HP Proliant DL360-Gen10 as a TrueNAS server?

[The Cobra]

Hi everyone, Happy Holidays to all!!! So I recently retired our "old" fileserver which was our VM machine. It is an HP Proliant DL360 G10 with Dual Intel Xeon Gold 5115 CPUs (20 cores/40 threads), 64GB of RAM, dual 750W PSUs. It only had 2 250GB 10k HDDs. I decided to go to eBay and purchase 8/1.2TB HDDs for $255 and will run them in a raid array obviously. However, this isn't going to be a windows box. It'll be running TrueNAS Scale. For the OS, I would like to have a separate SSD. I have attached pics with this post. It has 2 PCIe slots and a 64 bit slot on it. In one of the pics below, you will see where it says "PORT 1" and "PORT 2" These look like M,2 slots but I am not so sure. There is also an internal SATA slot just above "PORT 3" covered by the blue ribbon.

I need to figure out the proper setup for the TrueNAS disk array. DO I need a cache drive? Can I utilize one of those "PORT" slots as a cache drive? ANy help appreciated.

 

[mwroobel]

Port1 And Port2 are multilane SAS/SATA connectors, usually SATAx4 on the 360's. If you want to install an NVMe drive, get a PCIe slot to m.2 NVMe adapter card and install it that way.

 

[The Cobra]

Port1 And Port2 are multilane SAS/SATA connectors, usually SATAx4 on the 360's. If you want to install an NVMe drive, get a PCIe slot to m.2 NVMe adapter card and install it that way.

I just found an SSD cage on eBay for $65 used with the cords. It has all the cords with it and found a youtube video to install it. I have 4 Kingston 128GB drives that are compatible with the internals of the server. I will use them in some sort of RAID configuration.

 

[The Cobra]

Also need to figure out the boot drive. I am looking at this:

It's a 960gb NVM for $109.

 

[MrGuvernment]

First things first:

1. Do not raid the drives
2. Use an HBA, not a raid controller, setting each drive as RAID 0 or JBOD does not always work in raid controllers, see if you can flash the raid controller into an IT mode.
3. You do no need a cache drive, TrueNAS uses RAM (ARC) for caching. the rule with TrueNAS is always add more RAM, not cache drives. L2ARC (cache drives) only come in handy in very specific use cases, and if not matched can actually make performance worse.
4. What do you plan to use this to store? Are you doing NFS shares or just SMB? If you are doing NFS shares and running anything like VMs, now you need to look into a SLOG drive (which only specific SSDs can be used like intel optanes)

960GB boot drive is useless, once you install TrueNAS you can NOT use the boot drive for anything else. Get a 2.5 SSD drive or something for the boot drive, it is all you need, 128GB of less.

Those port slots are for an HBA / Raid controller connectivity, you can get splitters to convert them from that to say 4x SATA or something if needed.

I HIGHLY suggest going over to the TrueNAS community and doing some reading on their threads, there is a lot to wrap one's head around to set up TrueNAS properly, not half arsed.

https://www.truenas.com/community/

https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/coretutorials/

 

[Vengance_01]

Listen to Mr. Guv.

Here is what I would do.

1 Cheap SATA 2.5 SSD for boot (or 2 and mirror them in ZFS Pool)
1 NVME(fastest you can get and biggest you can afford) for VMs and Containers(Use PCI-E to NVMe adapter to get full bandwidth)
Spinners for storage. Would try on the onboard SAS controller and set it to JBOD. Test Freenas Scale with some dummy data and see if you get disk errors. Also if you have room for 8 drives consider doing a raid 2z with 6 drives, add a hot-spare and leave 1 bay for cold spare or a very large drive backups