New NAS

[SomeFknGuy]

So...wasn't sure where to post this so I'm throwing it in here since it's directly related to storage. I'm building a new NAS, 8x14tb SATA drives, i7-12700k, LSI-9305-16i and the rub is...I don't know what motherboard to go for. I'm going back and forth trying to decide between ECC and non-ECC ram and the motherboard determines that...Or ECC determines motherboard. I'd like to go DDR5 if I can, but not against DDR 4 I suppose. Given the amount of storage this machine has, bit flip or data corruption would be a big PITA... Could anyone point me in the right direction? Should I just get a decent quality 790 board and hope for the best? This machine will be running TrueNAS if that makes any difference

If it matters, the case is a jonsbo n5 and supports up to e-atx boards...so size isn't a problem.

 

[OFaceSIG]

Look... all things being equal, ECC is better than not. But don't let people tell you that you'll lose data and all this other non-sense if you don't. I've been building nas4free, freenas, truenas for damn near 15 years. On the CHEAPEST used crap I could get my hands on. I've never gone back to a file I've needed and have it not work. Turn on frequent data scrubs and you'll be fine.

If you're going flash, use good SSDs. That I will say.

 

[uOpt]

Always do ECC when you can.

I'd take the Supermicro X13SAE.

 

[SomeFknGuy]

Look... all things being equal, ECC is better than not. But don't let people tell you that you'll lose data and all this other non-sense if you don't. I've been building nas4free, freenas, truenas for damn near 15 years. On the CHEAPEST used crap I could get my hands on. I've never gone back to a file I've needed and have it not work. Turn on frequent data scrubs and you'll be fine.

If you're going flash, use good SSDs. That I will say.

I'm planning on running just spinny drives, with dual disk parity between the 8 drives in ZFS. Gonna lower my over-all pool capacity to ~72tb but thats significantly higher than the 40tb I have now and I think it would be worth it. Short of losing 2 drives I should be good to go...i think...heh. Man the W680 boards are sexy but used still running at $300(or higher in the case of that x13sae) it's hard to stomach... I think I'll just go for a good 790 board and decent quality ram... I've made it 10 years with a qnap box not running ECC...I think the more I see of responses like yours that I really should be good to go without it...Some day I might buy another 4 14tb drives to fill the case and move up to 3 parity drives....the likelihood of 3 drives shitting the bed at the same time is so miniscule...

 

[OFaceSIG]

I'm planning on running just spinny drives, with dual disk parity between the 8 drives in ZFS. Gonna lower my over-all pool capacity to ~72tb but thats significantly higher than the 40tb I have now and I think it would be worth it. Short of losing 2 drives I should be good to go...i think...heh. Man the W680 boards are sexy but used still running at $300(or higher in the case of that x13sae) it's hard to stomach... I think I'll just go for a good 790 board and decent quality ram... I've made it 10 years with a qnap box not running ECC...I think the more I see of responses like yours that I really should be good to go without it...Some day I might buy another 4 14tb drives to fill the case and move up to 3 parity drives....the likelihood of 3 drives shitting the bed at the same time is so miniscule...

Since you're staying on hard drives, depending on what you're doing it will effect how many drives will be helpful. The age old adage with hard drives still rings true. If you need I/O then you need as many drives as you can get. If you're just storing files, then fewer drives is okay.

Also, TrueNAS will use every bit of RAM you give it for Caching. So throw as much RAM as you reasonably can at the box. I only have a very small array of 4x2TB SSDs, that I use for modest file storage and for NFS for my proxmox box. Ten Gig link between them. 10 Gig link from my NAS to the rest of the network. Between the SSDs, 32GB of RAM, and 10Gbps interfaces the VMs feel super snappy. File transfers to my main machine at 2.5Gbps almost always saturate the 2.5Gbps link as well.

 

[SomeFknGuy]

Since you're staying on hard drives, depending on what you're doing it will effect how many drives will be helpful. The age old adage with hard drives still rings true. If you need I/O then you need as many drives as you can get. If you're just storing files, then fewer drives is okay.

Also, TrueNAS will use every bit of RAM you give it for Caching. So throw as much RAM as you reasonably can at the box. I only have a very small array of 4x2TB SSDs, that I use for modest file storage and for NFS for my proxmox box. Ten Gig link between them. 10 Gig link from my NAS to the rest of the network. Between the SSDs, 32GB of RAM, and 10Gbps interfaces the VMs feel super snappy. File transfers to my main machine at 2.5Gbps almost always saturate the 2.5Gbps link as well.

Going to be running 64gb ram to begin. The motherboard I'm considering is a gigabyte z790 with a realtek 2.5gb ethernet controller, will probably get a PCI-E intel x710 5/2.5 dual port card to speed things up... once I get this thing up and running i'll be moving all of my hard wired stuff up to 5 gig nics and hopefully be able to transmit stuff pretty quick.

 

[OFaceSIG]

Going to be running 64gb ram to begin. The motherboard I'm considering is a gigabyte z790 with a realtek 2.5gb ethernet controller, will probably get a PCI-E intel x710 5/2.5 dual port card to speed things up... once I get this thing up and running i'll be moving all of my hard wired stuff up to 5 gig nics and hopefully be able to transmit stuff pretty quick.

Realteks can be problematic with TrueNAS or any BSD based system, if that's what you're going to use. Intels are supported much better. Both my 1gig cards and 10gig cards are intels. I'll have to look into the x710. I wasn't aware they had a model that supported 5Gbps.