NAS hardware for HexOS question

[zczachor]

So, I'm thinking about this build for the HexOS NAS. Is there anything missing or wrong? Is the integrated GPU ok or do I need to have a dedicated one? 

Thanks! 

Cheers 

 

Case: JONSBO N4 Black NAS PC Case

Mobo: Asus Prime B550-Plus AM4 ATX

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G

Cooler: be quiet! Pure Rock LP

RAM: Kingston FURY Beast DDR4 3200 MHz CL16 32 GB

GPU: CPU integrated

OS: Kingston A400 240 GB SATA SSD

M.2: 2x Kingston NV3 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1 Tt M.2 SSD

HDD: 3x Seagate IRONWOLF PRO 16 TB SATAIII

PSU: be quiet! Pure Power 12 M ATX 550 W

[zczachor]

Also also, how would I set it for the easiest extendability and best operation.

[Mobius]

so your motherboard and poswer supply does not fit in your case. the jonsbo n4 supports up to matx cases and sfx power supplies.
also we highly recommend not getting a motherboard with a realtek nic (network interface card) because those just cause problems.
here is the skeleton of your build on pc part picker for reference. https://fi.pcpartpicker.com/list/pHnZTM

I see that it costs ~630 euros

let me see what i would do with a similar budget.

https://fi.pcpartpicker.com/list/pzG73w

i went with an intel cpu because they tend to do better if your usecase is say plex. with a fairly strong igpu for most non ai or gaming tasks.

i went with a thermalright cooler since they are usually pretty good. this one has better cooling headroom than the be quiet one you had before. im not thrilled about the rgb personally so if you are able to find it without it i would get that.

The motherboard i picked has an intel nic and ddr5 support. be careful if you decide to purchase the motherboard without using the pcpartpicker provided links as msi has like 5 different motherboards with the same name. Oh also this motherboard should fit in the jonsbo n4 no problem.
1 thing is that this motherboard only has 4 sata ports. the best way to add more is by adding an hba card (flashed to it mode) into the pcie slot.
i would recommend any of the following, lsi 9200-8i, 9305-8i, 9400-8i 

Since the motherboard supports ddr5 ram, i picked the same capacity ddr5 ram for you.

same case

I didn't pick the cheapest power supply that fit. I personally like the seasonic brand of power supplies and this one was fully modular making it just a bit easier to cable manage in that case.

this skeleton also came out to about ~630 euros. (not including storage)

the motherboard only has 1 full sized m.2 and i opted to use it for the boot drive.
and swapped out your ssds to sata ones instead for compatibility purposes.
i know its not ideal but itll likely be imperceptible on the day to day.

i didnt look into hdd pricing because its hard for me to check the pricing in your country outside of pcpartpicker but definitely check out the pricing of seagate exos drives since for some reason they end up being sold at a lower price than the ironwolf drives fairly often.

3 hours ago, zczachor said:

Also also, how would I set it for the easiest extendability and best operation.

i'm not sure what you mean by this but if you can clarify it for me i'm 
happy to answer this and any more questions you may have
as well as help you further modify this list if you desire. 

[zczachor]

42 minutes ago, Mobius said:

so your motherboard and poswer supply does not fit in your case. the jonsbo n4 supports up to matx cases and sfx power supplies.
also we highly recommend not getting a motherboard with a realtek nic (network interface card) because those just cause problems.
here is the skeleton of your build on pc part picker for reference. https://fi.pcpartpicker.com/list/pHnZTM

I see that it costs ~630 euros

let me see what i would do with a similar budget.

https://fi.pcpartpicker.com/list/pzG73w

i went with an intel cpu because they tend to do better if your usecase is say plex. with a fairly strong igpu for most non ai or gaming tasks.

i went with a thermalright cooler since they are usually pretty good. this one has better cooling headroom than the be quiet one you had before. im not thrilled about the rgb personally so if you are able to find it without it i would get that.

