We are literally building very similar stuff right now. Appreciate the ceph deep dive. The terramaster is a decent box. I picked up a f5-422. Just remove the USB 2 inside and stick a USB 3 in the USB port. I decided to go with open media vault on the USB and decided to keep it as a dedicated Nas to connect to proxmox vs adding it to the cluster
@@apalrdsadventures side note, the internal usb is only usb 2, so I abandoned it and just use the usb3 on the back. Unfortunately the f5-422 doesn't have an on board nvme port so usb is the only option unless you want to use up a drive slot in the caddy. Great little box for factor wise, even though its a bit over priced, IMHO worth the money for the choice to put your own OS if you know what you're doing
@apalrd's adventures considering the new TOS software locks out RAM so you have to pay loads more to get terramasters RAM it's not worth getting one of these if you want to use there own software
Well done. I have a F2-423 and want MORE of them. Mine has 2x NVMe and 2x SSD with Proxomox installed on the mirrored NVMe drives and Ceph on the 2x SSDs in a 3 node all-flash cluster. I don't have a power meter, so it's good to note the power consumption. It took me 3 days to work out I need to completely remove the original USB device, so this video should save other new TM F2-* owners a lot of grief. The only downside is that I think the NVMe devices are only PCIe 3 with 1 lane, so the max read speed is about 800 MB/s, which is better than 500 MB/s for SSD, but not worth populating with the best high speed NVMe drives. That's worth a mention in the next video featuring this device.
It does seem to be at PCIe x1 right now (lspci -vv, look for LinkSta), which is something I didn't even think to check. I put in an old drive anyway, so not a big deal for me, but definitely good to know.
You mentioned a 1RU model and sure enough there is a U4-423 with much the same specs BUT it only has a single NVMe slot. Damn! I got all hot and bothered there for a moment. I'll have to stick to F2-(2|4)23 as the dual NVMe is THE feature that got me to buy one. So far, the only rack-like option I've seen of any interest is a "NAS Motherboard N5105/N6005 4x Intel i226-V 2.5G Nics Dual M.2 NVMe Six SATA3.0 2*DDR4 HDMI2.0 DP Mini ITX" on Aliexpress for about $200USD. Teamed up with a short-depth 1 (or 2) RU would be tempting.
This one - www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Pro-Tech-Toolkit/IF145-307 They make cheaper ones depending on what sort of work you do, but it's a great set for working with computers and small electronics
To be fair, concerning thin clients... "awful processors", and implicitly no expansion... well, I beg to differ. Running here some ThinkCentre M720q, i5 9600T, with either 16 or 32GB of DDR4, NVME SSD, low profile half height PCie slot (some small GPUs fit, some NICs too, or a PCIe to multi M.2 adaptor) , USB 3.1 Gen 1 and 2 (capture cards to pass through, more storage, you can do a lot there too). And the power consumption is great!
When i was in progress to get home server setup. NAS setup was my first choice, at that time all the NAS was super expensive or had no option to have Proxmox going. Now i have NUC. and i am happy with it. In case someone will ask what is the best all around mini home server setup device with easy to setup i will just point them to your video :)
Depends on your needs, if you don't want spinning drives you can get something like a NUC or one of those fanless 'firewall' boxes and do all-SSD. I wanted spinning drives for storing a media library in this context.
It's getting hard to find name brand 2280 SATA drives anyway, so NVME support is preferred unless someone has a ton of SATA M2 laying around for whatever reason.
Nice. I have an f2-221 with TrueNAS scale on it, booting from and external ssd via a USB-SSD connector. Im going to follow your progress on this one, could be worth swapping to proxmox.
