Build with consumer DDR5 ram

[CheeryFlame]

Hello, I'm having an hard time finding a reliable mini-itx motherboard that's not overpriced. It seems that the Asus ROG STRIX B760-I is the only one that would win in the price versus quality category. This is considering I'm in Canada.

The board has DDR5 ram which I've never used before and isn't discussed in this page. I know that ram is something quite important when it comes to data servers.

Now my question is if TrueNAS Scale is working well with DDR5 yet or it's not recommended.

This is the ram I've found so far.

 

[Etorix]

RAM generation is essentially irrelevant, but CPUs and motherboards which use DDR5 are considered "too new" to be recommended at this point. The RAM you've found is not ECC, so not advised.

Look for older hardware, running on DDR4.
If you are set for mini-ITX, consider Supermicro A2SDi or X10SDV motherboards for your NAS.

 

[CheeryFlame]

RAM generation is essentially irrelevant, but CPUs and motherboards which use DDR5 are considered "too new" to be recommended at this point. The RAM you've found is not ECC, so not advised.

Look for older hardware, running on DDR4.
If you are set for mini-ITX, consider Supermicro A2SDi or X10SDV motherboards for your NAS.

This can't be right for my situation. The price of the boards you're suggesting are much over my budget for this build. Basically I already have my main server that I would backup to my unlimited Google Drive account. They decided to enforce data limits of 5 TB which isn't enough for my use case. I'm very short on money and decided to build a TrueNAS build instead of buying a server or a consumer NAS with closed source software (Synology/Qnap/etc) and bad hardware.

I'm profiting this situation to setup my Plex server on this new build that'll run with an Intel CPU that supports Quicksync. This will save a lot of heat and even give better performance for transcoding with Plex. Doing this on the r730xd so far has been problematic (heat, noise, etc)

Since this is only a ZFS replication and Plex server build I don't care about ECC since I already have it on my main server. Or should I say, I can't afford it, rather than I don't care. I've checked all the consumer NAS options, all the tower servers and rack servers on TechMikeNY and nothing can match/beat the price/size/noise/energy of a consumer mini-itx PC.

The build has to be small and not too noisy so I can put it at my parent's house.

So my question stand still. How different is consumer DDR5 from DDR4 ram, considering there are so many TrueNAS server out there running on consumer hardware?

 

[Etorix]

If price is a concern, definitely go for second-hand and/or older hardware! DDR4 is cheaper than DDR5, and second-hand DDR4 RDIMM is MUCH cheaper.
The boards I've suggested are low power, and their sub-45 W SoC can be cooled totally silently by a Noctua NF-A6x25 fan on the CPU heatsink.

 

[CheeryFlame]

If price is a concern, definitely go for second-hand and/or older hardware! DDR4 is cheaper than DDR5, and second-hand DDR4 RDIMM is MUCH cheaper.
The boards I've suggested are low power, and their sub-45 W SoC can be cooled totally silently by a Noctua NF-A6x25 fan on the CPU heatsink.

I think you might not be in Canada as it seems very easy for you to find decently priced used equipment. It's not the case here, you can try to go on TechMikeNY which is the cheapest place for sourcing server parts in north america. You can also try ebay.ca and you'll see that you can't beat this price;

Current build; https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/VnrHVw

Also going your route wont fix my Plex server issue with heat and simultaneous transcodes.

I'm curious to know when does consumer builds have stopped being something usable for a TrueNAS server. 6 months ago when I was about to buy a Synology everyone was saying to get a used server or build a consumer PC and that would be much better than a Synology. They were right so far BUT that's because my main server budget has different requirements than my replication and plex server.

 

[asap2go]

I found no issues when playing around with SCALE on DDR5 RAM. And while it is recommended to use ECC, it is not required.
So I think this will work just fine.

 

[Whattteva]

I honestly would rather have larger DDR4 RAM than faster, but smaller capacity DDR5 for the same price and ECC DDR4 are cheap and plentiful. I myself got 224 GB of it for only ~ $270 USD. ECC DDR5 for the same capacity woulda' cost me easily triple that price if not more.

For me, it's not really so much if it's supported or not, but the capacity is what's way more important cause it enables the server to be much more flexible. It allows me to run a lot of VM's and still have plenty leftover for ZFS cache.

Also, my main server (first in the sig) only cost me ~$400 more than your list, while having all enterprise-grade hardware and being dead silent (more silent than my consumer desktop surprisingly).
Admittedly, it does come with a few caveats:

• Used parts sourced off eBay.
• Probably would consume a little bit more power on average.
• Massive case.

But in return, I got the following specs, which actually allowed me to consolidate all my machines into just one universal silent system.

• 224 GB ECC RAM (and I still have 4 more slots to populate)
• 10 Core / 20 Threads CPU
• 5 PCIe slots
• 10 SATA ports
• Dual 10G Intel NIC
• IPMI

 

[asap2go]

I honestly would rather have larger DDR4 RAM than faster, but smaller capacity DDR5 for the same price and ECC DDR4 are cheap and plentiful. I myself got 224 GB of it for only ~ $270 USD. ECC DDR5 for the same capacity woulda' cost me easily triple that price if not more.

For me, it's not really so much if it's supported or not, but the capacity is what's way more important cause it enables the server to be much more flexible. It allows me to run a lot of VM's and still have plenty leftover for ZFS cache.

I agree as I also made this coice recently. But if DDR4 is really that hard to get in Canada then DDR5 is also fine.
If the setup is just for plex and replication then going with a modern processor with a good iGPU will be the cheapest way to get decent 4K decoding.
Older Ryzen 5X00G and comparable Intel processors do not support DDR4 ECC anyway and have some other caveats as well (only PCIe 3.0 etc.).

 

[Etorix]

I'm curious to know when does consumer builds have stopped being something usable for a TrueNAS server.

Consumer hardware has never been recommended here. You may use a gaming motherboard if you want, but you'll be frowned upon.
And I find it hard to believe that a shiny new board and DDR5 RAM can come out cheaper than the previous generation and its DDR4—at the very least, you should be able to buy more capacity for the same price with DDR4, as pointed out by @Whattteva. Wouldn't sellers on eBay or ServeTheHome forum "south of the border" ship to Canada?

Also going your route wont fix my Plex server issue with heat and simultaneous transcodes.

Plex and transcode were not part of your initial question. I'll leave it to you how to solve that, but I observe that the tall CPU cooler you've picked will make it hard to reach for drives, and you may have to take the CPU cooler off to replace a failed hard drive.