The motherboard i picked has an intel nic and ddr5 support. be careful if you decide to purchase the motherboard without using the pcpartpicker provided links as msi has like 5 different motherboards with the same name. Oh also this motherboard should fit in the jonsbo n4 no problem.
1 thing is that this motherboard only has 4 sata ports. the best way to add more is by adding an hba card (flashed to it mode) into the pcie slot.
i would recommend any of the following, lsi 9200-8i, 9305-8i, 9400-8i 

Since the motherboard supports ddr5 ram, i picked the same capacity ddr5 ram for you.

same case

I didn't pick the cheapest power supply that fit. I personally like the seasonic brand of power supplies and this one was fully modular making it just a bit easier to cable manage in that case.

this skeleton also came out to about ~630 euros. (not including storage)

the motherboard only has 1 full sized m.2 and i opted to use it for the boot drive.
and swapped out your ssds to sata ones instead for compatibility purposes.
i know its not ideal but itll likely be imperceptible on the day to day.

i didnt look into hdd pricing because its hard for me to check the pricing in your country outside of pcpartpicker but definitely check out the pricing of seagate exos drives since for some reason they end up being sold at a lower price than the ironwolf drives fairly often.

i'm not sure what you mean by this but if you can clarify it for me i'm 
happy to answer this and any more questions you may have
as well as help you further modify this list if you desire. 

Thank you for your answer. 

I've looked at your build and the need of purchasing SATA expansion card (or M.2 expansion card) is something I want to avoid. The reason why I have chosen to go with motherboard with 2xM.2 slots and 6x SATA ports is that I want finally use 4x HDD for storage + 1x SSD for HexOS and those 2x M.2 as a cache. Is there another motherboard that I can use that offers this? Worst case scenario is 2x M.2 and 4x SATA so I use only 3 storage drives instead of four. Motherboard price can be up to 150 euro.

Did check the Seagate Exos price in my place and is around 20 euro more for 16TB than Iron wolf so no difference for me, if it's better in any way I can change it.

As for settings that I want, I meant that I want to set it this way that I can swap drives without the need to rebuild the entire thing. Automate it. For example if I want to change drive because it's damaged or change them into higher capacity, everything with copy and set up itself. With redundancy of course.

P.S. I have found Thermalrigh APX 120 without RGB but in grey color. I'll look for black one.

Cheers.

 

[Mobius]

your best bet would be to jump up to a case that supports atx motherboards since matx motherboard with enough sata ports are rare. the jonsbo n4 can support 6 3.5" drives and 2 2.5" drives, which would require a total of 8 sata data ports to take full advantage of the case. There are motherboards that have 6 sata + 2 m.2 but they would likely be outside of your budget.

any reason why you don't want to use a sata expansion card?

3 hours ago, zczachor said:

Did check the Seagate Exos price in my place and is around 20 euro more for 16TB than Iron wolf so no difference for me, if it's better in any way I can change it.

for a homelab i would go with which ever of the 2 are cheaper.

3 hours ago, zczachor said:

As for settings that I want, I meant that I want to set it this way that I can swap drives without the need to rebuild the entire thing. Automate it. For example if I want to change drive because it's damaged or change them into higher capacity, everything with copy and set up itself. With redundancy of course.

we have something similar but its not fully automated. 
hexos will warn you that a drive is problematic. you would then need to replace the drive and then tell hexos that the newly added drive is for the purpose of taking the place of the bad drive.
then hexos will take care of the rest.

 

[zczachor]

27 minutes ago, Mobius said:

your best bet would be to jump up to a case that supports atx motherboards since matx motherboard with enough sata ports are rare. the jonsbo n4 can support 6 3.5" drives and 2 2.5" drives, which would require a total of 8 sata data ports to take full advantage of the case. There are motherboards that have 6 sata + 2 m.2 but they would likely be outside of your budget.

What is the price of motherboard that supports 6x SATA? Can you give me some examples to choose from? Let me think about it. Maybe it will be worth it. I want to stay with this case. 

Alternatively if I would go with your original build, I would rather go with M.2 expansion for the two cash drives than SATA expansions. Use the motherboard M.2 for the OS and 4x SATA ports for the HDD drives.  Is there a way for two expansion cards? One with SATA and one with two M.2 drives?

If the price of those expansions cards would add to the price of the motherboard, I could pay more for the motherboard instead with all slots required.

