Nearly half a dozen NAS videos on TH-cam, but everyone including yours skips the most important part of setting it up so it's accessible from outside of the home network, would you mind covering that as well? Thanks.
@@bigdamnhero2297 I wouldn't necessarily say it's the most important part, as there are many reasons why you maybe WOULDN'T want that, but I totally understand why you would! There are many different ways of doing it. I personally prefer using a VPN server like wireguard so that I can tunnel into my local network and access it vs doing some port forwarding or something. I'd like to get a wireguard video made, but in the meantime maybe look into that. Techno Tim has a solid video on it if I remember correctly
@@bigdamnhero2297 That's not the most important part, but more the more dangerous part that no one should do because 99% of you out there don't know how to configure networking, setup security rules properly or don't really know what they are doing.
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Problems i had following this Tutorial, and how i solved them: While trying to boot from USB, Selected boot image could not be Authenticated - Turned off SecureBoot GRUB Error Unknown Filesystem - Used Balena Etcher instead of Rufus Web interface could not be accessed - Used archive and installed an Older version of TrueNAS Install failed - Tried again i was nanometers away before throwing everything in the trash filled with rage, but somehow through clever googling it worked. Linux always Frustrates me.
Super easy, next level trick. TrueNAS loves quick NICs and ECC RAM. NASs love stable power supplies and nice drive mounts. How to get this for $100 or less? Used Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge workstations. HP Z420s, Z220s (with Xeons and ECC) or their Dell/Lenovo equivalents? Tons of space for drives, spare SATA ports, Intel NICs, great power supplies and cheap ECC RAM for expansion. I’ve built a pile of budget NASs with them, not a single issue with any of them. Bonus - on larger stations you’ve got spare PCIe 3.0 slots for a cheap NVME L2 cache drive. For power considerations? I’ll snag a Xeon L series chip off eBay for $10 that takes total draw down to near nothing. And then the massive factory heatsink for a 130-40w workstation cpu gives you even more thermal headroom.
Love it. I built a TrueNAS server I've had for years now with an FX-4130, 24tb (3x 12tb in RaidZ) storage, a 500gb SSD cache drive (had one on hand that I figured I might as well use), etc. and it's my baby. Even if you only have a couple tb, a NAS server is a fantastic use for old-ish hardware.
As much as I enjoy watching videos showing off expensive hardware with insane performance, I absolutely loved seeing this video making use of old hardware with cost and power consumption in mind. This just feels way more realistic which is awesome. Loved the video, gained a new subscriber!
Your videos are a joy to watch and I love seeing these projects that pretty much anyone can try given it doesn’t require a huge budget. Thanks for your time and effort! Looking forward to the next one!
I'm almost 2 years late to the party, but awesome video. This video inspired me to build a NAS using an old Dell workstation that was just collecting dust in a closet. Now I have a cheap 8TB NAS on my network. Thank you sir!
In my experience (at home, as sysadmin and as a vent for other sysadmins): matching drives too good is not good. The closer they are, the more equal they are in flaws and expected lifespan. Personally I like to make sure they are at least from different dates, but even better is different series. An alternative can be to, once things are set up, either change one drive after a while or run it degraded, if your data is not super critical. It makes the drives diverge and hopefully not fail together. A former colleague got an error from a raid. When he switched the drives and let the raid rebuild the next drive failed... And I think even more drives failed before the whole thing was up and running again. It might be uncommon, but if it's possible to work around, I would do that.
I agree and disagree. You should never run it degraded except for replacing disks. Most arrays are run on basically identical drives, and while yes, there is greater concurrence when using identical disks (critically true of SSD's) the general timeframe of failure will be similar. Which is why you don't wait until you have a failure to replace some disks. Make an estimate of how long disks will last, and then schedule replacements accordingly. So funny story on this, Synology created a proprietary array type called F1 specifically to "address" this issue on SSDs, which due to the way they work, have a higher liklihood of failing at around the same time. It works by basically writing more to one disk at a time, therefore aging them out ununiformly. The only way it can know which is the oldest disk to age out is via the disks smart stats. So we can write that another way: "Synology F1 intentionally damages disks, to get them to fail" it's an idiotic scheme, because using that same smart data you could just instruct the user to replace disks *without damaging it first*, without creating an actual real failure. The user would then have the option of re-purposing the disk for the remainder of it's lifespan in some low usage/non critical situation. SSD's make this need obvious, but it's always been true for spinning disks, and large environments will replace on a schedule, not wait for the whole array to be run into the ground.
Very good points! The F1 feature sounds like a quick and dirty solution and horrible for real life. "Running degraded" as i am strongly for depend on the system and setup and might not actually be degraded. A raid 6 is easy to run somewhat safe degraded with new disks. A raid 1 can be run for a while with one disk being a desktop computer disk used for a while and then swapped for the real disk etc. And of course there is a huge difference in doing this at home where money is an issue and downtime probably is not. Also doing this with 2-5 disks are much easier than 100. : ) This is also one reason I really like btrfs. With it I can start with 2 disks for a month, change one for a new, run for 2 months, and then re- add the replaces to continue on 3 disks. All without degradation nor downtime. And it is good for unmatched disks in terms of space usage. Maybe not an issue in the beginning, but when upgrading to newer drives or expanding.
Another reason you don't want to use exactly same model is that you don't know which one you replace when one of them dies. While synology has dedicated number tagged bays, this home built NAS doesn't have numbering on its drives.
Thanks for your easy to follow real world guide. Too many other youtubers speak to their audience like were all full stack developers instead of home jobbers!
Man I feel like even more of a home jobber, because this was too much. I followed his steps to set a static IP address and ended up bricking the NAS. One re-install later, and I think I'm just going to leave the default DHCP settings going forward. XD
I made one of these not long ago for my workplace. We needed to have everyone’s work backed up somewhere so I grabbed some old components I had in a drawer and built a kickass TrueNAS server. Now everyone in the office has a backup of their work.
Hi, I mounted my TrueNAS on an old Phantom case and AMD A8-7600 for fun and I liked it a lot, I also have an ASUSTOR and TrueNAS really has very good performance. Thanks for sharing !
Some time ago, I made myself my own servers out of old laptops. The most important thing for me, was to make them as much power efficient as possible. So I basically I stripped them down, leaving only parts, that were needed for them to run. So I ended up with a laptop without touchpad, keyboard, sound card, wi-fi card, nor a screen. It's a Lenovo G580 with a Celeron processor, so at idle with a headless ubuntu server install it only uses aprox. 8 Watts. And frankly, that's enough for a vpn, dns, Minecraft and some other things to tinker with, when I feel like it. I recommend everyone to try it out!, and since it's really power efficient maybe even use it as some kind of home server?
While I admire the initiative to save power, I really don't see the point of removing a laptops keyboard, touchpad, or screen. A keyboard and touchpad use no power to speak of, and the screen can turn itself off also. And having those three things can make troubleshooting easier when necessary.
@@JailerGamer i run a laptop server with the lid closed and removing all that would not do much, its easy to add additional fans which i highly recommend as well as heat sinks to components that get hot found some real hot inductors and the chipset... Removing all that will definitely be a pain when something happens to it and yeah the consume no power so pointless to remove them
Thank you so much, as an digital artist, I have only 25 gb left on my computer because of all the space my art takes up in the 1 tb drive, and this cleared up so much space.
The algorithm brought me here, probably because I watched LTT’s NAS video recently and it is well timed as I am putting serious consideration into it at the moment. This video really nicely covered the config side of it and I may go try to dig out my old PC from the loft and see what can be done (though it’s back from the Win XP era!)