I also use TrueNAS scale for storage only, but Proxmox is just so much better at virtualization and containers that doing a bit of manual work for the little Samba I do need might be worth it for an all in one solution, at least to me
I'm planning on a series of different home software (Home Assistant, OPNsense, and Jellyfin over the next few months) and I'll run them both on the microserver and terramaster with some performance, power, and capacity / utilization metrics as appropriate
for hw nothing beats hp8300 from walmart - about 100 bucks - add a few things to make it excellent - they use about 50w - 90w loaded - broken laptops are another option - no screen- no problem for a headless server - the refurb boxes are way better value and allow you to add more storage - you probably want 10th gen refurb for nvme optimally? for a nas it may be optional just use good ssd pr add in pci-e card with nvme - not bootable on older platforms but still low latency and no moving parts #rop sled
Interesting video, I wondered the same thing about some of the Qnap offerings given their awful reputation with security. However, did you check if the "usb thingy" was a SATA DOM? If it really was a USB then forget about installing Proxmox or anything else on it, but if it was a DOM, and if it was large enough in capacity, you could have used that to install Proxmox to and then you would have had a little more space on your SSD for other things. Not that Proxmox is resource hog, but still for efficiency sake, it would have been nice.
It's actually USB and is really small. It seems to be only a efi partition or something like that, since TOS downloads and installs itself to the data drives.
@@apalrdsadventures I feared that would be the case. It is just a one time use case and after that forgotten about by users who use the product for the intended use case. Too bad, would have been a small but nice little bonus. Thanks for responding and happy holidays.
hi Apalrd, thank you for this valuabe content, I do learn so much even if I have sometimes a hard time to follow the english explanations andrepeat and repeat it. I am new and try to do as close as you do. Unfortunately directly after proxmox installation my storage is named local-lvm but yours is local zfs. I tried to wipe all disk and did several new installs but can not be it local-zfs. My local drive is not a NVME instead a SSD. Is that the mistake or what do I do wrong ?
please consider as closed or too dumb. In the next try I used the options tab besides the Target Harddisk instead of trying to reformat with gparted all the time. Sorry Sorry Sorry
Hey @apalrd, just ordered the r1 aooostar. And I am considering running the same setup you have in this playlist. So my question is, what's your overall review of this setup now that you have it up for a year or so. Do you still recommend it?
I'm currently using it for my home automation stuff (Home Assistant, Frigate, my task tracker, and video editing NAS). So I'm pretty happy with it. Not enough RAM to run many VMs, but it's enough to keep my core stuff up and not mess with it while I tinker with other systems.
Hi, I like your videos. I have a question about the Proxmox installation on the NAS. As you skipped the Proxmox installation part in the video, did you install ZFS as the root file system? I thought you can't have, because you are using only one ssd for the install and at least 2 disks are required. So did you create the rpool on your own? Also is it ok to use the Proxmox installation disk for VM's and containers? I read somewhere that it's better to separate them. I install Proxmox on 2 32GB flash drives as Raid1 and create a VM ZFS pool with a single NVme. You can do the same with the NAS with the front USB's. All the best 😊
I used the installer with ZFS. It does not mandate 2 disks, you can install ZFS on a single disk. Select ZFS RAID0 and only the disk you want to boot from There's nothing wrong with using the install disk for VMs/CTs and I'd definitely go with that approach on a home server (preferably on a mirrored drive - I have one NVMe but having a mirror of two for boot + VMs/CTs would be ideal).
@@apalrdsadventures thanks for this comment!! i wasn't sure how to install with zfs on only one ssd but figured out i could just deselect the second drive option as it was on my usb drive by default
Have you considered getting a used Optiplex or similar HP/Lenovo desktop? It seems like the Optiplex 7040 SFF is a great choice, for example. You can get them for under $150 or so on ebay, and get a quad core with DDR4 ram. I've even seen some listings under $100, usually without a hard drive or something. I plan on building a proxmox cluster with optiplex's. They typically have a pcie x16 and x4 slot in the SFF chassis. Which gives great options for high speed networking and DAS expansions. Probably the main disadvantage with the optiplex boxes is they only have one hard drive bay. So I think a external DAS is the way to go. I haven't looked into DAS's much, but I assume you could split up its drives across multiple computers. Edit: forget to mention they’re also very power efficient. But I couldn’t really find some precise examples of what they idle at.
