PsychoWards

In addition to what @ubergeek and @Mobius said, never run RAM in single Channel (1 Module) always go for dual Channel (2 modules) or else you are leaving a lot of performance on the table.

If you want to have 32GB RAM go for 2x16GB but not 1x32GB 🙂 

Looks like a solid system. No dramatically oversized boot drive, Intel NIC, CMR HDDs (if you stay with the Red Plus variant, absolutely avoid SMR drives) 

Depends on what your needs are, but as a NAS with only plex and not to many streams in parallel, this should be up to the task. 

You can edit a post 5-10min after you posted it, after that you can no longer edit it. 

You do have similar priced 8 TB CMR drives, although a bit more expensive:

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/seagate-ironwolf-8tb-3-5-5400rpm-sata-desktop-internal-hard-drive-st8000vnz04/19186378

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/wd-red-plus-8tb-5640rpm-sata-internal-nas-hard-drive-wd80efpx/17935390

You might not notice anything now, but once SMR drives hit a certain capacity threshold you will notice it. 

You can make it work with SMR drives, but expect some weird performance issues down the road, just something to keep in mind. 🙂 

Hey, 

Seems like a decent build and you got some nice value out of it. 🙂 

Just a couple of remarks to help with some pitfalls:

For Ryzen 1000-3000 CPUs you need to disable all the C States in the BIOS to get the server stable, with C states enabled it will freeze at random. 

Your Motherboard has a Realtek NIC, they are not supported by Hexos due to bad linux drivers, causing stability issues and causing data corruption. Get yourself an Intel NIC which is supported and working out of the box.

Return the HDDs and get yourself some CMR drives, the Barracuda drives are SMR drives, which you really shouldn't use in a Raid. 🙂

It looks like your motherboard has 2x m.2 slots and only the 2nd one (M2_2) is sharing bandwidth with a SATA port. As long as you use only 1 M.2 SSD in the M2_1 slot, you can use all 4 SATA ports.

If you start with 2 HDDs, Hexos will create a mirror which cannot be extended. If you want to be able to extend the pool in the future you need at least 3 HDDs now to create a RaidZ1. 

Mirror: you have 2 drives, the data is stored in those 2 drives, they are exact replications of one another and you can lose 1 drive, you have the capacity of 1 drive. 

RaidZ1: you have at least 3 drives and data is stored on multiple drives, while 1 drive is being used for parity.You can lose 1 drive and have the capacity of all drives combined -1 drive

RaidZ2/3: Similar to RaidZ1, but you can lose 2/3 drives and your capacity is that of all drives -2/3 drives

Stripped: You have only 1 drive and if it dies everything is gone. 

Please don't use an external USB enclosure, this is just asking for trouble, because very often they are not forwarding the drives serial number but are just giving a generic one, which means that Hexos cannot differentiate between drives and will not be able to create a pool or use those drives. Only stick with internal SATA ports and SATA expansion cards to avoid any trouble. 

A lot of people in here are using Jonsbo cases, which exists in various sizes to accommodate varying amount of drives.

A couple of remarks to keep in mind:

You need a dedicated drive just for the OS and you cannot use it for anything else. Don't waste a 1TB SSD on this, 16GB is all you need, so go for a low capacity one. 

With 2 drives Hexos will create a mirrored Pool which cannot be extended, if you want to extended your Pool later on you need 3 drives now to create a RaidZ1 which is extendable. If you go for the 2 drives now, 4 drives in total later, you will have 2 mirrored drives and only the capacity of 2 drives in total

Stay away from SMR HDDs. 

If you decide to go custom built, please post your specs in here as there are some pitfalls which we can help you avoid. 🙂

Hey, 

With Ryzen 1000-3000 CPUs you have to disable all the C-states or else the server is constantly freezing, just something to keep in mind

That's impressive, glad that it's working as you expected it =D

Is your pool 2 now RaidZ2? 🙂 

How do you intend to copy the files over?

If the old server is Hexos/Truenas I would recommend replication task via network or just chuck the old drives in the new server and do a replication tasks from one pool to the other.

If it's none Hexos/Truenas then good luck 😁 nah just kidding rsync is also awesome and if you leave it running you should be done in a week 🙂

Do you have an UPS for your setup? 

Hey,

I'm not sure if I understand you question, but yes you will find a link to download the OS which you then need to install as a new OS. During the installation process you can choose to skip the creation of a new pool if you want to import an existing pool. This however has then to be done in the truenas GUI.

As for Hexos, it only supports Truenas 24.10.2.X. 25.04 is currently not supported and will break some functions/displays in Hexos.

Hey, 

For Plex/Jellyfin the recommendation is generally to go with Intel CPUs (at least 12th gen) because Intel Quick Sync is really great for decoding/encoding, much better then AMD in fact. Some people would say to avoid 13th & 14th gen and to go for either 12th or Core Ultra (or how are they called again, the latest gen ?) due to the issues which 13 and 14th gen had/have. i5 or i7 are a good option for Intel.