This video is THE most helpful one when I install Truenas Scale first time with only trivial experience with Synology, QNAP and WD My Cloud. Thank you so much for explaining the process in a novice viewpoint.
So helpful and insightful. Thank you for these vids on your homemade NAS. Doing basically the same for the first time, so it's great to be a part of your journey!
Hello! Great channel! I have used your video to set up Truenas scale on a server at our church. It works great for saving all of our muntimedia video and audio files
With mirroring you should get double the speed when reading because it can use both disks. otoh writing on a raid1 requires to make sure both disks are written (in sync) before processing further writes, and thta can reduce overall throughput.
This is a fantastic video. I thought the NASes on the market were expensive, while the old desktop hardware is sitting unloved and is more upgradeable or has better specs than the NASes. Really brilliant, kinda janky setup, but it works well. As for the read/write speeds - I've noticed that empty HDDs read/write quicker than those with data on - like your synology drives which I presume were not empty. Something I read said that the outer tracks of the disk are wider and bigger (on those circular platters) - so you can move more data. As you fill up the drive, the drive uses more of the central tracks, which has a smaller circumference, which means the speeds slow down. It's something I've noticed as I've used drives and filled them up more.
That's astonishing. I never would want to start with this hardware but your results speak for themselves. However I would recommend a couple of improvements. First with the 5.25" to 3.5" you could have chosen one that fitted inside the bay so you could keep the nice front panel. Secondly you could have booted from stubby USB sticks in mirror thus making the build cheaper and cleaner. I don't know if Scale still installs on USB but Core does and it's fine, just use Sandisk and it will be fine.
An alternative to the USB to SATA solution would be to use an SATA expansion card. Your motherboard sadly does not support PCIE... But if someone is looking for a better solution, this would be the better option.
I did a DIY NAS build a few years ago with a ryzen 2400G, SFP+ 10gig NIC, an older Sun F80 800GB (4 x 200gb quad ssd) server ssd cache card, 32GB of ram, 4 seagate firecuda 2TB drives, and 4 x 4TB WD Red CMR drives. I set up up the firecuda's in a raid Z1 pool for more frequently accessed data and current projects, and the Red's as a Raid Z2 pool for longer term storage. also used the F80 to work as read cache, write cache, and meta data cache. with a pair of 30GB ssds as mirrored boot. the thing has been a beast of a work horse for the duration, and I just upgraded the CPU to a 5700G, picked up 2 pcie 3.0 x1 to quad sata adapters, and doubled the ram to 64GB. am planning on buying 4-8 8TB drives into a massive Raid Z2 pool for storage to offload everything I currently have and the repurpose the older drives, if they pass a durability test, to faster ssd cached quad mirror pools for VMs. hoping to pick up an X399 board and a first or second gen threadripper in the future with some LSI HBA cards and convert the NAS into a proper storage server in a many drive bay rack mount chassis once prices comes down a bit more.
@@HardwareHaven Right now it's been mainly storage, Plex, Resolve finished projects, a copy of my game libraries, various installers for my programs, .iso's of various linux builds, images/snapshots for my other computers/raspberry pi's, an archive of radeon and radeon pro drivers going back 2 years, and my dmg files for my old mac pro with copies of 10.6 - current MacOS. I do a lot of data recovery, and repairs for friends and family so having space to copy data to and install onto a fresh drive is also nice. still have more plans for it hence the upgrade in the future. but for now it's doing a bangin job.
I'm also one of the types who likes to run a clean boot drive with just the OS on it so being able to store copies of everything really helps when I do a quarterly clean windows or linux install. I've been big on data redundancy since college when I lost close to a TB of music and a couple TB of movies and tv shows along with nearly all my senior projects a week before finals due to a power outage killing my iMac
@@catalystguitarguy oof. Yeah I honestly need to be better with backups and redundancy. Horror stories like that should bring more fear to people, including myself haha. That’s an awesome setup you have! I’m always down to hear any other cool things you do with it in the future.
@@HardwareHaven It’s fun experimenting and relieving to have backups. I’m using an old full tower CFI case I picked up from FB marketplace for $35 for it currently. It’s a CFI-A7007. It has 6 x 3.5” bays, 3 x 2.5” mounts, 4 x 5 1/4” bays, and 8 x 120mm fan mounts. I converted the 5 1/4” bays to a Quad 3.5” hot swap enclosure with 3 slots. And the remaining slot I put a quad 2.5” drive hot swap enclosure. The thing is a bit bulky but for drive capacity and cooling it’s hard to match. Short of one of those expensive fractal designs behemoths. I don’t think I’ve seen temps over 40C under heavier loads and sustained transfers.
Hello there! Id like to make a suggestion. I have a similar truenas setup to yours, with 2 drives (although theyre 2 tb). I think the ssd would be much better used as a cache vdev for your main 2 hdds, this will help with sustaining gigabit speeds over longer file transfers after your ram fills up. you can put truenas on 2 usb 2.0 flash drives in raid 1, as the truenas operating system doesn't actually need fast storage to run on, and raid 1 will make sure that even if one of the usb drives dies after a couple of years there is always a backup.
Truenas isnt recommended to run off of usb drives. You may not encounter a problem but it still doesnt make it a good decision. In this vid from level1techs they encountered problems with it and truenas clarified theyd update the documentation to not recommend usb install anymore. th-cam.com/video/yTNEevsRk_E/w-d-xo.html
@@JFat5158 after looking back it it, it looks like they specifically recommend against using usb drives for data vdevs. I’m not sure if that includes the boot drive as well. If I had the ability not to use USB, I would 100% do that. But if you’re limited to it, it makes more sense to me to just use the boot drive over usb. Just a guess and opinion though 🤷🏻♂️
About boot devices: a cheap solution is to use 2 USB Sticks - they are easily fast enough for booting and would not influence general performance of your NAS. They are pretty cheap as well (you can use 2 32GB or even 16GB sticks). With two sticks you can even do a software raid1 (it is a bit tricky to duplicate the mbr in a way to get it booting if the stick with the master mbr fails). I did that a few times when I was short on SATA-Ports and unable to expand for some reason (e.g. with a Intel ATOM Board). There are also external cases that link two m2-sata keys to one raid1 (about $80, for example ORICO M2N210). More expensive but less headache getting it up and running.
Yes, Nas enclosures are expensive especially if you want a higher bay count. The problems with custom ones are power consumption, size and heat. Haven't built a NAS in a while but when I had my Freenas server I ran it on a USB stick. I wouldn't know why the Synology is slower maybe you could open it and add more ram as a test. Also don't know if that SSD is doing some caching.
You don't need to turn off DHCP address assignment and pin a static IP on TrueNAS side, as long as you pinned IP for TrueNAS's mac in your router (which you did). It's a better practice when the server has a "dynamic" IP assignment, while DHCP assignes effectively the same IP. Why it's better to not assigned static IP on the server side? Well, because otherwise, if you change something in your router's setting (e.g. subnetwork address), you wan't be able to login to your NAS.
Welcome to the TrueNAS ecosystem. The great thing about this software is its versatility. It can deliver solid results for the new user repurposing spare equipment. When paired with more powerful equipment, and networking it can be nearly indistinguishable from internal storage.
30W for the system that is in 99% idle is no-go. Buy a SBC (RPi4 or even better Orange Pi 5) and do this storage on them. Of course not on TrueNAS but maybe openvault. Power consumption when idle:
So 28W constant across a year is 245.28 kW hours, and energy prices vary by location but in Texas I'm averaging $0.12 per kW hour so that's ~$30 difference across an entire year assuming constant uptime, not hundreds.