If you're limited by drive bays, I think the best option would be to use a big HDD and then cluster with Ceph. If you can get at least 1x NVMe + 1x big HDD in a node, the total capacity should be pretty good.
@@apalrdsadventures That is a good suggestion. Pretty close to what I was thinking of doing in fact. Something I did not consider before, but I could use the NVMe as both my boot drive and ceph storage correct? I didn't realize that was an option till this video.
You can use put Ceph on a partition. That's fine. With NVMe drives only, Ceph also recommends creating multiple OSDs on the same disk, since NVMe can handle multiple queues and the OSD process isn't highly threaded.
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Thanks for the recommendation, this indeed looks very nice. Is the power supply made by some decent brand or it's worth replacing it with something better? There's a regular DC barrel jack on the back if I'm not mistaken. That Terra Master logo and name is obviously a Cooler Master ripoff, the hardware inside the case is probably fine though, but I'm not really trusting running no name Chinese power supplies 24/7.
Hey! I'm following your adventure here with Terramaster NAS and have a question. Do you think it makes sense/possible to run OpenSense in Proxmox on this device? Two network sockets make an impression that this hardware can work as a router.
It's certainly possible using the dual NICs. Dual NICs aren't strictly required for a router anyway, but having them means you don't need any managed switches.
The only danger in using ZFS without ECC is that ZFS will tell you when your data is corrupted for some reason and any other filesystem will silently ignore it.
@@apalrdsadventures I know, you can’t compare both systems. It was a joke. A good 24 bay NetApp FAS costs at least €50.000 retail. So they aren’t comparable. Mostly used for large databases with PetaBytes of storage. Medium sized businesses usually only run 112 bays with around 90-160Tb of storage. Small companies run Synology most of the times in 4, 8 or 12 bay configuration. If you don’t have more then 50 users it’s fine. But when you go over that certainly look into Oracle or NetApp(the best for SAN)
I got an F2-223 recently. I still can't figure out how to get it to boot from NVME after restarting. Somehow it keeps on looking for a USB drive after restarting and the only way to get it to boot from NVME is after each restart, to go into the bios and manually set the NVME option to something other than Disabled. In my case, it's "ubuntu." Have you figured out how to make it boot from nvme automatically each time?
I had to switch the boot option to NVME and also select the specific NVME drive as the NVME boot option (there's an option to select which nvme drive of the two slots, and it seems to not work reliably if that option isn't set). The internal USB drive also undoes this setting each time it boots, so it needs to come out also.
I'm currently testing it with Jellyfin and it's very usable for transcoding. Some quirks like enabling the huc/guc firmware blobs in the kernel cmdline for quicksync to work but that's required for anything with an Intel GPU of this generation. I'm running in LXC so not using PCIe passthrough.
Great content! It'd be sweet to have 3 of such NASes (I've previously been eyeing some cheap Chinese glorified NAS 'crypto-box' for this role, but this looks way better!), run Ceph with erasure-coding, and have them as the data storage solution. Won't be able to do that anytime soon, but I can always dream!
Someday I'll get there. Low power, >1G Ethernet, can build an NVMe + HDD cluster with HA on the same nodes. Pretty reasonable for a home or even small business system.
I use XigmaNAS on my Dell R510 and R710 rack servers. Very similar to TrueNAS since they share the same heritage. I picked XigmaNAS because I liked the user interface better. I have not been able to find a side-by-side comparison as well as how to convert from one to the other if that should ever be necessary.
True, but cheap/free up front can cost a lot ok the energy on the backend unless you have cheap/free power like off grid solar. I've passed up a lot of old server hardware purely because the noise and energy cost would be unacceptable over just the first year of use
The difference in power costs alone between this and my HP microserver (which is pretty quiet and low-power as far as used IT hardware goes) is $35 a year where I am *at idle*, and electricity is relatively cheap here compared to the rest of the US and especially the world. I have plenty of used hardware, but I don't want to run any of it as a full-time server.
