Hello there,
Glad to share my build using the NAS 4.0 guide.
Current Situation
NAS Synology DS411j from 2013 with 4 disks of 1.8TB each for an SHR Raid of 5 TB.
As i was reaching the limit of this raid capacity i was getting more and more alarms on my disks bad sectors so even if it wasn’t planned i had no choices if i wanted my data secure once more.
(Also, bad performance, 256MB of Ram, what else could be wrong in 2020…)
Target
- My base for this build is the case i’ve already had in stock locally which is a Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 that i have in black for my home workstation and a white one which was unused at the moment with a Dell-Frankenstein built.
- This case provide me 8 3.5 disks tray and 5 2.5 disks trays. The 3.5 will be for the storage and the 2.5 for OS & Cache
- I will not go for Unraid on this build but with Truenas/Freenas as i’m much more familiar with it
- The server will be mainly a NAS, no Plex or others consuming softwares on it except few Jails for data management
- I’m using Jellyfin through NFS in order to consume my data
Let’s get started
Based on the NAS 4.0 Guide, i went for the following pieces:
| Type | Part | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Supermicro X9SCM-F (2 Net Ports / No IPMI) | $117.71 |
| CPU | Intel Xeon E3-1270v2 | $93.46 |
| RAM | 32GB DDR3 ECC UDIMM | $126.50 |
| SAS Controller | LSI SAS 9211-8i | $76.90 |
| SAS Wire | SFF-8482 29Pin 4 SATA Connectors to Mini SAS SFF-8087i | $20.22 |
| CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-U12S + Extra Fan | $94.00 |
| Case Wire PSU | Corsair CP-8920186 | $28.00 |
| PSU | Corsair RM550x | $118 |
| Total | ----- | $674.79 |
General Remarks
It was difficult to find the right RAM compatible as i gave it a try with an Samsung M393B1K70CHD-CH9 but wasn’t compatible, hopefully the Supermicro website contains the matrix regarding RAM which help me find the right reference.
I was lucky enough to get 4TB disks from used server out-of-warranty from a datacenter for free to lower my costs. For the OS disks i used two sata disk which i had already in stock from older laptop.
If i had to change one parts, it would be the Noctua FAN which is too big and it cost me a PCIE port in the motheboard. I would change it to the Noctua NH-L9i as advised on the guide. As i have a noisy Coolermaster V8 in my workstation it may worth it to switch it at some points in the future.
Also i added an extra Network card with 2 ports GB in order to have more ways of managing the network.
Storage Capacity
As i’m using ZFS, i have to follow the rules of the 80% capacity rules which say that once this capacity is reached i will lost performance in my pools. This lead me to a 16TB capacity which is more than the double of my old capacity on Synology.
All my disks went through a long smartctl test prior to put them back in production and i will monitor them using Munin in the near future. I went for a RaidZ2 configuration with 2 parity disks, i have also a 9th disk on my stock ready to replace any failed disks.
Services running
-
NFS Shared to an old Packard Bell Workstation with an i3 CPU 530 and 4GB of Ram which run my Jellyfin and other services. I know it’s an old stuff, but as it’s still working i can’t get rid of it as long as i can found him a purpose of life
-
SMB Shares to my workstation for Windows Backup and files management
-
Freebsd Jails : Radarr, Sonarr, Syncthing for data management
Future
I’m waiting to rebuild my network stack in order to setup LACP and VLAN to have as limited as possible direct flows within my LAN to this server.
I want to use only Jellyfin as a way to consume my data through Web or Kodi.
I’m going to setup snapshots in the ZFS Pools in order to gain even more flexibility.
I may add also SSD Disk in the setup in order to setup L2ARC & SLOG caches.
Also, add an PCIE-USB3 card in order to get back my USB3 ports of my case for backup data (1+1=0)
Again, thanks a lot to @JDM_WAAAT for his guide which let me find the right pieces of hardwares.