Also if you plan to use Proxmox, use it as the OS and not Hexos. You can host Hexos as a VM in Proxmox but you definitely should not host Proxmox as a VM in Hexos. This is a decision which you should take and already deploy now, because changing it afterwards is a lot of work and hassle.

Tailscale or Wireguard as a VPN are the safest options. 

If you want a public domain, so that you can access it from any device, you first need a public domain and a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager, Traefik, Caddy). However this is pretty much a security risk without hardening, so you likely want to use cloudflare, a good firewall (ditch your ISP router and go for OpnSense or OpenWRT) and MMO Fail2Ban like Crowdsec. There are still other ways to secure your network (VLAN, DMZ etc.). VPN is the quickest with little setup, domain is the more versatile with a loooooot more setup to do to not risk your data. 

Hey,

Yes you can use your old Synology NAS as the target for a backup, but you cannot install Hexos on it, it can only run the proprietary Synology OS on it. 

You still need a way to connect from your place to your parents house, this is in your case likely best done by setting up a VPN server (Wireguard or Tailscale) on your parents side. (either in the router or the NAS).

Then you just need to setup a rsync task which is running periodically, you find a lot of guides out there on how to do this, for the time being you need to configure this in Truenas and not they Hexos dashboard. 

It's best to do the initial filling via the local network and only afterwards move the NAS to your parents place for the delta backups. 

Hey,

1 license is for 1 single server.

Your use case would be 2 servers and thus 2 licenses. (because each server needs it own OS to be installed) 

However buddy backup is not yet available, you can however already today realise this using different ways, which do require a bit of setup. (but still a 2nd Hexos license) 

SFP+ to RJ45 are getting hooooot, they are using significantly more power compared to fibre optics. 

10Gbps is gimmicky for most users around here. If you're not editing directly off the NAS or have a lot of users accessing it, there is very likely no need to get 10Gbps, 2.5 Gbps is more than enough.

But it's still fun to watch those high numbers, so if it's worth doing (2.5), it's worth overdoing (10) 😂

2 hours ago, Mobius said:

i just have no idea how to take advantage of it

Once, you do the initial backup to your new low cost, not yet existing, but already way more thought out that you like to admit , server via buddy backup or ZFS replication task, you will see and notice the full speed. After that, it's not gonna make a huge difference 😂

Also if you want a good GPU for AI or ML, used RTX3090 (non ti) can be bought for 600$/€ and likely delivery the best bang for buck.

You're welcome 🙃

Ah, I see that makes a lot of sense. Better safe then sorry and in comparison it's only a minor investment.

Upgrading the network to 10Gbps isn't cheap, I understand that you don't want to buy it yet, especially if you cannot profit from it yet. 

If you eventually upgrade, will you be going the RJ45 path or go for SFP+ ? I've not found many affordable RJ45 10Gbps switches or at least not with many 10Gbps ports, but found some really affordable 8port SFP+ 10Gbps switches.

I got myself SFP+ switches and Intel X540 NICs and I'm just using SFP+ to RJ45 for the connection to the 2.5Gbps switch (which is full RJ45). 

You probably haven't thought about that yet I imagine 🙂 

Seeing the drives and components, the 265k build title could also be understood as the price for the server. 😉 🙂 😛

So, did I understood correctly that you want to do a 3 drive mirror with the 980 Pros ?

Why not do a Z1 instead ? You really want the double redundancy? 🙂 

If you are adding an L2ARC, the general rule of thump is that it should be 10x your RAM.

So. If you only have 16GB of RAM don't put a 1TB SSD as L2ARC, because the L2ARC also puts strain on your memory and putting to much of it hurts the system in the end. 

Also L2ARC and Metadata SSD might be redundant, if the metadata is stored in the L2ARC, there is no point in having the SSD and vis versa but this depends a lot on the hitrate of your ARC.

Hey, 

You cannot the change RaidZ type.

If you want to change it from RaidZ1 to RaidZ2, you need to delete your existing pool and manually create a new RaidZ2 pool in the Truenas GUI.

This will wipe all your data. 

However what you can do, is create a new RaidZ1 or RaidZ2 VDEV and expend your Pool this way, such that you have 2 VDEVs in 1 Pool.

Hey, 

I would (and am) using the 2nd slot for a redundant boot drive.

There is no write cache in Hexos, so no way to increase write performance.

There is a read only cache called L2ARC and as you mentioned you can offload some metadata to the drive:

There is no "best use case", because it really depends on the own needs and what is the most important to you.

You might not even notice the benefits of using an SSD to store metadata, or your primary boot SSD might never die. It's a matter of reading into the different options and make an education decision based on what's important for you and what isn't. 🙂 

Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) or Traefik. 

Both of them can be secured with Crowdsec. 

That's great to hear and thank you for the feedback. 🙂 

You need to deactivate the C-States in the BIOS for Ryzen 1000-3000 CPUs, because this is causing the crashes. 

Can you please post the HW specs of your server?