@@jettachamp26 No duh. Be smart about it. And the flipside is true too. A used Skylake workstation could handle Aplalrds workload of that NAS, his micro server, and all his thin client things combined. Not to mention he could eliminate some network hardware... all a savings in power.
I pulled a T440P out of a dumpster and it's loaded with 3 SSD's now. It's only SATA 2 bus for 2 of the ports, and one of them is a sata-only 2242 slot, so it's a bit wonky, but it's fine.
@@XiaOmegaX I bought a t440p a few years ago, upgraded to a 35w CPU,16 ram,two 1tb ssd and 256 wwan port ssd. Its a freaking powerhouse. Triple boot and can play emulators with the gt 7** dgpu. If I don't sell it soon it'll be a VM test lab.
We are literally building very similar stuff right now. Appreciate the ceph deep dive. The terramaster is a decent box. I picked up a f5-422. Just remove the USB 2 inside and stick a USB 3 in the USB port. I decided to go with open media vault on the USB and decided to keep it as a dedicated Nas to connect to proxmox vs adding it to the cluster
Keep up the great work!
Sounds like a good solution
@@apalrdsadventures side note, the internal usb is only usb 2, so I abandoned it and just use the usb3 on the back. Unfortunately the f5-422 doesn't have an on board nvme port so usb is the only option unless you want to use up a drive slot in the caddy. Great little box for factor wise, even though its a bit over priced, IMHO worth the money for the choice to put your own OS if you know what you're doing
@apalrd's adventures considering the new TOS software locks out RAM so you have to pay loads more to get terramasters RAM it's not worth getting one of these if you want to use there own software
Well done. I have a F2-423 and want MORE of them. Mine has 2x NVMe and 2x SSD with Proxomox installed on the mirrored NVMe drives and Ceph on the 2x SSDs in a 3 node all-flash cluster. I don't have a power meter, so it's good to note the power consumption. It took me 3 days to work out I need to completely remove the original USB device, so this video should save other new TM F2-* owners a lot of grief. The only downside is that I think the NVMe devices are only PCIe 3 with 1 lane, so the max read speed is about 800 MB/s, which is better than 500 MB/s for SSD, but not worth populating with the best high speed NVMe drives. That's worth a mention in the next video featuring this device.
It does seem to be at PCIe x1 right now (lspci -vv, look for LinkSta), which is something I didn't even think to check. I put in an old drive anyway, so not a big deal for me, but definitely good to know.
You mentioned a 1RU model and sure enough there is a U4-423 with much the same specs BUT it only has a single NVMe slot. Damn! I got all hot and bothered there for a moment. I'll have to stick to F2-(2|4)23 as the dual NVMe is THE feature that got me to buy one. So far, the only rack-like option I've seen of any interest is a "NAS Motherboard N5105/N6005 4x Intel i226-V 2.5G Nics Dual M.2 NVMe Six SATA3.0 2*DDR4 HDMI2.0 DP Mini ITX" on Aliexpress for about $200USD. Teamed up with a short-depth 1 (or 2) RU would be tempting.
I've struggled to find a half decent 1/2U rack case, I'm not a huge fan of the one I have and the low cost ones aren't great
"There are instructions for it. I didn't read them." You, sir, are my spirit animal 😁
F2-423 would really be pretty nifty. You're onto something good here.
YT just recommended your channel. That's an interesting tool kit you have.
This one - www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Pro-Tech-Toolkit/IF145-307
They make cheaper ones depending on what sort of work you do, but it's a great set for working with computers and small electronics
Great review, well done showing full setup.
Good stuff! I'm getting into a lot of NAS/TrueNAS/Proxmox adventures myself so this is a big help! Thanks and God Bless!
Glad you appreciate it! Thanks!
What a great discovery! I didn't know Terramaster has such a cheap NAS with Intel CPU enabling transcoding, plus there are two 2.5 Gbps ports.
Thank you for this. This helped me with my decision.
