Manderis

Maybe I just derped. I have no prior experience with TrueNAS and had 2 Sata drives installed, 1 x 500 GB, 1x 1 TB. I tried to set a mirror with these two drives at 500 GB but somehow ended up with just the 500 GB drive in the vdev and the 1 TB drive was not included and still available. From then on HexOS recognize the mirror vdev and complained about a drive missing. I might need to say that I am particularly good at breaking software, which was a real pain for my previous employer.

Edit: redundant, I missed the second page of this topic. Ups. I leave it here anyways. You can go to TrueNAS and crate a vdev with just one drive. Did this as a intermediate solution for playing around before my HDD's get shipped. Ad I never used TrueNAS I just went to storage, create vdev as mirror (don't know why with just one drive), select my one drive, ignored all the individual settings and pressed continue a bunch. Gets detected in hexos no problem and works fine. Just with the warning because the storage is degraded (I think it is expecting some kind of redundancy).

I got the Elitedesk with the 9500t and 2x 4 tb WD Red Pro's (7200 rpm) are on the way. I can borrow a power measuring plug around Christmas. So I hope to be able to optimize the power consumption. I was positively supprised by HP's use of a 250 W 80+ Platinum PSU. Fingers crossed that I get below 20 W in idle. Be aware that you will have trouble installing more than 2x 3.5" drives in any HP SFF case, this will probably be true for similar Lenovo or Dell models. I think I can dremel the 2.5" bay away and print something if I want to. For know I am fine with 2 drives plus Sata SSD. I am locking myself in a two drive scenario a bit but I hope that maybe hexos will support expanding 2 drive mirrors one day. And 4 TB is fine for me for some time. When the time comes I will either modify the case or print a new one.

If you want to use it as a game server I would always connect via Cable to the network. Your milage may vary depending on how stable your wifi is but personally I wouldn't bother with this potential bottle neck unless it is really not practical to run a cable. If you don't already have the 3700X I would consider a Ryzen with iGPU and ditch the dedicated GPU to save some power. Probably enough for 3 x 4k streams but maybe someone else can give a confirmation. Maybe 4700 G or 3400 G (big step down). Somewhere it was stated as a rule of thumb that zfs likes 1 GB of RAM for 1 TB of storage.

I read somewhere that the feature mirrored to raidz1 is supposed to come to TrueNAS. And betting on features that currently don't exist are basically what we are all doing here. Alternatively you can always add another vdev, right? But I lose some capacity and setup flexibility if I have multiple vdevs with a few drives compared to a single vdev with more drives, right?

Hey everyone, Realistically I just need around 2 - 4 TB of storage for my data (and friends and family), so I am locking at two or three 2TB drives or maybe two 4 TB ones. But pricing really sucks for this low range. I am locking at 20 - 40 €/TB (from used to new) for decent CMR drives that have reasonably low power consumption. If I look at new 2 TB HDDs suddenly SSDs make sense because they are not that much more and use way less power (this turns around fast at high capacity). As I have a 1 GB/s network there is no point for the speed. Do you thing there will be a Buddy community here in the forum to mutually share space when the feature drops maybe next year? I am thinking of going double because with 8 or 10 TB drives the cost per TB is so much more attractive. Does not make any sense though if it is just empty space.

At some point you come into the realm of PSU low power efficiency. If you have one that is sized for a gaming pc you have a real influence. I grabbed the first unit seasonic 80+ gold from ltt labs https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/psu/seasonic-focus-gx-850-atx-3-2024 In a low power scenario you have ~66% efficiency. So I only can imagine having a system tailored to run under load sub 50 W and idle under 20 W has its benefits. The OEM motherboards are all something of a wild card. From the one German overview list the i5-9500t on a hp oem board has idle power of 1,5 Watt and load 63 Watt. That is really impressive. So you can get the performance if you need it. I am looking to pick up a hp elitedesk 800 g5 i5-9500t from ebay for ~200 €. I already asked a friend for a power meter so I can play around with different configurations and bios settings to get idle as low as possible. I will share my results with the forum if there is any interest. For me I just have to save 20 W idle and I save around 50 €/Year. So after 4 years my cost over a "free" pc that is sitting in the basement is amortized. And I have not even touched the topic of noise if you don't have to get rid off the heat. My hope is to get the system semi passive (cpu fan curve high temp activation only) and install the a single 120/140 mm noctua or similarly silent fan somewhere Frankenstein on the case which handles all the heat. I am also a bit concerned regarding HDD idle use of ~6 W. But two or even three 4 TB SSD is just not cost effective.

