Seeking advice on first NAS build

[megruder]

I'm piecing together my first home server and trying to stay under $100. Before I get any grief, I'm well aware none of this is even remotely optimal, probably not even suggested. This setup is more for me to understand how all the hardware/software fits together AND determine what I want to focus on for a more long-term build.

Primary Use: Family file share for PDFs, ebooks, music (storage, no streaming), etc.
Secondary Use (if *feasible*): Test server to determine what other uses we may want.

Hardware: Dell Optiplex 9020 MT with i7-4790 (3.6 GHz) and 16 GB DDR3 SDRAM; 3 x 3TB HDD for storage; 1 x 1TB HDD for boot (will swap for small SDD if I can locate the spare one I own)
I picked up the PC for $60 on ebay for multiple, future repurposing projects and my friend is giving me the 3TB drives so definitely under the $100 price point.

Proposed TrueNAS setup: SCALE 3-wide RAIDZ1

CORE vs SCALE: I'm honestly not sure if I should go with CORE or SCALE, but if the setup doesn't completely implode I'd like to add a few plugins/containers either to host a website, home assistant, plex, etc. Based on the info I've consumed, SCALE might be there slightly better way to go. Either way, I don't really have Linux experience but I'm not completely lost in a command line environment.

RAIDZ: The single disk parity is mostly because these are used disks and I don't want to completely lose all my work if one dies. One big goal of this setup is to move ALL of our files from various cloud storage, local storage, and random external storage into one place, sort it down, and get rid of duplicates. Once that's done it will get moved to the newer, shinier NAS/server built based on lessons learned with this setup.

Please forgive and correct anything I've miscommunicated/misstated. I've read through a BUNCH of the beginner/intro documentation here and tried to avoid the regularly scheduled obnoxiousness. Any and all comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Katie

 

[Patrick_3000]

I used to run Truenas Core, and before that its predecessor Freenas, on an Optiplex 7020 MT, which is almost identical to the 9020. It worked perfectly. As I recall, it has four SATA ports (I assume the 9020 is the same), and its HDD cage can fit two 3.5" drives, and there is space to dangle another 2.5" drive, which I used for boot. (There is also optical installed typically, which would take up another SATA port if you leave it hooked up, although that's likely unnecessary with Truenas).

So, when you say 3 x 3 TB hard drives, I assume one will be a 2.5" drive, since I don't believe a third 3.5" drive will fit in that case.

As I mentioned, that setup worked perfectly for me for years, although back then I ran a two-way mirror, which is somewhat risky. The reasons I switched to a different setup a couple of years ago were (1) I wanted a three-way mirror, and my pool size of around 5-6 TB was too big for a three-way mirror with a 2.5" hard drive; and (2) I wanted ECC RAM, which as I recall is not supported by the 7020 (and probably 9020) motherboard, even though I think Intel processors back in that era often supported it, unlike later on.

In any event, in your case, I think it should work for a starter system, because with all three drives being < 3 TB, you can use a 2.5" drive as one of them, so they'll fit in the case.

The only thing I would caution against is RAID Z1. Your fault tolerance there will be that you can afford to lose one drive without your pool being destroyed, but you can't lose two drives. The problem, then, is that if you lose one drive, once you replace it, resilvering is likely to take a day or two, and the stress on the two good drives from the resilvering process could trash one of them, thus bringing down your pool. A three-way mirror would be far safer (though it would hold less data). That being said, in the past I've resilvered a two-way HDD mirror, which has the same fault tolerance as RAID Z1, and the process went smoothly, although I was sweating the entire time. Nowadays, I would never use RAID Z1 or a two-way mirror, especially with hard drives given the length of time that resilvering takes.

As for CORE vs. SCALE, there are a lot of differences of opinion in this forum. I personally use SCALE and am a fan of it, because of the more user-friendly web UI, the fact that it's Linux under the hood, which I'm far more familiar with than FreeBSD, and the easier process for running VMs, although it doesn't sound like the last point has relevance to your use case since it doesn't sound like you'll be installing VMs.