10/10 for the box toss.
i would like to see a "all in one server" :D
working on it, Home Assistant and OPNsense are coming next, and a file server within Proxmox
To be fair, concerning thin clients... "awful processors", and implicitly no expansion... well, I beg to differ.
Running here some ThinkCentre M720q, i5 9600T, with either 16 or 32GB of DDR4, NVME SSD, low profile half height PCie slot (some small GPUs fit, some NICs too, or a PCIe to multi M.2 adaptor) , USB 3.1 Gen 1 and 2 (capture cards to pass through, more storage, you can do a lot there too).
And the power consumption is great!
super useful, thanks! Subscribed
I think you can further reduce the power consumption by spinning down the hard disk.
I was wondering about that. I presume his measurement was with the disks spinning.
When i was in progress to get home server setup. NAS setup was my first choice, at that time all the NAS was super expensive or had no option to have Proxmox going.
Now i have NUC. and i am happy with it. In case someone will ask what is the best all around mini home server setup device with easy to setup i will just point them to your video :)
Depends on your needs, if you don't want spinning drives you can get something like a NUC or one of those fanless 'firewall' boxes and do all-SSD. I wanted spinning drives for storing a media library in this context.
It's getting hard to find name brand 2280 SATA drives anyway, so NVME support is preferred unless someone has a ton of SATA M2 laying around for whatever reason.
Nice. I have an f2-221 with TrueNAS scale on it, booting from and external ssd via a USB-SSD connector. Im going to follow your progress on this one, could be worth swapping to proxmox.
I also use TrueNAS scale for storage only, but Proxmox is just so much better at virtualization and containers that doing a bit of manual work for the little Samba I do need might be worth it for an all in one solution, at least to me
Thanks!
Nice video. Can I make a suggestion? Not only do performance test but also make various performance comparisons with other solutions.
I'm planning on a series of different home software (Home Assistant, OPNsense, and Jellyfin over the next few months) and I'll run them both on the microserver and terramaster with some performance, power, and capacity / utilization metrics as appropriate
Awesome.
for hw nothing beats hp8300 from walmart - about 100 bucks - add a few things to make it excellent - they use about 50w - 90w loaded - broken laptops are another option - no screen- no problem for a headless server - the refurb boxes are way better value and allow you to add more storage - you probably want 10th gen refurb for nvme optimally? for a nas it may be optional just use good ssd pr add in pci-e card with nvme - not bootable on older platforms but still low latency and no moving parts #rop sled
Interesting video, I wondered the same thing about some of the Qnap offerings given their awful reputation with security. However, did you check if the "usb thingy" was a SATA DOM? If it really was a USB then forget about installing Proxmox or anything else on it, but if it was a DOM, and if it was large enough in capacity, you could have used that to install Proxmox to and then you would have had a little more space on your SSD for other things. Not that Proxmox is resource hog, but still for efficiency sake, it would have been nice.
It's actually USB and is really small. It seems to be only a efi partition or something like that, since TOS downloads and installs itself to the data drives.
@@apalrdsadventures I feared that would be the case. It is just a one time use case and after that forgotten about by users who use the product for the intended use case. Too bad, would have been a small but nice little bonus. Thanks for responding and happy holidays.
hi Apalrd, thank you for this valuabe content, I do learn so much even if I have sometimes a hard time to follow the english explanations andrepeat and repeat it. I am new and try to do as close as you do. Unfortunately directly after proxmox installation my storage is named local-lvm but yours is local zfs. I tried to wipe all disk and did several new installs but can not be it local-zfs. My local drive is not a NVME instead a SSD. Is that the mistake or what do I do wrong ?
please consider as closed or too dumb. In the next try I used the options tab besides the Target Harddisk instead of trying to reformat with gparted all the time. Sorry Sorry Sorry
Think this video is on similar lines to what alpalrd's adventures did with his Terramaster NAS.
Hey @apalrd, just ordered the r1 aooostar. And I am considering running the same setup you have in this playlist.