Ohh, you can make VM's aswell. I wonder if it would be possible to have a machine with true nas as the base OS and then have a router OS on a VM and use the machine as your nas and router. Even expensive routers tend to have kinda underwhelming hardware.
You can. I did something similar years ago running a virtual pFsense router in ESXi (as my home router). ESXi was also running a virtual NAS. Only caveat was finding a dual-port gigabit NIC that w work w ESXi (since I needed a port for WAN and another for LAN). The main configuration was making sure the networking is done properly to make it all work. In my case, it was configuration of the vSwitches.
You should NOT use pfSense or OPNSense - they don't support 802.11ac and have sub-optimal 802.11n support. See more information about OpenWRT performance here" so.... OpenWRT + pihole + unbound + omv5 + proxmox to start on a quad core. see th-cam.com/users/OneMarcFiftyvideos to get started
Awesome video. I have an older PC with an i7 2600 and I think I'll turn it into a Nas. I'm a photographer and I often find myself taking 500gb of photos each year so a Nas will really help me keep my data secure.
@@HardwareHaven I was in Puerto Rico for 1 week before taking a cruise. Using a AirBNB 5Mb internet I connected to my home server through my OpenVPN to upload a few GB of pics/video...in case something happened to my cam/laptop while on the cruise I didn't lose ALL my trip data. Very convenient. Have remote access to about 1.5TB of data from anywhere. We just need faster internet options. Primarily upload
the mpcie for the wifi could maybe be used with an adapter, to pcie 1x, to fit a sata card for more drives. (or maybe gigabit ethernet?) and since the OS is probably read only into ram(?) you could probably just use a usb stick instead of sata to usb3
Since you have limited RAM...look into using ZRAM (since the OS is Debian based) it really helps offload read/writes to SSD and USB and helps quite a bit Very cool video!
While this sounds like a handy option. Wouldn't you only really want to use this with an older spare SSD laying around. Instead of using on an SSD with important data because of lifespan of flash based memory?
The advice when running TrueNAS as a VM is to turn off memory ballooning. The ballooning is a really cool feature which saves RAM but they say it interferes with TrueNAs which finds use for any and all memory it has. I would say that buying the SSD+SATA2USB was a poor choice and the money should have been spent on more RAM and run the boot from USB sticks.
Very helpful video! It would be nice to see nextcloud in addition. As far as I understand it, it should give you the function to add two-way-sync to folders on your PC.
I’d like to do something with nextcloud. From what I understand, it’s basically like Dropbox or Google drive, but self hosted. Could be really cool to try!
@@HardwareHaven It would be a nice video. I tried Nextcloud on my old Lenovo laptop with AMD A10 and 256GB SSD just to see if it works. But I used a Ubuntu server, the setup was a little bit harder because It was my first encounter with CLI system only, but It worked fine, I did even setup a free domain and had acces to it over the internet. It can do also chat and video calls.
The appeal of Synology to me are the web based desktop, mobile apps for mobile file access, the surveillance station and mobile app, and Photos backup app. Synology is can be a complete cloud service replacement. TrueNAS works great while on premise, however. Love the options it provides. I opted to install Xpenology and make my own Synology with hardware decoding for PLEX and ability to use Docker containers and all of the Synology mobile apps. I get full speed read/write speeds.
Ready built NAS are amazing for the hardware they use. The advantage of building your own is you can chuck better hardware at it for less money. I was amazed how well this one performed because you can't get much weaker hardware than this without going vintage.
There are mini PCI-E to gigabit, and SATA, and even dual sata (I have these XD). Also, pop the front cover off that drive bay adapter, then maybe the cover fits
I'm not sure that is a mini PCIe socket with the WiFi in it but if it is then that would be a great idea. I bet you never thought an 8GB TrueNAS with a weak CPU and a USB network adaptor could out perform a Synology! I was amazed.
TrueNAS is a nice OS that makes everything so much more convenient. But a 1 Gbit ethernet port would definitely be something you want. 100 mbit is just "meh". Generally I don't power on my NAS when I don't need it. the boot time is pretty low, and on demand boot is just good enough.
@@HardwareHaven That adaptor worked really well. I bought a 2.5Ggbe version and although it gets to that speed it cannot sustain it. It shuts off after 40GB. Pretty sure it overheats.
One thing I'd suggest is mounting the two drives in the same orientation. It helps to have drives that are also designed for use in a NAS configuration, with additional vibration reduction rings to isolate the drive from the case.
Interesting. Do you mean the little rubber washer type things? I think I've seen some people claim that those can actually make vibrations potentially worse. Not for noise, but for the drive itself.
@@HardwareHaven -- yup, they look like little rubber washers. Some NAS-rated drives will already have those built into the internals of the case, and you won't see them. They're probably less important for a device that has only two drives, but for devices with a larger number of drives, I think you're going to want them. I believe that the early models of the Backblaze server rigs did not have them, while the newer models of their rig does. Yes, Backblaze publishes full video and design specs for the NAS devices that they build for themselves. It's almost as cool as their list of drive reliability that they post every quarter.
Funny. I did something similar with a higher specced Pavillion P7-1220, with an A8 3820 and 8 gigs of DDR3. I did it with Ubuntu Server and samba but it works just about the same, giving me gigabit speeds if I use ethernet. Great thing to have, I love it.
@@HardwareHaven Goes to show that even though data centers are buying computers with multiple 64 core CPU's in them, a 4 core or even dual core computer can do it just fine on small scale. It's beautiful.
Instead of "disable DHCP and configure a static... make sure it isn't in the DHCP range..." I recommend just creating a reserved DHCP address on the router. Centralize administration of IP addresses in one spot making it easy to see what is used (or assigned to devices long gone). Personally I usually reserve the IP address initially assigned to the device by DHCP and give it a nice hostname so I don't have to remember the address.
You can make a reservation, and still use static ip. That way, if you have a NAS, and a main PC, and router fails, you can drop any router, switch, and still access your nas without hassle. In my experience, all servers should have an static ip.
Cool video! I am glad TH-cam suggested it, just subbed. I am building my system with an FX 8350. Quite the opposite of efficient. I am going to justify it to myself by running some jails or hopefully even Docker, now that I believe that is supported. I had a hard time with doing anything other than windows shares with FreeNAS.
XIGMA NAS AND OMV ARE VIABLE OPTIONS TOO... XIGMA NAS is a fork of freenas and was previously called nas4free. It has served me well for years. Omv runs on lighter hardware including ras pi's, also quite stable.
@@VladislavKurashov Yea, I forget the model but it has a big tower cooler. The mobo is a fatal1ty with all kinds of OC stuff in the bios. I was thinking of an underclock/volt. At least it isn't 9000 series I guess, haha
I did something similar with an old Dell tower, installed a 250gig SSD for the boot drive, and 3 8tb drives. Ended up with 24tb of storage. I thought about using a dedicated NAS OS, but I didn't have any trouble setting up Windows to share across my network. Seems to work fine with smart TV's and phones. The TV in the Living Room isn't a smart TV, so I put together a Small Form Factor PC for out there, wireless keyboard and you can do internet, PC gaming, and home school when the kids weren't allowed to attend in person classes.
I have three HP n40Ls running Ubuntu Server for this purpose. I did have a couple of HP ML110s too, but had to downsize a little. You can pick these up pretty cheap on ebay.
I have actually been thinking of setting up a nas using truenas on a i5 9800X with 16GB ram I have laying around. This video made be decide to actually go do it!
4:00 I suppose you forgot or didn't know FreeBSD has issues with realtek nics? A common issue for pfsense, although the latest version of FreeBSD is a tad better.