32 minutes ago, Mobius said:

we have something similar but its not fully automated. 
hexos will warn you that a drive is problematic. you would then need to replace the drive and then tell hexos that the newly added drive is for the purpose of taking the place of the bad drive.
then hexos will take care of the rest.

 

How about expansion? What if I want to add more drives to my NAS later. Will I have to rebuild the RAID or is it as simple ass clicking add new drive to the pool?

Cheers.

[zczachor]

Or what if I want to change old drive in Nas and replace it with a new one with higher capacity?

[Mobius]

5 hours ago, zczachor said:

What is the price of motherboard that supports 6x SATA? Can you give me some examples to choose from? Let me think about it. Maybe it will be worth it. I want to stay with this case. 

 

use the link i made for the build
click edit this list
remove the motherboard i picked
then look for a new motherboard
set sata 6gb slider to minimum 6.

this will give you the models with 6 sata ports but majority of them do not have pricing so you will have to look for pricing yourself.
also avoid any with realtek network interface cards.

6 hours ago, zczachor said:

I would rather go with M.2 expansion for the two cash drives

cache drives are barely a thing in hexos/truenas you are far better off allocating that budget for additional ram.

6 hours ago, zczachor said:

Is there a way for two expansion cards? One with SATA and one with two M.2 drives?

if you do go with expansion cards like the lsi hbas they do support both sata and nvme on one expansion card depending on the model but im not too familiar with how to connect nvme drives to them.

6 hours ago, zczachor said:

If the price of those expansions cards would add to the price of the motherboard, I could pay more for the motherboard instead with all slots required.

depending on the model the expansion cards are not expensive and might be a lot less expensive than different motherboard.

6 hours ago, zczachor said:

What if I want to add more drives to my NAS later. Will I have to rebuild the RAID or is it as simple ass clicking add new drive to the pool?

if you start with a pool of at least 3 drives it is as simple as clicking add new drive and waiting.

5 hours ago, zczachor said:

Or what if I want to change old drive in Nas and replace it with a new one with higher capacity?

at this time until you change out all the drives in a pool all drives will be treated as the same size as the lowest capacity drive.
once you finish changing them out, it should automatically increase in capacity.

in the distant future we will have a feature called zfs anyraid which will let you mismatch drive sizes and still have use of the full capacity.
That said its likely years away and may not be compatible with existing pools.

[zczachor]

2 hours ago, Mobius said:

use the link i made for the build
click edit this list
remove the motherboard i picked
then look for a new motherboard
set sata 6gb slider to minimum 6.

this will give you the models with 6 sata ports but majority of them do not have pricing so you will have to look for pricing yourself.
also avoid any with realtek network interface cards.

I have found a few Intel mATX motherboards with 6x SATA slots at 220-250 euros, but all of them have Realtek networking. AMD AM4/AM5 had Intel networking. What exactly is the reason why you have chosen the Intel CPU? Why is Realtek something to avoid? What is more important here? The CPU or the Networking? Also also, I would like to avoid Gen12 and Gen13 Intel CPUs, because of the recent issue with them dying. That was the reason why I chose AMD in my original choice.

2 hours ago, Mobius said:

cache drives are barely a thing in hexos/truenas you are far better off allocating that budget for additional ram.

Do I need more than 32GB for NAS?

3 hours ago, Mobius said:

depending on the model the expansion cards are not expensive and might be a lot less expensive than different motherboard.

Found LSI 9300 8i with 4x for 99 USD on Amazon, and the Intel motherboard with 6x SATA was 220-250 (but Realtek network), so price-wise your choice is cheaper. I think I may go with it.

14 hours ago, Mobius said:

1 thing is that this motherboard only has 4 sata ports. the best way to add more is by adding an hba card (flashed to it mode) into the pcie slot.
i would recommend any of the following, lsi 9200-8i, 9305-8i, 9400-8i 

What do you mean by "flashing it"? Do I need to change the original BIOS on the extension card? Doesn't it work as plug and play?

If so, can you please explain that to me? What BIOS, from where and with what tools? I have never flashed the BIOS besides the motherboard.

