I have edited this post since the time it was originally made. Because i realize many here use UnRaid as opposed to TrueNas?
I am in the process of procuring h/w. I already ordered the following
MoBo: Asrock Z370 Pro4
CPU: i5 8500T
I am planning to use this NAS build merely for storage purposes and not for gaming or media serving. I do intend to run either a VM or some docker containers which will run some python scripts for web scraping.
RAM:
is a 64GB Crucial Pro RAM an overkill for my needs?
SSD
The motherboard I ordered only supports Gen3 nvme m.2 SSD. however, it is hard to find a Gen3 SSD and they are expensive. Is it Ok to use a Gen4 SSD? [WD SN560 1TB NVMe Gen4x4 Internal M.2 2280 SSD] - these are less expensive than the Gen3 ones.
Storage:
I am looking at this from the NAS killer 6.0 as a reference.
1 SSD cache for docker containers and VMs
1 HDD cache for large file ingest
1 parity drive
6 data drives (48TB usable)
I have about 6-8 TB of data to be backed up.
I have no idea how many storage, parity, cache drives should i be using. Can someone provide some suggestions?
Hi, I just responded to your similar post with info about TrueNAS, sounds like maybe you are changing corse and considering Unraid?
Your motherboard / CPU look good. 64 GB is probably overkill for your purposes in Unraid. It never hurts to have more RAM but you could probably save some money and go with 32GB without any difference in performance.
You can use a Gen4 NVMe drive with a Gen3 motherboard without issue it will just run at Gen3 speeds.
For Unraid I would probably just go with a single NVMe cache drive 1TB should be plenty, you can always upgrade / add to it later if you need to. If you want to be safe you can get 2 identical NVMe drives and run them in RAID1 in case of a drive failure, but that is not strictly necessary.
Unless you are constantly moving very large files off and onto your NAS every day I would skip the HDD cache. The idea of the HDD cache is it saves wear and tear on your SSD drive if your are writing many TB per day of very large files. Not sure what you are planning on scraping with your python scripts but if that doesn’t sound like something you are planning on doing you probably don’t need the HDD cache.
Besides your NVME cache I would just put all your HDDs into your array. They can be any mix of capacity and you can add drives at any time, the only rule is that your parity drive must be at least as large or larger than any other drive on the Array.
For your NAS build, 64GB of RAM is likely overkill unless you plan on running heavy VMs or containers. Typically, 16GB-32GB would suffice for storage and light web scraping tasks. Regarding the SSD, while your motherboard supports Gen3 NVMe, using a Gen4 SSD like the WD SN560 is fine but not necessary, as it won’t fully leverage the Gen4 speeds and would be more expensive than a Gen3 SSD. For storage, your plan with 1 SSD cache for Docker/VM performance and 1 HDD cache for handling large files is solid.
That cable should work fine to connect your SAS drives to your HBA.
You can also connect SATA drives to the SAS HBA, but since you are all set up for SAS you might as well use SAS drives unless you can find a substantially better deal on SATA drives.