Oh interesting. It was odd that I literally wasn’t even getting lights on the adapter. With Debian I at least got that on each adapter, even if it wasn’t recognized
I would like to do something similar to this, as I am fed up of windows forgetting my users and passwords etc, I am not really that interested in redundancy, as I don't have anything I can't download again etc, but the whole vdev and pool thing confuses me a little. What I would ideally like to do would be to have each connected hard drive separate, so I can allow different users access to different drives, depending on use case scenario. So, should I be making a separate pool for each device, in this use case, and then allowing each user access to specific pools based on use case? I am really hoping with a specific software for users and managing things like plex, smb, ftp etc that it will run a lot smoother than windows is at present. (I have older parents, so I want it to be as simple as possible, ideally I can set up their PC's and then just have them use network locations etc for when they want to back up or access files.) Fingers crossed this all made sense and any assistance you can throw my direction will be very much appreciated. Love the video by the way, will watch it a few times to check I get things right :D
I have a few additional questions about access outside of the LAN, but I don't want to use up too much of your time, I appreciate the effort you have put into making this vid as it is.
I would puttall the drives into one pool if it were me, and then just create different datasets for each user. You can set quotas to limit the amount of space each user can use, so it's similar to individual drives, but you get the performance benefits of having your drives in zraid.
TrueNAS strongly, strongly suggests you use normal USB flash drives as your boot medium. That way you can easily replace them on the fly, and even have multiple in case one fails. You do not get any benefit from installing TrueNAS to a hard drive or SSD, it is designed to work from USB flash drives. Great video regardless! I just felt this was important for any viewers to know.
the layout sinds the update is a bit changed concerning static ip config. users and groups you can find in accounts, to look up your default gateway you can also use cmdprompt and then type ipconfig , further if you follow this tutorial you wil get this running, if i can you all can do this! Thanks Haven!
Great video. One question, at 6:40 you start the installation by booting up the computer with the USB drive. Does the hard disk have a version of windows on it or is it clean and TrueNAS will be the only operating system?
I spent a while looking into Unraid and True NAS. There are pro's and con's to both but for my use I went with Unraid and still enjoy your video. Maybe I missed something in the video and maybe you had them around, but instead of using USB sata and network adapters, why didn't you just purchase a cheap HBA card and cheap NIC card?
Good question! I failed to clearly mention it in this video, but this board doesn’t have PCIe slots haha. A mPCIe adapter has been recommended since it does have a wifi card, so that might be something I tryout later
He started with a terrible choice of hardware which performed surprisingly well. Much better to build this in a proper PC where you can plug in an HBA and have bays for drives.
I'm so glad YT recommended this to me, fantastic video. I'm hoping to set something up like this in the near future. This stuff is really cool.+1Like & Sub
My server is almost 20 years old :) In 2019 I have done a comparable move with the remains of a 2003 HP D530 with a Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz); 2GB DDR (400MHz); Ethernet 1 Gbps and two striped datapools: - 3.5" IDE 250 & 320 GB, I have no issue with the difference in size and speed for this raid-0 type of solution. I think a mirror would be reduced to 250GB. - 2.5" SATA-1 320 & 320 GB The system has 2 cables; Power and Ethernet. It runs 32-bits FreeBSD 13.0 on OpenZFS 2.0. I use the system as backup server and the backup runs at 200Mbps due to a ~95% load on one CPU thread. The system is powered on for ~1 hour/week to receive the incremental backup (send | ssh receive). For 1 hour/week; weekly power usage is minimal and the system only ages say 1 week per year. It also supports; samba; ssh; xrdp and the graphical interfaces for xfce-desktop; conky and firefox 98. I would partition the SSD, one boot partition; one swap partition and add two partitions to speed up the HDDs; one cache (L2ARC, say >60GB) and one log (ZIL; 5GB). I have done it in the past with Ubuntu booting from ext4; I've added cache and log partitions on the SSD for the ZFS datapool to speed up the HDDs. I still use a partitioned sata-SSD to speed up my HDDs and its is noticeable, when booting VMs from those SSD cached datapools.
Check the description for updates/corrections!
Nearly half a dozen NAS videos on TH-cam, but everyone including yours skips the most important part of setting it up so it's accessible from outside of the home network, would you mind covering that as well? Thanks.
@@bigdamnhero2297 I wouldn't necessarily say it's the most important part, as there are many reasons why you maybe WOULDN'T want that, but I totally understand why you would!
There are many different ways of doing it. I personally prefer using a VPN server like wireguard so that I can tunnel into my local network and access it vs doing some port forwarding or something. I'd like to get a wireguard video made, but in the meantime maybe look into that. Techno Tim has a solid video on it if I remember correctly
@@bigdamnhero2297 That's not the most important part, but more the more dangerous part that no one should do because 99% of you out there don't know how to configure networking, setup security rules properly or don't really know what they are doing.
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Problems i had following this Tutorial, and how i solved them:
While trying to boot from USB, Selected boot image could not be Authenticated - Turned off SecureBoot
GRUB Error Unknown Filesystem - Used Balena Etcher instead of Rufus
Web interface could not be accessed - Used archive and installed an Older version of TrueNAS
Install failed - Tried again
i was nanometers away before throwing everything in the trash filled with rage, but somehow through clever googling it worked. Linux always Frustrates me.
Super easy, next level trick. TrueNAS loves quick NICs and ECC RAM. NASs love stable power supplies and nice drive mounts. How to get this for $100 or less? Used Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge workstations. HP Z420s, Z220s (with Xeons and ECC) or their Dell/Lenovo equivalents? Tons of space for drives, spare SATA ports, Intel NICs, great power supplies and cheap ECC RAM for expansion. I’ve built a pile of budget NASs with them, not a single issue with any of them. Bonus - on larger stations you’ve got spare PCIe 3.0 slots for a cheap NVME L2 cache drive. For power considerations? I’ll snag a Xeon L series chip off eBay for $10 that takes total draw down to near nothing. And then the massive factory heatsink for a 130-40w workstation cpu gives you even more thermal headroom.
Nice! I’m definitely going to keep an eye out
That ECC RAM, dirt cheap compared to the desktop stuff.
Hey can I message you to get more info on this? I'm trying to build a dort cheap NAS and I'm a bit lost
Love to see video on this especially an occasional dual windows boot.
@benpatch8692 An old thread but just picked up a z420 and wondering which L-series you were thinking about?
Love it. I built a TrueNAS server I've had for years now with an FX-4130, 24tb (3x 12tb in RaidZ) storage, a 500gb SSD cache drive (had one on hand that I figured I might as well use), etc. and it's my baby. Even if you only have a couple tb, a NAS server is a fantastic use for old-ish hardware.
As much as I enjoy watching videos showing off expensive hardware with insane performance, I absolutely loved seeing this video making use of old hardware with cost and power consumption in mind. This just feels way more realistic which is awesome. Loved the video, gained a new subscriber!
Your videos are a joy to watch and I love seeing these projects that pretty much anyone can try given it doesn’t require a huge budget. Thanks for your time and effort! Looking forward to the next one!
I'm almost 2 years late to the party, but awesome video. This video inspired me to build a NAS using an old Dell workstation that was just collecting dust in a closet. Now I have a cheap 8TB NAS on my network. Thank you sir!
In my experience (at home, as sysadmin and as a vent for other sysadmins): matching drives too good is not good. The closer they are, the more equal they are in flaws and expected lifespan. Personally I like to make sure they are at least from different dates, but even better is different series.
An alternative can be to, once things are set up, either change one drive after a while or run it degraded, if your data is not super critical. It makes the drives diverge and hopefully not fail together.