Cheers

[zczachor]

The LSI 9300 8i card I found: Amazon.com: LSI SAS3008 9300-8I IT-Mode HBA JBOD PCI-E 3.0 SATA/SAS 8-Port SAS3 12Gb/s ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2* SFF-8643 SATA Cable : Electronics

[zczachor]

or maybe this 9207 8I? Amazon.com: SVNXINGTII 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS 2308 PCI-E 3.0 HBA IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2*SFF-8087 SATA Host Bus Adapter : Electronics

[Mobius]

1 minute ago, zczachor said:

What exactly is the reason why you have chosen the Intel CPU?

they work better for transcoding video in jellyfin or plex. if that doesnt matter to you feel free to use amd.

2 minutes ago, zczachor said:

Why is Realtek something to avoid?

they are garbage hardware with even worse linux drivers. Ive seen so many problems from them from system crashing to straight up not working.
the most common 2.5 and 5gb nics are realtek because they are cheap but straight up disabled by truenas/hexos because they cause data corruption.

4 minutes ago, zczachor said:

What is more important here? The CPU or the Networking?

networking more important. you can survive using amd for transcoding.

5 minutes ago, zczachor said:

I would like to avoid Gen12

gen 12 doesnt have that issue only 13 and 14 does.

5 minutes ago, zczachor said:

Do I need more than 32GB for NAS?

you don't need more than 32, heck you don't need more than 8 but the more you have the better itll perform.

 

6 minutes ago, zczachor said:

Found LSI 9300 8i with 4x for 99 USD on Amazon, and the Intel motherboard with 6x SATA was 220-250 (but Realtek network), so price-wise your choice is cheaper. I think I may go with it.

you can find it for a fraction of the price on ebay, there are fakes so i tend to avoid things being shipped directly from china. that said i've heard the fakes work fine.
i would also avoid the 9300 and go with either 9200 or 9305 because 9300 has overheating problems.

8 minutes ago, zczachor said:

What do you mean by "flashing it"? Do I need to change the original BIOS on the extension card? Doesn't it work as plug and play?

so for this i would just check the description and see if it has already been flashed to "i.t. mode" or i would ask the seller if it has been.
these cards have 2 different modes and "i.t. mode" is what is compatible for us.
while they can be manually flashed at home, its just not worth the effort since a large amount of them come pre-flashed.

 

5 minutes ago, zczachor said:

or maybe this 9207 8I? Amazon.com: SVNXINGTII 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS 2308 PCI-E 3.0 HBA IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2*SFF-8087 SATA Host Bus Adapter : Electronics

this looks not bad to me. since it comes with 2 sata break out cables 
each worth around ~10-12 usd

[zczachor]

10 minutes ago, Mobius said:

this looks not bad to me. since it comes with 2 sata break out cables 
each worth around ~10-12 usd

Alright then. It also says that it has IT mode P20 Firmware already. 

I will go with your build and this extension card then.

One last question, I think. I have checked the case details, and it says that the tallest CPU cooler is 70mm. I have then looked at this 65mm Noctua: Noctua NH-L9x65 chromax.black 33.84 CFM CPU Cooler (NH-L9x65 chromax.black) - PCPartPicker

There is only 5mm of spare room. Would this not choke the cooler if I go with it?

Or should I go instead with Noctua NH-L9i-17xx chromax.black 33.84 CFM CPU Cooler (NH-L9i-17xx chromax.black) - PCPartPicker that is 37mm OR this black Thermalright Thermalright AXP90-X47 42.58 CFM CPU Cooler (AXP90-X47 BLACK) - PCPartPicker 47mm tall? 

[Mobius]

the jonsbo n4 case has ventilation holes all along the top of the case
the 70mm coolers wouldn't really be chocked and would likely be bringing in fresh air from outside of the case

Quote

 

[zczachor]

3 minutes ago, Mobius said:

the jonsbo n4 case has ventilation holes all along the top of the case
the 70mm coolers wouldn't really be chocked and would likely be bringing in fresh air from outside of the case

 

OK. Thanks for your help. I think I have all my questions answered.

I will make a new post if I have any questions about setting up the HexOS.

Cheers!

[Mobius]

glad i could help