto shut down at 23:00hrs and only restart on demand (basic button push because I could get wake on LAN to work yet and the unit is next to my bench anyway). Not the most techie setup but the reduction in energy costs is small but noticeable in my low energy house.

[@nomadelog]

That rack is becoming so awesome !

[@sageosaka]

I had a laugh at the "not ltt screwdriver" during the build montage haha

[@kyoudaiken]

I just bought an ASRock A520M-ITX/ac, an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 32Gigs of G.Skill Aegis 3200 CL16 RAM, installed Ubuntu Server 22.04 onto it, put in 4 Samsung SSD 870 EVO 4TB, made a RAID0 volume out of it, stuck a 10GBe ethernet card in that came with a former Motherboard I had, done. It's really fast and wasn't that expensive! And it has new parts, no risk of it just randomly breaking down. With a PICO PSU and a power brick with >80% efficiency, this thing only draws 16W at idle from the wall. Oh and it gives me 1.1 GB/s write and 1.1 GB/s read. ZFS is extremely slow by the way...

[@Wordsnwood]

A lot of LTT love in this one, but I wonder... was that a pre-production LTT screwdriver at @3:07 😉

[@austinwilson930]

Definitely looks like it.

[@JeffGeerling]

Nope! Just one of the ones I'm planning on comparing it to-that's the same model Snap-On I think Linus used to use.

[@Wordsnwood]

@@JeffGeerling I guess I don't dismantle enough systems as I've been following this long buildup to the LTT screwdriver with a lot of amusement. (as in, I really am not that interested. Of course then there is their much hyped $350 backpack. umm, no, sorry.)

[@JeffGeerling]

@@Wordsnwood Heh, yeah-the main thing for me is Linus is talking a pretty big game with the screwdriver. I mean... can it hold a candle to other $35-70 ratcheting drivers, much less the premium ones like PB-Swiss's? I want to test that.

[@jjmcook]

The fact that you didn't have to run the full Uncle Roger clip to still get the full effect: mmm Chef's Kiss sir!

[@MrJordanSDean]

Nice ltt screwdriver you're using there, good to see you finally got hold of one.

[@JeffGeerling]

Unfortunately not yet. I used a Snap-on, which is probably the main source of inspiration for the general look and feel of the LTT driver. Priced about the same too, so I've been using it to get a feel for the quality/drawbacks of a $70 ratcheting driver.

[@eliptikon]

This solution is quite good and you can probably replicate all your data to an offsite backup or another home NAS with spinning rust.

[@walterbkeen]

Great video, and couldn't agree more with you about your sponsor. Honolulu desperately needs a Microcenter.

[@awesomearizona-dino]

Ansible Fest 2019, Must been a wild time 🤣, But serially, Jeff you do awesome geek stuff. Thanks for sharing it.

[@weldonwilson]

Come on Jeff, your better than this. You don't need to start copying from Linus and dropping expensive equipment in every video. 😂

[@JeffGeerling]

Only the SSDs were expensive this time! Honestly I only need a few TB right now-I could've built this thing with four 1TB SSDs and kept the _total_ cost under $1k for a pretty darn good edit server!

[@markconger8049]

I think he already has the SSDs. The rest was chump change.

[@weldonwilson]

Well, to be fair, the last thing I saw Linus drop wasn't that expensive either. It was the glass from a picture frame that somehow managed not to break when it bounced of the floor. 😄

[@walterwhite2270]

@@weldonwilson now that is funny...got a link to that one? BTW - love watching your vids....always learn something when i do.....thx

[@weldonwilson]

@@walterwhite2270 it's this one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gKmcgH-VodJqoc0 Titled today's video was a disaster on the LTT channel

[@thebigt42]

We really wish we had a Microcenter in Birmingham AL

[@knomad666]

Oh how I love me my 80's montages, mainly because of the choice music... I also love how you are rescuing otherwise would-be eWaste!

