I used to work in IT, I’ve work on most things like installing AV, Help Desk, Firewalls, web servers and I built a lot of machines in the past but not for the last ten years.
I’m in the UK - At the moment I’ve just built a Truenas server from an old HP but now I’ve got the hang of it I will be reinstalling and adding a few better parts. The thing is I’m a pensioner and money is tight so I’ll need to use what I can.
I currently have a few options for my finished NAS - which will mainly be used or watching video & playing music but also will host a few website - yes I know, don’t fret about it
So the motherboard I have are;
IPM17-TP with i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz 16gb Ram - Seems to work a dream but to be honest I would prefer to use this as it was intended - HP Tower
Intel DQ77MK with i5 (something)
Or do I look for something more modern?
I also have a few SSDs that I’ll use for the OS and cache drive with 2 raids of 2x4tb and 2x8TB drives
The DQ77MK (Q77 chipset, 2nd Gen Intel CPU) would be a huge step down from your current HP (Z170 Chipset, 6th / 7th gen CPU)
If this server is just going to be a Pure NAS (Only storing data and serving over the network to other servers that do the actual work) then the DQ77MK would probably suffice although it will use more power to do perform the same task and might bog down under load.
However if you are planning on hosting Plex / Jellyfin directly on the NAS to serve / transcode video as well as run a web server and other services then you should certainly stick with your current HP setup. Depending on the video files you are serving and how much transcoding you do it might even be worthwhile to upgrade your CPU to the 7th Gen equivalent CPU (i7-7700 or similar), but in the interests of keeping cost down I would use what you have and only upgrade if you start running into bottlenecks.
Your mix of hard drives is not really optimum for TrueNAS. Because you have 2 pairs of drives of different sizes you are basically going to have 2 RAID1 pools for a total of 12 Tb (1 4TB Pool + 1 8TB Pool). Or I suppose you could stick all the drives into a single RAIDZ1 but then you would still only have 12 TB and half the space on the 8TB would be unused.
If you get 2 more 4TB drives you could get the same capacity in a single RAIDZ1 with 4 x 4TB drives for 12TB useable capacity and then you re-purpose your 8TB drives elsewhere. Or if you could get 2 more 8TB drives you would effectively double your capacity to 24TB freeing up your 2 extra 4TB drives for something else.
With TrueNAS I would recommend maxing out your RAM before investing in a cache drive. You will get more bang for your buck with RAM than a cache drive in ZFS.
Good luck with your build, let us know how it goes.
I wasn’t anticipating such a delay in my post being moderated so things have moved on. Current system below, is doing what I need for now. I’ll be looking to upgrade in the new year. I’ve reverted the HP back into a PC so I can use it for editing photos. Interesting about the cache drive as others have said Truenas doesn’t really use then at this end of the usage chain. So I left it out the final build but I’ll have reconsider that. Probably change the MB & CPU when I find a price hit. Thanks again.
Intel MB Dq77MK
Intel i5-3570T CPU @ 2.30GHz
20gb Ram
250gb SSD
2 x 6gb HHD (stripe) Not concerned about data
2 x 2gb HHD (unused) Will be used as photo backup drives
Only used for streaming Old films, TV & Photo storage
Yea, I don’t have much money and mainly used parts from old computers I had laying around here. I just remembered another reason I went with the Intel rather than the HP was although I had a decent dedicated card for the HP it was AMD and had problems transcoding some file. The Intel chip ending in T have the transcoders built in and really work well even at this level. I’ve had no such problems yet.