So my question is, what's your overall review of this setup now that you have it up for a year or so. Do you still recommend it?
I'm currently using it for my home automation stuff (Home Assistant, Frigate, my task tracker, and video editing NAS). So I'm pretty happy with it. Not enough RAM to run many VMs, but it's enough to keep my core stuff up and not mess with it while I tinker with other systems.
Hi, I like your videos. I have a question about the Proxmox installation on the NAS. As you skipped the Proxmox installation part in the video, did you install ZFS as the root file system? I thought you can't have, because you are using only one ssd for the install and at least 2 disks are required. So did you create the rpool on your own? Also is it ok to use the Proxmox installation disk for VM's and containers? I read somewhere that it's better to separate them. I install Proxmox on 2 32GB flash drives as Raid1 and create a VM ZFS pool with a single NVme. You can do the same with the NAS with the front USB's.
All the best 😊
I used the installer with ZFS. It does not mandate 2 disks, you can install ZFS on a single disk. Select ZFS RAID0 and only the disk you want to boot from
There's nothing wrong with using the install disk for VMs/CTs and I'd definitely go with that approach on a home server (preferably on a mirrored drive - I have one NVMe but having a mirror of two for boot + VMs/CTs would be ideal).
@@apalrdsadventures I guess they recently added the option to install on Raid0.
@@apalrdsadventures thanks for this comment!! i wasn't sure how to install with zfs on only one ssd but figured out i could just deselect the second drive option as it was on my usb drive by default
Have you considered getting a used Optiplex or similar HP/Lenovo desktop? It seems like the Optiplex 7040 SFF is a great choice, for example. You can get them for under $150 or so on ebay, and get a quad core with DDR4 ram. I've even seen some listings under $100, usually without a hard drive or something.
I plan on building a proxmox cluster with optiplex's. They typically have a pcie x16 and x4 slot in the SFF chassis. Which gives great options for high speed networking and DAS expansions. Probably the main disadvantage with the optiplex boxes is they only have one hard drive bay. So I think a external DAS is the way to go. I haven't looked into DAS's much, but I assume you could split up its drives across multiple computers.
Edit: forget to mention they’re also very power efficient. But I couldn’t really find some precise examples of what they idle at.
If you're limited by drive bays, I think the best option would be to use a big HDD and then cluster with Ceph. If you can get at least 1x NVMe + 1x big HDD in a node, the total capacity should be pretty good.
@@apalrdsadventures
That is a good suggestion. Pretty close to what I was thinking of doing in fact.
Something I did not consider before, but I could use the NVMe as both my boot drive and ceph storage correct? I didn't realize that was an option till this video.
You can use put Ceph on a partition. That's fine.
With NVMe drives only, Ceph also recommends creating multiple OSDs on the same disk, since NVMe can handle multiple queues and the OSD process isn't highly threaded.
Thanks for the recommendation, this indeed looks very nice. Is the power supply made by some decent brand or it's worth replacing it with something better? There's a regular DC barrel jack on the back if I'm not mistaken. That Terra Master logo and name is obviously a Cooler Master ripoff, the hardware inside the case is probably fine though, but I'm not really trusting running no name Chinese power supplies 24/7.
I did the same on my F5-221 ,increased ram to 10gb , replaced the usb , and installed OMV and using as a NAS
As TOS is crappy OS
Haven’t you tried second m.2? Does it also supports name?
They both support NVMe
@@apalrdsadventures thanx
why don't you have a home (box) for your computer? (I have a ton of them by the way ;))
Did you found how to activate the pci passthrough?
Hey! I'm following your adventure here with Terramaster NAS and have a question. Do you think it makes sense/possible to run OpenSense in Proxmox on this device? Two network sockets make an impression that this hardware can work as a router.
It's certainly possible using the dual NICs. Dual NICs aren't strictly required for a router anyway, but having them means you don't need any managed switches.
This NAS is without ECC - do you think it is safe to use ZFS?