A former colleague got an error from a raid. When he switched the drives and let the raid rebuild the next drive failed... And I think even more drives failed before the whole thing was up and running again.
It might be uncommon, but if it's possible to work around, I would do that.
That’s probably a good point. I’ve heard similar things recently. I’ll have a correction in the description. Thanks!
I agree and disagree. You should never run it degraded except for replacing disks. Most arrays are run on basically identical drives, and while yes, there is greater concurrence when using identical disks (critically true of SSD's) the general timeframe of failure will be similar. Which is why you don't wait until you have a failure to replace some disks. Make an estimate of how long disks will last, and then schedule replacements accordingly. So funny story on this, Synology created a proprietary array type called F1 specifically to "address" this issue on SSDs, which due to the way they work, have a higher liklihood of failing at around the same time. It works by basically writing more to one disk at a time, therefore aging them out ununiformly. The only way it can know which is the oldest disk to age out is via the disks smart stats. So we can write that another way: "Synology F1 intentionally damages disks, to get them to fail" it's an idiotic scheme, because using that same smart data you could just instruct the user to replace disks *without damaging it first*, without creating an actual real failure. The user would then have the option of re-purposing the disk for the remainder of it's lifespan in some low usage/non critical situation. SSD's make this need obvious, but it's always been true for spinning disks, and large environments will replace on a schedule, not wait for the whole array to be run into the ground.
Very good points!
The F1 feature sounds like a quick and dirty solution and horrible for real life.
"Running degraded" as i am strongly for depend on the system and setup and might not actually be degraded. A raid 6 is easy to run somewhat safe degraded with new disks. A raid 1 can be run for a while with one disk being a desktop computer disk used for a while and then swapped for the real disk etc.
And of course there is a huge difference in doing this at home where money is an issue and downtime probably is not. Also doing this with 2-5 disks are much easier than 100. : )
This is also one reason I really like btrfs. With it I can start with 2 disks for a month, change one for a new, run for 2 months, and then re- add the replaces to continue on 3 disks. All without degradation nor downtime. And it is good for unmatched disks in terms of space usage. Maybe not an issue in the beginning, but when upgrading to newer drives or expanding.
Another reason you don't want to use exactly same model is that you don't know which one you replace when one of them dies. While synology has dedicated number tagged bays, this home built NAS doesn't have numbering on its drives.
@@INJOONKIM The SMART data should be more than enough to identify the fault
Thanks for your easy to follow real world guide. Too many other youtubers speak to their audience like were all full stack developers instead of home jobbers!
Man I feel like even more of a home jobber, because this was too much. I followed his steps to set a static IP address and ended up bricking the NAS. One re-install later, and I think I'm just going to leave the default DHCP settings going forward. XD
I made one of these not long ago for my workplace. We needed to have everyone’s work backed up somewhere so I grabbed some old components I had in a drawer and built a kickass TrueNAS server. Now everyone in the office has a backup of their work.
That's awesome!
May I ask where you work or at least what sort of work you do? What's your "workplace"?
he's never going to answer that
I audibly cheered out loud when I saw you use studio one. ONE OF US
Hi, I mounted my TrueNAS on an old Phantom case and AMD A8-7600 for fun and I liked it a lot, I also have an ASUSTOR and TrueNAS really has very good performance. Thanks for sharing !
Some time ago, I made myself my own servers out of old laptops. The most important thing for me, was to make them as much power efficient as possible. So I basically I stripped them down, leaving only parts, that were needed for them to run. So I ended up with a laptop without touchpad, keyboard, sound card, wi-fi card, nor a screen. It's a Lenovo G580 with a Celeron processor, so at idle with a headless ubuntu server install it only uses aprox. 8 Watts.
And frankly, that's enough for a vpn, dns, Minecraft and some other things to tinker with, when I feel like it.
I recommend everyone to try it out!, and since it's really power efficient maybe even use it as some kind of home server?
While I admire the initiative to save power, I really don't see the point of removing a laptops keyboard, touchpad, or screen. A keyboard and touchpad use no power to speak of, and the screen can turn itself off also. And having those three things can make troubleshooting easier when necessary.
@@sidorgeorge ig better cooling and u can plug in the monitor back whenever u want to
@@JailerGamer i run a laptop server with the lid closed and removing all that would not do much, its easy to add additional fans which i highly recommend as well as heat sinks to components that get hot found some real hot inductors and the chipset... Removing all that will definitely be a pain when something happens to it and yeah the consume no power so pointless to remove them
Thank you so much, as an digital artist, I have only 25 gb left on my computer because of all the space my art takes up in the 1 tb drive, and this cleared up so much space.
You're one of my favorite channels, and it's sooo underrated!
Much love from Brazil
Obrigado!
The algorithm brought me here, probably because I watched LTT’s NAS video recently and it is well timed as I am putting serious consideration into it at the moment. This video really nicely covered the config side of it and I may go try to dig out my old PC from the loft and see what can be done (though it’s back from the Win XP era!)
You’d be surprised what it might be capable of! Though power draw might be a little high haha
Discovered your channel of of your last video, really love the format, and the content! Very underrated!
Glad you enjoy it, and thanks for the comment!
This video is THE most helpful one when I install Truenas Scale first time with only trivial experience with Synology, QNAP and WD My Cloud. Thank you so much for explaining the process in a novice viewpoint.
Finally a step by step to get up and runnning a custom NAS.
Thanks this is probably the best noob friendly guide I've read I've read through like 10-20 and this makes me confident to try again.
So helpful and insightful. Thank you for these vids on your homemade NAS. Doing basically the same for the first time, so it's great to be a part of your journey!
Welcome aboard haha
This is definitely one of those "yes you can, but tou shouldn't" instances. Definitely cool how much you did with so little.
If you don't use the wifi card, you could swap it for a mini pcie ssd or sata controller card, and bypass the potential usb issue...
LMAO beat me to it by 11 hours!
Hello! Great channel! I have used your video to set up Truenas scale on a server at our church. It works great for saving all of our muntimedia video and audio files
With mirroring you should get double the speed when reading because it can use both disks.
otoh writing on a raid1 requires to make sure both disks are written (in sync) before processing further writes, and thta can reduce overall throughput.
This is a fantastic video. I thought the NASes on the market were expensive, while the old desktop hardware is sitting unloved and is more upgradeable or has better specs than the NASes. Really brilliant, kinda janky setup, but it works well. As for the read/write speeds - I've noticed that empty HDDs read/write quicker than those with data on - like your synology drives which I presume were not empty. Something I read said that the outer tracks of the disk are wider and bigger (on those circular platters) - so you can move more data. As you fill up the drive, the drive uses more of the central tracks, which has a smaller circumference, which means the speeds slow down. It's something I've noticed as I've used drives and filled them up more.
This is a really great video - it explains a lot of things that many other people just assume you already know
this video is better and easier to follow than the one actually published by TrueNAS
Been avoiding creating a NAS for the longest time. Thank you for the video, going to actually attempt it now.
Awesome! Best of luck
Great video, relaxing and BS free !!
Best video I've seen on getting started with TrueNAS!
That's astonishing. I never would want to start with this hardware but your results speak for themselves. However I would recommend a couple of improvements. First with the 5.25" to 3.5" you could have chosen one that fitted inside the bay so you could keep the nice front panel. Secondly you could have booted from stubby USB sticks in mirror thus making the build cheaper and cleaner. I don't know if Scale still installs on USB but Core does and it's fine, just use Sandisk and it will be fine.
Man, this is soo new and interesting to me thank you for this video I appreciate it.
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@HardwareHaven affirmative!
An alternative to the USB to SATA solution would be to use an SATA expansion card. Your motherboard sadly does not support PCIE... But if someone is looking for a better solution, this would be the better option.
