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My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the funniest edit have read in while.
Waiting for the edit to the edit
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For system failure, yes, but not if data retention and recovery is your primary concern. When building a device primarily used for storing personal things, I'd much prefer to save money on the motherboard and risk that failing than skimping on the drives themselves
Eh, cheap motherboards aren't a panacea that can't hurt the rest of the hardware, I personally don't skimp on motherboards, and would much rather skimp on the drives themselves as I have redundancy and 1-2 drives failing wouldn't hurt too much. And data retention is my top priority. Motherboards have fried connected hardware before, poor grounding/ESD protections, firmware bugs together with aggressive power manageme…
I’ve experienced many drive failures over the years, but never lost data due to RAID. Failing MB or PSU on the other hand has wiped out my entire system.
I was looking at N class CPU builds and very quickly realized they're not for me. For storage only over LAN, low power prioritized use they're a valid play, but there are some tradeoffs that are not obvious at first glance. See those NVMEs he stuck in there? They're running at 1/8th their rated link speed. Yeah...12.5%. (PCIe 4.0 x4 vs PCIe 3.0 x1). This board is one of the better ones on pcie layouts [0], but 9 gen3…
Hmm good point. But to make sure I understand you completely, this only really matters for compute-heavy workloads, right?
Realistically for your DIY stuff you're talking a different beast to these NASs. Bang for your buck you'd be attaching the mass 3.5" storage in an external second hand JBOD enclosure and the main device would be dealing with the faster storage and have an HBA to connect to it.
[1] edit: as Havoc pointed out I need my coffee should be 2gb/s which does change the point.
> My only complaint about the motherboards has been that buying them from one of the Chinese e-tail sites like AliExpress is considered problematic by some. I love some AliExpress deals for some of my hobby purchases, but a NAS motherboard is not one of them. The contrast between the fashionable case, boutique Noctua fans, and then an AliExpress motherboard doesn’t inspire confidence in the priorities for this build.…
That's a Topton board from the official Topton store on AliExpress. It's strictly equivalent to buying straight from the manufacturer and will be shipped by Topton not AliExpress. The Jonsbo case is probably both cheaper and easier to buy from AliExpress than Amazon too to be fair. It's also a Chinese brand.
This listing should be as close to a sure thing as you can get on AliExpress. But even then, dealing with AliExpress when things go sideways isn't always all that great.
I have purchased this motherboard from this link, I'd do it again in a heartbeat if I needed to, and I wouldn't fault anyone for avoiding AliExpress either.
If somebody wants to buy from a different vendor, it's sometimes possible to find resellers on Amazon or eBay (myself included). The prices might be a bit more expensive, but some folks might think it's worth it.
I talk about it in the blog, it's my understanding that there's shortages of the Intel CPUs which I would expect to drive up the pricing.
My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm good point. But to make sure I understand you completely, this only really matters for compute-heavy workloads, right?
Yes, mostly. PCIE 3.0 x1 lane gets you 500mb/s [1] not much point to it compared to a regular ssd on sata3 which could do 600mb/s. So if you want very fast storage you would also think about it. Realistically for your DIY stuff you're talking a different beast to these NASs. Bang for your buck you'd be attaching the mass 3.5" storage in an external second hand JBOD enclosure and the main device would be dealing with…
Better question is how the article is getting 1.2 on fio tests. That must be a testing artifact
I was looking at N class CPU builds and very quickly realized they're not for me. For storage only over LAN, low power prioritized use they're a valid play, but there are some tradeoffs that are not obvious at first glance. See those NVMEs he stuck in there? They're running at 1/8th their rated link speed. Yeah...12.5%. (PCIe 4.0 x4 vs PCIe 3.0 x1). This board is one of the better ones on pcie layouts [0], but 9 gen3…
Hmm good point. But to make sure I understand you completely, this only really matters for compute-heavy workloads, right?
So if you crunch the numbers you'll see storage (esp flash) is much faster than network, meaning NAS can cut corners on storage. If you're running something like a VM that accesses the storage directly then suddenly storage speed matters
My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
It's great for people who just want storage and don't want the heavy features that came with TrueNAS' move to Linux (Kubernetes, etc.) or who want full control over vfs_fruit options for serving Macs.