The only danger in using ZFS without ECC is that ZFS will tell you when your data is corrupted for some reason and any other filesystem will silently ignore it.
hey i have 5110p phi coprocessor you ever get yours working ?
Hair is amazing
Way better is to use a SAN solution instead of a NAS, like NetApp or Oracle. Way more performance. Even a nice Z16 will do nice as a storage server.
This started as a NAS but now it's a hypervisor with storage, and it's quite cheap for something new with modern power efficiency
@@apalrdsadventures I know, you can’t compare both systems. It was a joke. A good 24 bay NetApp FAS costs at least €50.000 retail. So they aren’t comparable. Mostly used for large databases with PetaBytes of storage. Medium sized businesses usually only run 112 bays with around 90-160Tb of storage. Small companies run Synology most of the times in 4, 8 or 12 bay configuration. If you don’t have more then 50 users it’s fine. But when you go over that certainly look into Oracle or NetApp(the best for SAN)
I got an F2-223 recently. I still can't figure out how to get it to boot from NVME after restarting. Somehow it keeps on looking for a USB drive after restarting and the only way to get it to boot from NVME is after each restart, to go into the bios and manually set the NVME option to something other than Disabled. In my case, it's "ubuntu."
Have you figured out how to make it boot from nvme automatically each time?
This happens even if I remove the internal boot usb drive.
I had to switch the boot option to NVME and also select the specific NVME drive as the NVME boot option (there's an option to select which nvme drive of the two slots, and it seems to not work reliably if that option isn't set). The internal USB drive also undoes this setting each time it boots, so it needs to come out also.
This is a cool server - how about the GPU - is it usable also ?
I'm currently testing it with Jellyfin and it's very usable for transcoding. Some quirks like enabling the huc/guc firmware blobs in the kernel cmdline for quicksync to work but that's required for anything with an Intel GPU of this generation. I'm running in LXC so not using PCIe passthrough.
Great content! It'd be sweet to have 3 of such NASes (I've previously been eyeing some cheap Chinese glorified NAS 'crypto-box' for this role, but this looks way better!), run Ceph with erasure-coding, and have them as the data storage solution. Won't be able to do that anytime soon, but I can always dream!
Someday I'll get there. Low power, >1G Ethernet, can build an NVMe + HDD cluster with HA on the same nodes. Pretty reasonable for a home or even small business system.
Have you ever tried xigmanas? Thoughts on it as a solution?
I use XigmaNAS on my Dell R510 and R710 rack servers. Very similar to TrueNAS since they share the same heritage. I picked XigmaNAS because I liked the user interface better. I have not been able to find a side-by-side comparison as well as how to convert from one to the other if that should ever be necessary.
If you learn how to scrounge and make connections, you can have used IT hardware coming out of your ears for free or cheap. Better than a $250 'NAS'.
True, but cheap/free up front can cost a lot ok the energy on the backend unless you have cheap/free power like off grid solar. I've passed up a lot of old server hardware purely because the noise and energy cost would be unacceptable over just the first year of use
The difference in power costs alone between this and my HP microserver (which is pretty quiet and low-power as far as used IT hardware goes) is $35 a year where I am *at idle*, and electricity is relatively cheap here compared to the rest of the US and especially the world. I have plenty of used hardware, but I don't want to run any of it as a full-time server.
@@jettachamp26 No duh. Be smart about it. And the flipside is true too. A used Skylake workstation could handle Aplalrds workload of that NAS, his micro server, and all his thin client things combined. Not to mention he could eliminate some network hardware... all a savings in power.
I pulled a T440P out of a dumpster and it's loaded with 3 SSD's now. It's only SATA 2 bus for 2 of the ports, and one of them is a sata-only 2242 slot, so it's a bit wonky, but it's fine.
@@XiaOmegaX I bought a t440p a few years ago, upgraded to a 35w CPU,16 ram,two 1tb ssd and 256 wwan port ssd. Its a freaking powerhouse. Triple boot and can play emulators with the gt 7** dgpu. If I don't sell it soon it'll be a VM test lab.