I did a DIY NAS build a few years ago with a ryzen 2400G, SFP+ 10gig NIC, an older Sun F80 800GB (4 x 200gb quad ssd) server ssd cache card, 32GB of ram, 4 seagate firecuda 2TB drives, and 4 x 4TB WD Red CMR drives. I set up up the firecuda's in a raid Z1 pool for more frequently accessed data and current projects, and the Red's as a Raid Z2 pool for longer term storage. also used the F80 to work as read cache, write cache, and meta data cache. with a pair of 30GB ssds as mirrored boot.
the thing has been a beast of a work horse for the duration, and I just upgraded the CPU to a 5700G, picked up 2 pcie 3.0 x1 to quad sata adapters, and doubled the ram to 64GB. am planning on buying 4-8 8TB drives into a massive Raid Z2 pool for storage to offload everything I currently have and the repurpose the older drives, if they pass a durability test, to faster ssd cached quad mirror pools for VMs.
hoping to pick up an X399 board and a first or second gen threadripper in the future with some LSI HBA cards and convert the NAS into a proper storage server in a many drive bay rack mount chassis once prices comes down a bit more.
DANG. That's crazy! What do you primarily use it for?
@@HardwareHaven Right now it's been mainly storage, Plex, Resolve finished projects, a copy of my game libraries, various installers for my programs, .iso's of various linux builds, images/snapshots for my other computers/raspberry pi's, an archive of radeon and radeon pro drivers going back 2 years, and my dmg files for my old mac pro with copies of 10.6 - current MacOS.
I do a lot of data recovery, and repairs for friends and family so having space to copy data to and install onto a fresh drive is also nice.
still have more plans for it hence the upgrade in the future. but for now it's doing a bangin job.
I'm also one of the types who likes to run a clean boot drive with just the OS on it so being able to store copies of everything really helps when I do a quarterly clean windows or linux install.
I've been big on data redundancy since college when I lost close to a TB of music and a couple TB of movies and tv shows along with nearly all my senior projects a week before finals due to a power outage killing my iMac
@@catalystguitarguy oof. Yeah I honestly need to be better with backups and redundancy. Horror stories like that should bring more fear to people, including myself haha. That’s an awesome setup you have! I’m always down to hear any other cool things you do with it in the future.
@@HardwareHaven It’s fun experimenting and relieving to have backups. I’m using an old full tower CFI case I picked up from FB marketplace for $35 for it currently. It’s a CFI-A7007. It has 6 x 3.5” bays, 3 x 2.5” mounts, 4 x 5 1/4” bays, and 8 x 120mm fan mounts. I converted the 5 1/4” bays to a Quad 3.5” hot swap enclosure with 3 slots. And the remaining slot I put a quad 2.5” drive hot swap enclosure.
The thing is a bit bulky but for drive capacity and cooling it’s hard to match. Short of one of those expensive fractal designs behemoths. I don’t think I’ve seen temps over 40C under heavier loads and sustained transfers.
Hello there! Id like to make a suggestion. I have a similar truenas setup to yours, with 2 drives (although theyre 2 tb). I think the ssd would be much better used as a cache vdev for your main 2 hdds, this will help with sustaining gigabit speeds over longer file transfers after your ram fills up. you can put truenas on 2 usb 2.0 flash drives in raid 1, as the truenas operating system doesn't actually need fast storage to run on, and raid 1 will make sure that even if one of the usb drives dies after a couple of years there is always a backup.
Ive been running truenas off a usb stick for over a year now and no problems with speed and reliability so far.
Super interesting! Great idea. Pinned
Truenas isnt recommended to run off of usb drives. You may not encounter a problem but it still doesnt make it a good decision. In this vid from level1techs they encountered problems with it and truenas clarified theyd update the documentation to not recommend usb install anymore. th-cam.com/video/yTNEevsRk_E/w-d-xo.html
@@JFat5158 after looking back it it, it looks like they specifically recommend against using usb drives for data vdevs. I’m not sure if that includes the boot drive as well. If I had the ability not to use USB, I would 100% do that. But if you’re limited to it, it makes more sense to me to just use the boot drive over usb. Just a guess and opinion though 🤷🏻♂️
@@JFat5158 and to clarify, I can’t watch the video you sent currently, so I could be missing something in there. I’ll try to watch it later
Great presentation and good to see the channel grow. 🎉🎉
Thanks!
This is the first video I saw from this channel and you piqued my interest. Subscribed! Keep up the good work dude.
Thanks!
About boot devices: a cheap solution is to use 2 USB Sticks - they are easily fast enough for booting and would not influence general performance of your NAS. They are pretty cheap as well (you can use 2 32GB or even 16GB sticks). With two sticks you can even do a software raid1 (it is a bit tricky to duplicate the mbr in a way to get it booting if the stick with the master mbr fails). I did that a few times when I was short on SATA-Ports and unable to expand for some reason (e.g. with a Intel ATOM Board).
There are also external cases that link two m2-sata keys to one raid1 (about $80, for example ORICO M2N210). More expensive but less headache getting it up and running.
Excellent video! Something i have been wanting to do for a while. Now i have a guide. Many thanks
Also a good choice is to get an old HP Microserver (N36L/N40L/N54L).
This is what I run TrueNas on along with an Intel 520 10gbps adapter. It works fantastic.
found a new gem on this channel, i am keeping you.
Thanks alot I had made TrueNas as per ur guidelines...perfectly working and very much helpful
Yes, Nas enclosures are expensive especially if you want a higher bay count. The problems with custom ones are power consumption, size and heat. Haven't built a NAS in a while but when I had my Freenas server I ran it on a USB stick.
I wouldn't know why the Synology is slower maybe you could open it and add more ram as a test. Also don't know if that SSD is doing some caching.
just wanted to say thanks, I was trying to get it to work and you tutorial was amazing!!!!
Excellent video with good pacing and pleasant narration.
Thank you!
You don't need to turn off DHCP address assignment and pin a static IP on TrueNAS side, as long as you pinned IP for TrueNAS's mac in your router (which you did). It's a better practice when the server has a "dynamic" IP assignment, while DHCP assignes effectively the same IP. Why it's better to not assigned static IP on the server side? Well, because otherwise, if you change something in your router's setting (e.g. subnetwork address), you wan't be able to login to your NAS.
Welcome to the TrueNAS ecosystem. The great thing about this software is its versatility. It can deliver solid results for the new user repurposing spare equipment. When paired with more powerful equipment, and networking it can be nearly indistinguishable from internal storage.
Ah yes Studio one Daw, a man of culture. Great daw mate
30W for the system that is in 99% idle is no-go. Buy a SBC (RPi4 or even better Orange Pi 5) and do this storage on them. Of course not on TrueNAS but maybe openvault. Power consumption when idle:
The drives themselves pull probably close to 20w... Assuming he is not setting them to spin down when idle, which he doesn't mention doing.
So 28W constant across a year is 245.28 kW hours, and energy prices vary by location but in Texas I'm averaging $0.12 per kW hour so that's ~$30 difference across an entire year assuming constant uptime, not hundreds.
@@wloustalot 1 kWh in UK is 0.25 GBP
@@zyghom that's still only 60gbp or $80 not a few hundred for a year
@@wloustalot you are right, a year ago 1 kWh was almost 0.80 GBP ;-)
Great video. I am planning on using TrueNAS. Very helpful.
Ohh, you can make VM's aswell. I wonder if it would be possible to have a machine with true nas as the base OS and then have a router OS on a VM and use the machine as your nas and router. Even expensive routers tend to have kinda underwhelming hardware.