[@SteelHorseRider74]

I'd assume it had auto-tuned some setting when it saw the hba in the system - and kept that setup even after you removed the hba again. Interesting build btw! Thanks for sharing.

[@mitchross2852]

This is great. Im about to do stripped mirrors also!

[@redslate]

Really liking the QVOs so far.

[@khyoyeon554]

Wendell1Techs has a nice calming voice. We need more of him.

[@twistidclowns]

For the amount of advertising I see from Microcenter you would think they had alot more locations.

[@Jango1989]

Woo! Yay Wendel! Great little build. I love the power optimisation. Sad that that is so important these days.

[@MrBlakBunny]

"hey bud you drop it you buy it" "who do i look like, Linus?" Hold for canned laughter "but seriously don't drop it"

[@JeffGeerling]

lol that employee was great, we did a few takes and he'd be a perfect foil.

[@keesnuyt8365]

zfs is awesome and has been awesome for well over a decade.

[@brittherself]

As soon as you said I wanted to talk to an expert I was like he called Wendell and then like clockwork there's Wendell

[@rodrimora]

As I'm just researching the best setup for Truenas myself, couple of questions. When setting up the vdev, could't you just add the 4 and set them up then as mirror? I don't think it's necessary to make 2 vdevs? That's just a UX/UI question really. Also the 5th can be selected as a hot spare in Truenas And, would't a couple of 120GB cheapo ssd's (i got a couple for 15€ each on amazon) work as SLOG to avoid having to use Sync "disabled"?

[@jsclayton]

That case looks amazing, excited for it to ship!

[@oscarcharliezulu]

I wish we had microcenter in Australia.

[@rui1863]

As a DBA and big ZFS fan -- The RAID10 setup is the way to go. Databases depend on a lot of random I/O and there is big different between RAIDZ and RAID10. I would also not recommend RAIDZ2 with only 5 drives. I follow the formula of 2^n+p. So for RAIDZ2 I would use 4,6, or 10 drive configuration.

[@social.media.command]

Thank you for your report.

[@Steamrick]

Interesting setup. Personally my home server is running this hardware: Ryzen 5 3600 on Asrock Rack X570D4U with 96GB ECC UDIMM, 10Gbit SFP+ Mellanox ConnectX-3 and 3 SSDs This also idles at 44-45W of power (running Windows Server with 7 VMs up but idle) with all the advantages of a server-grade mainboard (including IPMI), but the R5 3600 (and compatibility up to R9 5950X) gives it much more power on tap - the power parity being why I bring it up.

[@davidbronke5484]

MicroCenter is one of the few things I miss from the US.

[@sutekhxaos]

uh oh, jeff has fallen down the throughput chasing rabbit hole... EDIT: the uncle roger jump cut was peak comedy

[@marcogenovesi8570]

the raspberry isn't enough anymore for him

[@JeffGeerling]

Need... more... bandwidth! Next month: "I just installed a 400 Gbps core router in my homelab" :D

[@sutekhxaos]

@@marcogenovesi8570 we all knew that day was coming I think. I'm not sure if I can get behind this x86 heresy though.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

@@JeffGeerling it's ok, tell us where Patrick Kennedy touched your home lab on this rack cabinet doll

[@skyline8121]

Thank you Jeff, excellent idea to recycle server parts... can you do a full tutorial of true nas setup on that hardware, i will like to replicate it with a smaller budget in the ssd department.

[@muddyexport5639]

Thanks! Excellent content. (I miss the outtakes at the end, however;~)

[@justinooms6419]

Note 2 on page 1-18: Do not use the 4-pin DC power at PJ1 when the 24-pin ATX Power at JPW1 is connected to the power supply. Do not plug in both PJ1 and JPW1 at the same time.

[@Caddy666]

i'm using that same board. works really well with trunas. use the nvme as cache, with 4 8tb hdd's because we're not all swimming in money, like you, scrooge mcjeff.

