Is SCALE right choice for this hardware and use-case?

[tarelda]

Hi,
I have following NAS system to work with:

• Terramaster F4-423 case and mobo with Intel N5095
• 16GB of DDR4 Non-ECC Kingston RAM
• 2xSamsung 980 NVMe 500GB SSD's

Four bays will be populated with server grade drives as follows:

• 12TB HDD
• 12TB HDD
• 1TB HDD
• 1TB HDD

My use case is pretty simple. I want three things:

1. Minio instance backed by 1TB drives. Preferably bare metal drives formatted with XFS or EXT4. (This doesn't need ton of resilience, because writes will be rare and instance will be mirrored into two geographically spaced S3 storage locations).
2. Mirrored storage od 12TB drives with Samba mountable shares for local backups.
3. PostGIS database instance running on SSD drives with regular backups to Minio instance. Also maybe some random containers that I might need.

I don't intend to use it for any media streaming and stuff like that.

Question is SCALE right choice for this hardware or should I just go bare Debian/Ubuntu?

 

[sretalla]

Question is SCALE right choice for this hardware or should I just go bare Debian/Ubuntu?

I suspect you'll need to go with something other than TrueNAS due to the wish for direct disk access for a non-ZFS filesystem and the lack of a separate disk controller to passthrough to a VM (in addition to having too little RAM to run a VM).

TrueNAS SCALE can handle 2 & 3, but not 1 in your list.

 

[tarelda]

I suspect you'll need to go with something other than TrueNAS due to the wish for direct disk access for a non-ZFS filesystem and the lack of a separate disk controller to passthrough to a VM (in addition to having too little RAM to run a VM).

TrueNAS SCALE can handle 2 & 3, but not 1 in your list.

I rethought this a little bit and I am not sure about performance but I might as well bind two datasets from two pools into Minio and get what I wanted.

Regarding SSD's since these are boot devices only I feel this is a waste of perfectly good Samsung drives. Should I get instead cheap generic SSD's (likes of Kioxia Exceria) and configure TrueNAS to have mirrored boot device?

 

[artlessknave]

Regarding SSD's since these are boot devices only I feel this is a waste of perfectly good Samsung drives.

yes. yes it is.

cheap generic SSD's (likes of Kioxia Exceria)

dear lord please no. just get some kingston a400 120gb. the are like 20$ each and will last nearly forever.

XFS or EXT4.

nope. zfs or nothing.

PostGIS database instance running on SSD

nope. you cannot install these. it would have to be a VM or docker, and you cant share the boot SSDs with anything.

I agree with the earlier post; truenas is likely not the right tool for what you are describing. you can get a decent webui with webmin or cockpit. the truenas UI is nice but it's focused due to the appliance nature of truenas.