TrueNAS Scale is based on Debian, so it's very likely.
You can. I did something similar years ago running a virtual pFsense router in ESXi (as my home router). ESXi was also running a virtual NAS. Only caveat was finding a dual-port gigabit NIC that w work w ESXi (since I needed a port for WAN and another for LAN). The main configuration was making sure the networking is done properly to make it all work. In my case, it was configuration of the vSwitches.
You should NOT use pfSense or OPNSense - they don't support 802.11ac and have sub-optimal 802.11n support. See more information about OpenWRT performance here"
so.... OpenWRT + pihole + unbound + omv5 + proxmox to start on a quad core.
see th-cam.com/users/OneMarcFiftyvideos to get started
& see th-cam.com/users/TechnoTimLivevideos for self hosted at home for docker images setup etc
@@paulmaydaynight9925 Wasn't an issue for me. I was running an AP but can't remember what kind.
Awesome video. I have an older PC with an i7 2600 and I think I'll turn it into a Nas. I'm a photographer and I often find myself taking 500gb of photos each year so a Nas will really help me keep my data secure.
Oh nice! Definitely have another backup though especially if it’s data you rely on for work haha
@@HardwareHaven I was in Puerto Rico for 1 week before taking a cruise. Using a AirBNB 5Mb internet I connected to my home server through my OpenVPN to upload a few GB of pics/video...in case something happened to my cam/laptop while on the cruise I didn't lose ALL my trip data. Very convenient. Have remote access to about 1.5TB of data from anywhere. We just need faster internet options. Primarily upload
the mpcie for the wifi could maybe be used with an adapter, to pcie 1x, to fit a sata card for more drives. (or maybe gigabit ethernet?)
and since the OS is probably read only into ram(?) you could probably just use a usb stick instead of sata to usb3
Since you have limited RAM...look into using ZRAM (since the OS is Debian based) it really helps offload read/writes to SSD and USB and helps quite a bit
Very cool video!
Interesting idea! Curious how that would compare to the swap TrueNAS provides. Could be fun to look into
While this sounds like a handy option. Wouldn't you only really want to use this with an older spare SSD laying around. Instead of using on an SSD with important data because of lifespan of flash based memory?
@@i_am_macgyver84 That's probably a good point.
The advice when running TrueNAS as a VM is to turn off memory ballooning. The ballooning is a really cool feature which saves RAM but they say it interferes with TrueNAs which finds use for any and all memory it has. I would say that buying the SSD+SATA2USB was a poor choice and the money should have been spent on more RAM and run the boot from USB sticks.
Enjoying the content 👍 keep up the great work.
Thanks!
Very helpful video! It would be nice to see nextcloud in addition. As far as I understand it, it should give you the function to add two-way-sync to folders on your PC.
I’d like to do something with nextcloud. From what I understand, it’s basically like Dropbox or Google drive, but self hosted. Could be really cool to try!
@@HardwareHaven It would be a nice video. I tried Nextcloud on my old Lenovo laptop with AMD A10 and 256GB SSD just to see if it works. But I used a Ubuntu server, the setup was a little bit harder because It was my first encounter with CLI system only, but It worked fine, I did even setup a free domain and had acces to it over the internet.
It can do also chat and video calls.
Thanks for this. Makes me want to try TrueNAS.
Very Detailed and informative video. Thank you!
The appeal of Synology to me are the web based desktop, mobile apps for mobile file access, the surveillance station and mobile app, and Photos backup app. Synology is can be a complete cloud service replacement. TrueNAS works great while on premise, however. Love the options it provides. I opted to install Xpenology and make my own Synology with hardware decoding for PLEX and ability to use Docker containers and all of the Synology mobile apps. I get full speed read/write speeds.
Completely agree! I won't be getting rid of my Synology anytime soon. The surveillance station alone is probably worth it.
@@HardwareHaven Look into DSM7 redpill loader with Xpenology. Well worth building one that's for sure
@@bankruptsee Will do, thanks Mitch!
Ready built NAS are amazing for the hardware they use. The advantage of building your own is you can chuck better hardware at it for less money. I was amazed how well this one performed because you can't get much weaker hardware than this without going vintage.
This was great to watch! thank you!
There are mini PCI-E to gigabit, and SATA, and even dual sata (I have these XD). Also, pop the front cover off that drive bay adapter, then maybe the cover fits
I'm not sure that is a mini PCIe socket with the WiFi in it but if it is then that would be a great idea. I bet you never thought an 8GB TrueNAS with a weak CPU and a USB network adaptor could out perform a Synology! I was amazed.
TrueNAS is a nice OS that makes everything so much more convenient. But a 1 Gbit ethernet port would definitely be something you want. 100 mbit is just "meh".
Generally I don't power on my NAS when I don't need it. the boot time is pretty low, and on demand boot is just good enough.
I used an adapter to get gigabit in the video. 100mb is rough haha
@@HardwareHaven That adaptor worked really well. I bought a 2.5Ggbe version and although it gets to that speed it cannot sustain it. It shuts off after 40GB. Pretty sure it overheats.
Thanks for this you've answered a problem I was having with samba access 👍
It's good to see you are making great videos
Ah thanks 👍🏻
Loving your content bro, you've earned my sub and like all the way from South Africa.
Haha that’s awesome. It’s an honor
One thing I'd suggest is mounting the two drives in the same orientation. It helps to have drives that are also designed for use in a NAS configuration, with additional vibration reduction rings to isolate the drive from the case.
Interesting. Do you mean the little rubber washer type things? I think I've seen some people claim that those can actually make vibrations potentially worse. Not for noise, but for the drive itself.
@@HardwareHaven -- yup, they look like little rubber washers. Some NAS-rated drives will already have those built into the internals of the case, and you won't see them. They're probably less important for a device that has only two drives, but for devices with a larger number of drives, I think you're going to want them. I believe that the early models of the Backblaze server rigs did not have them, while the newer models of their rig does.
Yes, Backblaze publishes full video and design specs for the NAS devices that they build for themselves. It's almost as cool as their list of drive reliability that they post every quarter.
Funny. I did something similar with a higher specced Pavillion P7-1220, with an A8 3820 and 8 gigs of DDR3. I did it with Ubuntu Server and samba but it works just about the same, giving me gigabit speeds if I use ethernet. Great thing to have, I love it.
Nice! I did an Ubuntu server with this machine as well a couple videos back. Works great
@@HardwareHaven Goes to show that even though data centers are buying computers with multiple 64 core CPU's in them, a 4 core or even dual core computer can do it just fine on small scale. It's beautiful.
@@masterkitty It's all about scale haha. Super cool though. Computers are amazing to me
@@HardwareHaven True that on both.
I just installed both. Scale is the way to go!
Great video! Why this isn't getting 100K+ views is beyond me
Still a new channel, but thank you!
Thanks! This was pretty helpful. I kind of needed help with this truenas thingy and this helped me out!
More ram won't help write speeds.
With ZFS ram is used mainly for caching reads and the deduplication table if you are using dedup.
Excelllent video, I learned a lot from it
You got a new sub
keep doing what you doing master
Instead of "disable DHCP and configure a static... make sure it isn't in the DHCP range..." I recommend just creating a reserved DHCP address on the router. Centralize administration of IP addresses in one spot making it easy to see what is used (or assigned to devices long gone). Personally I usually reserve the IP address initially assigned to the device by DHCP and give it a nice hostname so I don't have to remember the address.
Yeah you’re probably right. I have some ranges I like to stick stuff in, but that’s probably a bad amateur habit of mine haha
You can make a reservation, and still use static ip. That way, if you have a NAS, and a main PC, and router fails, you can drop any router, switch, and still access your nas without hassle. In my experience, all servers should have an static ip.