[@mikestechtalks6781]

Jeff, Yes, MicroCenter is great. (Been a customer for over 35yrs, plus while in school worked there part time. ) You must live in California because your store layout isn't their traditional layout found in either OH or IL. That said... you spent 4K on 8TB drives. Why cheap out on the rest? I mean you could gone with a AMD Epyc based ATX motherboard combo (SuperMicro) and then put it in any case plus power supply. Or purchased MB and CPU separately. The other thing was the chassis. If you're doing a NAS, why not opt for hot swap? I haven't priced out the used stuff, but you could have done a bit more research, paid a bit more, but would have gotten something you'll want to keep around a bit longer. The other thing... why not also consider wi-fi? Sure not for your editing, but if you wanted to use it with your laptop?

[@jaysonbunnell8097]

the nearest micro center is a bit far from me, so I went on my birthday (gotta treat yourself sometimes). It was awesome, and if given the opportunity I will let them bankrupt me lol

[@JeffGeerling]

Ha! Just make sure you set a budget for when you go in :D

[@opticbit]

Fry's has been gone a couple years now, would think microcenter might take over some of those locations.. the old Fry's here in Vegas is still closed off. Don't know if anyone is planning on going in.

[@joelcarson4602]

Trivia note, the build montage theme music is the same that the Cassette Comeback channel has been using as the channel theme.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Can we see Red Shirt Jeff do the next Micro Centre sponsored bit? YBIYBI

[@nxvasix8696]

We used to have a ‘micro centre’ in the UK called maplins until they went bust a couple of years ago. I miss it.

[@korokikaze2221]

The main problem for me is the consumption. Clearly 60/70W is not too much for this kind of NAS. But, for a home NAS, it is crazy. I'm still waiting for doing some similar but with raspberry.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yes-my similar Pi NAS setup used less than 30W (so less than half), but with the current generation Pi could only do 1 Gbps or a little more over a 2.5 Gbps connection with the same SSDs. I'm hoping a good RK3588-based setup, or a new Pi someday, could get similar throughput (500 MB/sec or more written through a 10G connection) for 25W or less. We'll see!

[@tsionwilliamson1385]

I too wish microcenter had more locations ive never seen one before or been in one i live in washington state

[@jens-digitalwoodwork9852]

Great case, i like to shrink my homelab rack and looking for a short case - that will fit great!

[@JeffGeerling]

This is almost perfect for a Mini ITX build-they're making a few revisions to fix a few quirks I ran into. And they even have two mounts for 80mm fans on the front (one on each side) that I didn't notice until *after* I made the video, oops!

[@jens-digitalwoodwork9852]

@@JeffGeerling i love the keystone-idea - great for custom/tinker-build :-) and they are a europe based company with fast and hopefully hasslefree delivery to germany :-)

[@henryledbetter9686]

Micro Center sells used flash drives as new (specifically the green 512GB model)- this is just coming out but I put it in the LTT sponsor complaints as well

[@welshboy2012]

I wish we had a Micro Center here in the UK...oh, and Raspberry Pi's in stock

[@EvanBoldt]

I keep seeing deals on Amazon for used racks with case, PSU, memory, and storage all included for sub $400 and some of them have crazy RAM capacities like 128+GB. Most seem to have small and slow storage though.

[@JeffGeerling]

Many of those are proprietary systems from Dell or HP though, and you won't be able to piecemeal upgrade parts like the motherboard or case over time :(

[@D9ID9I]

It is more versatile to run plain ubuntu/debian with mdraid for the raid10 storage and just use Samba as a docker container. Then you will realize that you actually can run HA as a docker container too. As well as MQQT and so on. And use libvirt for virtual machines. And power consumption won't be huge. And then you will start to think why the hell do you need these RPI toys at all. btw, since you have spare 8x PCI-E you could put cheap 40Gbe card there for pennies.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yeah, I'm considering bumping up to 25 or 40 GbE someday. Right now 10 GbE is fine though, and gear is becoming more available again.