Bottom line, however, is that you can't go wrong with either SCALE or CORE. They're both phenomenal in my opinion, and I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy using whichever you choose.

 

[megruder]

I used to run Truenas Core, and before that its predecessor Freenas, on an Optiplex 7020 MT, which is almost identical to the 9020. It worked perfectly. As I recall, it has four SATA ports (I assume the 9020 is the same), and its HDD cage can fit two 3.5" drives, and there is space to dangle another 2.5" drive, which I used for boot. (There is also optical installed typically, which would take up another SATA port if you leave it hooked up, although that's likely unnecessary with Truenas).

So, when you say 3 x 3 TB hard drives, I assume one will be a 2.5" drive, since I don't believe a third 3.5" drive will fit in that case.

As I mentioned, that setup worked perfectly for me for years, although back then I ran a two-way mirror, which is somewhat risky. The reasons I switched to a different setup a couple of years ago were (1) I wanted a three-way mirror, and my pool size of around 5-6 TB was too big for a three-way mirror with a 2.5" hard drive; and (2) I wanted ECC RAM, which as I recall is not supported by the 7020 (and probably 9020) motherboard, even though I think Intel processors back in that era often supported it, unlike later on.

In any event, in your case, I think it should work for a starter system, because with all three drives being < 3 TB, you can use a 2.5" drive as one of them, so they'll fit in the case.

The only thing I would caution against is RAID Z1. Your fault tolerance there will be that you can afford to lose one drive without your pool being destroyed, but you can't lose two drives. The problem, then, is that if you lose one drive, once you replace it, resilvering is likely to take a day or two, and the stress on the two good drives from the resilvering process could trash one of them, thus bringing down your pool. A three-way mirror would be far safer (though it would hold less data). That being said, in the past I've resilvered a two-way HDD mirror, which has the same fault tolerance as RAID Z1, and the process went smoothly, although I was sweating the entire time. Nowadays, I would never use RAID Z1 or a two-way mirror, especially with hard drives given the length of time that resilvering takes.

As for CORE vs. SCALE, there are a lot of differences of opinion in this forum. I personally use SCALE and am a fan of it, because of the more user-friendly web UI, the fact that it's Linux under the hood, which I'm far more familiar with than FreeBSD, and the easier process for running VMs, although it doesn't sound like the last point has relevance to your use case since it doesn't sound like you'll be installing VMs.

Bottom line, however, is that you can't go wrong with either SCALE or CORE. They're both phenomenal in my opinion, and I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy using whichever you choose.

Thanks, Patrick!

Yes, the 9020 is damn near identical to the 7020 and I'm planning to pull the optical drive. I haven't received the case yet but based on photos I've seen, it looks like the two drive bays at the base may hold 3.5" drives. Regardless, I'll jury-rig something for the third data drive.

I appreciate your point about the resilvering. Like I said, this is my first home server and not entirely sure what I'm doing. I'll continue to do some research and may look at purchasing a 4th drive. Mirror a 2-wide vdev then do the unspeakable and boot from a SSD connected via USB.

I'm less concerned about data loss, I know I'm taking a risk and I can retrieve any and all lost data. I'm more interested in testing what I can do with the system so I know what will be most useful for a future, well-designed setup.

Thanks!

 

[Patrick_3000]

One other thing I thought of. If you're using three hard drives for your pool, what will you use for your boot drive? You can likely fit 2 x 3.5" drives and 1 x 2.5" in drive in that case, but are you planning to try to squeeze in an additional 2.5" drive, which would use up the fourth SATA port? I'm not sure if that's possible.

Another option would be to pick up a PCIE M.2 NVME card and a small NVME SSD. You could probably get both for around $50 total. You'd need to check if that would be bootable, but I suspect it would.