Cool video! I am glad TH-cam suggested it, just subbed. I am building my system with an FX 8350. Quite the opposite of efficient. I am going to justify it to myself by running some jails or hopefully even Docker, now that I believe that is supported. I had a hard time with doing anything other than windows shares with FreeNAS.
That’s awesome! Definitely not efficient haha, but hopefully it works well for ya
Those can work well for video rendering and other tasks that can leverage multiple cores.
XIGMA NAS AND OMV ARE VIABLE OPTIONS TOO... XIGMA NAS is a fork of freenas and was previously called nas4free. It has served me well for years. Omv runs on lighter hardware including ras pi's, also quite stable.
It will be hot baby) I also once had an 8350.
@@VladislavKurashov Yea, I forget the model but it has a big tower cooler. The mobo is a fatal1ty with all kinds of OC stuff in the bios. I was thinking of an underclock/volt. At least it isn't 9000 series I guess, haha
I did something similar with an old Dell tower, installed a 250gig SSD for the boot drive, and 3 8tb drives. Ended up with 24tb of storage. I thought about using a dedicated NAS OS, but I didn't have any trouble setting up Windows to share across my network. Seems to work fine with smart TV's and phones. The TV in the Living Room isn't a smart TV, so I put together a Small Form Factor PC for out there, wireless keyboard and you can do internet, PC gaming, and home school when the kids weren't allowed to attend in person classes.
This video was a big help. Thank you.
I have three HP n40Ls running Ubuntu Server for this purpose. I did have a couple of HP ML110s too, but had to downsize a little. You can pick these up pretty cheap on ebay.
It’s on my radar, thanks!
@@HardwareHaven N54Ls too, they have a bit more grunt
Truenas strongly recommends ecc memory. You might want to look into older server hardware.
For sure! This wasn’t a “what to buy to build a TrueNAS server” video haha
You can replace the mini pci card for a sata card adapter instead of having the boot drive run off usb3.
tbh your voice is so calming
Haha I’m glad to hear that
I have actually been thinking of setting up a nas using truenas on a i5 9800X with 16GB ram I have laying around. This video made be decide to actually go do it!
4:00 I suppose you forgot or didn't know FreeBSD has issues with realtek nics? A common issue for pfsense, although the latest version of FreeBSD is a tad better.
Oh interesting. It was odd that I literally wasn’t even getting lights on the adapter. With Debian I at least got that on each adapter, even if it wasn’t recognized
I would like to do something similar to this, as I am fed up of windows forgetting my users and passwords etc,
I am not really that interested in redundancy, as I don't have anything I can't download again etc, but the whole vdev and pool thing confuses me a little.
What I would ideally like to do would be to have each connected hard drive separate, so I can allow different users access to different drives, depending on use case scenario.
So, should I be making a separate pool for each device, in this use case, and then allowing each user access to specific pools based on use case?
I am really hoping with a specific software for users and managing things like plex, smb, ftp etc that it will run a lot smoother than windows is at present. (I have older parents, so I want it to be as simple as possible, ideally I can set up their PC's and then just have them use network locations etc for when they want to back up or access files.)
Fingers crossed this all made sense and any assistance you can throw my direction will be very much appreciated.
Love the video by the way, will watch it a few times to check I get things right :D
I have a few additional questions about access outside of the LAN, but I don't want to use up too much of your time, I appreciate the effort you have put into making this vid as it is.
I would puttall the drives into one pool if it were me, and then just create different datasets for each user. You can set quotas to limit the amount of space each user can use, so it's similar to individual drives, but you get the performance benefits of having your drives in zraid.
@@HardwareHaven Thank you very much for the prompt reply, that's great.
I will have to look into datasets now and their functionality :D
TrueNAS strongly, strongly suggests you use normal USB flash drives as your boot medium. That way you can easily replace them on the fly, and even have multiple in case one fails. You do not get any benefit from installing TrueNAS to a hard drive or SSD, it is designed to work from USB flash drives.
Great video regardless! I just felt this was important for any viewers to know.
At the beginning you talked about using the iSCSI, but didn't mention it again in this video. Did you cover that somewhere else?
the layout sinds the update is a bit changed concerning static ip config. users and groups you can find in accounts, to look up your default gateway you can also use cmdprompt and then type ipconfig , further if you follow this tutorial you wil get this running, if i can you all can do this!
Thanks Haven!
This is such a cool build and comparison.
Great video. One question, at 6:40 you start the installation by booting up the computer with the USB drive. Does the hard disk have a version of windows on it or is it clean and TrueNAS will be the only operating system?
just TrueNAS 👍
I spent a while looking into Unraid and True NAS. There are pro's and con's to both but for my use I went with Unraid and still enjoy your video. Maybe I missed something in the video and maybe you had them around, but instead of using USB sata and network adapters, why didn't you just purchase a cheap HBA card and cheap NIC card?
Good question! I failed to clearly mention it in this video, but this board doesn’t have PCIe slots haha. A mPCIe adapter has been recommended since it does have a wifi card, so that might be something I tryout later
He started with a terrible choice of hardware which performed surprisingly well. Much better to build this in a proper PC where you can plug in an HBA and have bays for drives.
I'm so glad YT recommended this to me, fantastic video. I'm hoping to set something up like this in the near future. This stuff is really cool.+1Like & Sub
Thanks for the comment. Best of luck with your own endeavor!
that board shows to have a mini pcie slot. You might consider getting a mini pcie-to-M.2 adapter to add additional SSD or additional usb ports
My server is almost 20 years old :) In 2019 I have done a comparable move with the remains of a 2003 HP D530 with a Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz); 2GB DDR (400MHz); Ethernet 1 Gbps and two striped datapools:
- 3.5" IDE 250 & 320 GB, I have no issue with the difference in size and speed for this raid-0 type of solution. I think a mirror would be reduced to 250GB.
- 2.5" SATA-1 320 & 320 GB
The system has 2 cables; Power and Ethernet. It runs 32-bits FreeBSD 13.0 on OpenZFS 2.0. I use the system as backup server and the backup runs at 200Mbps due to a ~95% load on one CPU thread. The system is powered on for ~1 hour/week to receive the incremental backup (send | ssh receive). For 1 hour/week; weekly power usage is minimal and the system only ages say 1 week per year. It also supports; samba; ssh; xrdp and the graphical interfaces for xfce-desktop; conky and firefox 98.
I would partition the SSD, one boot partition; one swap partition and add two partitions to speed up the HDDs; one cache (L2ARC, say >60GB) and one log (ZIL; 5GB). I have done it in the past with Ubuntu booting from ext4; I've added cache and log partitions on the SSD for the ZFS datapool to speed up the HDDs. I still use a partitioned sata-SSD to speed up my HDDs and its is noticeable, when booting VMs from those SSD cached datapools.
you can use the wifi m.2 port to get a PIC-E slot for SATA, or they even sell m.2 SATA adapters for you SSD if you want.
I'm using this with a laptop is there a way to make so that I can close the lid and it will not shut down
i just found this channel but i love your content. i gotta learn how to make a nas as i have a bunch of hardware old and new lying around
Thanks! Enjoy messing around with it, it's fun
Did you label your drives? So if one goes down you know which one needs to be changed out?
🥲 Nope. Haha
Two drives. I reckon he could figure it out.
Merry Christmas!
I noticed what looked like a wifi card. Could you use that port for a small SSD?
I love the video, Sir!
Very interesting!
If I could suggest a video it would be about accessing this TrueNAS server remotely (While travelling).