newbie Fresh NAS Built by a newbie

[Pilotn55]

Hey all. I am looking at purchasing my new NAS to install HexOS on.

This will be a Ebay build, roughly $400, with enough storage to start a RaidZ2 and expand the pool later on (minimum of 4 drives).

Right now I am looking at a Lenovo P520 with the Intel W-2135, 64gb DDR4 2666mhz ECC, LSI 9300-16i 12gbs, 4x4tb Seagate Enterprise SAS 12gbs, Nvidia 1070, and a SK Hynix 256gb M.2 NVME boot drive.

The thought process was get something that is new(er) and can have a high-core CPU upgrade later with the ability to run more ram as Cache later as well. The LSI card was for the ability to through most of this stuff into a true 4U server at some point and run up to 16 drives off of it. The SK Hynix is a good price and has 1gb of Dram cache as well, more than other options at that price. The RAM is Micron/Crucial branded and inexpensive for the size, 16gb 2Rx4 DIMMs. The 1070 is a good plex transcoding card and I will be having 4k HDR content on there in the future so I want the ability to transcode that sooner rather than later.

What do you all think? I am ready to press buy on it. I have built many a computer so I am not worried about that. I just want to make sure I am not doing something stupid and forgetting something.

Thanks all!

[PsychoWards]

Hey,

Looks like a proper built in my eyes, with a lot of potential to grow as you intend to do.

Just some remarks; currently RaidZ2 is not supported by Hexos, Hexos will always create a RaidZ1. You can manually create a RaidZ2 pool in Truenas but this might have unforeseen impacts and consequences.

You might want to consider buying a second boot drive and having the boot drives running as a mirror. This can save you a lot of headaches in case the boot drive fails, because right now, it's not possible to import pools into Hexos, meaning if the drive dies you cannot reinstall Hexos, because it will wipe your drives and even if pool import is supported in the future, it might still be worth the consideration, especially since you are already going full server build anyway.

[Pilotn55]

42 minutes ago, PsychoWards said:

Hey,

Looks like a proper built in my eyes, with a lot of potential to grow as you intend to do.

Just some remarks; currently RaidZ2 is not supported by Hexos, Hexos will always create a RaidZ1. You can manually create a RaidZ2 pool in Truenas but this might have unforeseen impacts and consequences.

You might want to consider buying a second boot drive and having the boot drives running as a mirror. This can save you a lot of headaches in case the boot drive fails, because right now, it's not possible to import pools into Hexos, meaning if the drive dies you cannot reinstall Hexos, because it will wipe your drives and even if pool import is supported in the future, it might still be worth the consideration, especially since you are already going full server build anyway.

Thank you!

I foresee this becoming a truenas serve fully in the future so I might take that risk with setting up a raid z2 right away. 
 

Good point with the boot drive. I will see if it’s possible with the Lenovo motherboard. I would like to keep it as both the same drive for easy use. 
 

thank you!