That is the fun thing. If I did my research right this one takes 4 sticks! I also looked at the Aoostar WTR Pro, but in the end I feel like I can do better price to performance if I go used. I will probably end at the same price with drives compared to the prebuild without drives. And the 200 $ 2 bay option is a bit to limited for my taste

Hey, First time home lab builder here. Usecase: I want to provide a private cloud for backing up fotos from the phones of family and remove some files from my desktop pc with a single point of failure to a more redundant location. I will probably offer that to family as well via tailscale. I have not really looked into plex or jellyfin because I don't have a private library but I canceled all the streaming subscriptions this year because I didn't like the value proposition anymore, that why one of my requirements was decent decoding. Right now I am locking at a 2x4 TB for now. Oh, and I am looking for something very power efficient because for each Watt in idle I have to pay ~2,60 €/Year here in Germany. Option 1: I have seen a video from Hardware Haven using the Elitedesk 800 G3 with an older Pentium processor for a jellyfin server (in the end he used a similar machine because he derped). The advantage of the SFF case (not the mini) is apparently that it fits 2x3.5" and one 2.5" additionaly to the m.2 drive. So my eye fell on the ebay listing HP EliteDesk 800 G5 SFF PC INTEL CORE i5-9500T (6x 2,20GHz) 16GB DDR4 256GB SSD with a coupon price of 206 € (~217 USD). Base on this Google list (last update sadly 2022) the 9500T has superb idle power consumption. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/edit?usp=drivesdk The CPU Plus the Intel UHD 630 probably can handle everything it needs to do for the next 4+ years. If I feel the need for more drives I can always print a new enclosure and use either the PCIe 3 x16 or the x4 for a nice HBA for more SATA or SAS. I am playing with the idea of using "refurbished" SAS drives because they are so dirt cheap. Option 2: The other solutions I was looking at where the Asrock and Asus N100 boards, adding PSU, RAM, SSD and case I will probably be above 280 € with a significantly less powerful machine and similarish idle power consumption. Option 3: Wendell from Level1Techs has shown the use of a mini pc plus a USB enclosure that would only be slightly more expensive. But I have trouble trusting USB for a always on solution that ideally should detect each drive 100% of the time. I would like to hear your opinions on this, I think you can already guess that the Elitedesk is my current favorite but maybe I missed something significant.

You can go Pi but not with Hexos/TrueNAS. There is no Arm support. I have seen a Zimaboard solution on this forum though.

I am also wondering about that. I am not sure how you came up with the 4 USD/Year. I guess you live somewhere with more expensive power than Germany. 24 Wh each day x 365 days 8,76 kWh x individual USD/kWh @0.30 €/kWh or 0.316 USD/kWh For me it comes out to around 2.62 €/(W x year) or 2.77 USD/(W x Year) I would love to go with some old optiplex (I have a without ram and cpu sitting in my basement) but I am worried about power consumption. 5th or 6th Gen Intel. If I get a new ish thinclient with a modern mobile cpu ~200 USD I can get with drives below 25 W max power and have a reasonable idle, maybe below 10 Watts. With an old Gen Intel optiplex I worry about 50 - 70 W idle (guesstimate) for the whole system. That would make more than 150 €/Year in electricity cost. There are a few mini pc/thin clients availabile like a blackview Mp100 ryzen 5700u (ebay ~220 €) or a HP T640 ryzen 150G (eBay 69 €, nice) @10 W idle. But pcie expendability and sata power is questionable. For pcie I can probably use the m.2 slot for maybe 4x sata/sas. Additionally you are dependent on on board grafics for transcoding. So maybe I should look to something more modern. Case is not a problem, I have a 3D printer to build something