dinecoj

That case is super nice! I too am using an old supermicro board (X10 SLL-F) and it's been flawless so far. I threw in a Mellanox ConnectX-3 for 10Gb and a Dell H310 HBA and still have some PCI to spare 🙂

Yep! Since ZFS uses RAM for caching, more RAM means more cached data which means faster retrievals. Compared to the bottlenecks like 1Gb networking, HDD speeds, etc, RAM speed shouldn't be very impactful.

1. I think the biggest factor is the chipset on the motherboard 2. Some googling says the Intel H370 chipset on that motherboard is limited to 2666MHz max. You could get RAM rated for faster than that, but it would only run at 2666 3. PC4-21333 is naming convention: PC4 = DDR4, 21333 = transfer rate in MB/s ( 2666MHz * 8 bytes / tick ~= 21333)

For the pool, yes, drives should to be the same size. I believe drives can be mismatched in pools when set up directly in TrueNAS, but HexOS will not do this by default and I'm not sure how tolerant it would be. You will be limited to the size of your smallest drive, so for a pool of 2x10TB drives and a 1x1TB drive, your effective capacity is only 2TB. Parity information is distributed among the drives equally in Raid5 / RaidZ1. I'm simplifying, but this is how I understand it: for a 1GB file, disk 1 and disk 2 will have 500MB of data and disk 3 will have 500MB (?) of parity info. For another 1GB file, disks 2 and 3 may have the data, and disk 1 stores the parity info. Because of the distribution of parity, all three drives should are only as good as the smallest drive. In the example above, the 1TB drives runs out of space for parity / data before the others, so the pool is only limited to storing 2TB

@MSKenyon If you have a pool of three 4TB drives you would have ~8TB of storage. It isn't exactly as binary as "1 for redundancy and 2 for storage", since all three drives contain some data and parity information. In practice, this allows you to lose one drive while maintaining data integrity. This is raid level 5 (Raid Z1 in ZFS). HexOS will create pools in Raid Z1. As @Magnus mentioned, you can't expand a pool of two drives since they're mirrored, so it is recommended to create a pool with a minimum of three drives. Additionally, you would want your pool drives to be the same size, as I'm not sure if HexOS would create a pool with mismatched drive sizes.

I had a TrueNAS install with a few shares and a major pain point was permissions management. Creating a new user for my partner was a multi step process, and granting access to the shares was complicated. I had issues with permissions propagating from one folder to the next within a given share. She would have access to one folder in the share but not another, and for every new folder we created there would need to be another permissions edit. I really wanted something that just worked and didn't require more tinkering after an 8 hour workday, and that's what I've gotten with HexOS so far. I only used TrueNAS for its NAS features - SMB shares, backblaze backup, scheduled smart tests + email report. Of those three, HexOS only sets up the SMB shares right now, but at least there's a much simpler permissions management system. In the future I look forward to trying out some of the 1-click install apps, as complicated installs and maintenance are what previously turned me off of them.

It may be possible to drop into the shell from the TrueNAS UI and copy files from the portable drive to the share, but I don't think this is the expected pattern. Once you have a folder created, you would access that folder from another machine and then copy the drive contents to the NAS via SMB over the network. Portable drive -> Second machine -> SMB -> HexOS Folder

A good example of something similar is Nabu Casa's Remote UI for Home Assistant. For $6.50 / month my HA instance can be accessed from anywhere with ease. This is helpful for enabling the non-tech-savvy family members to interact with HA. Not sure exactly how this would work with SMB shares and a NAS, but the HA model seems to be working well and is appreciated in the community.

You should be able to drop into TrueNAS and configure the Backblaze backup there, but I realize we all want a way to do this within HexOS itself