Downsizing ZoL NAS - Hardware suggestions please

[RubenTheRat]

Hi everyone,

First post here. I'm a bit out of touch with where I should be looking for hardware for a build I need to do, so I'm hoping some of you can make some suggestions and point me in the right direction.

My current NAS is 14 x 4TB WD RED HDDs for the storage (in ZFS RAIDZ-3, about 40TB usable), the OS is on a pair of 2.5" SATA SSDs in hotswap bays. There's some decent LSI SAS card I can't recall that they're all connected to. CPU is a pretty decent mid to top of range Xeon from when I bought it about 5 or 6 years ago, then there's 32GB of ECC RAM, and a motherboard with remote out-of-band management.

Duties are mainly Samba and NFS for backups, streaming, general archival etc.

I want to downsize a bit in drive numbers, because density has grown enough that I could envisage having 8 x 16 TB drives in RAIDZ2 for about twice my current usable space, which would be a worthwhile upgrade considering the lower chance of drive failure, lower cost of parity etc.

I'd be looking to keep the overall enclosure compact. The current hot-swappability of the boot SSDs is not essential to keep - in that sense, if the OS could be on a pair of NVMe SSDs internally and I could keep the whole thing to an 8-bay size or so that would be ideal. I'm not averse to a 10 drive enclosure if such a thing existed but that would be the maximum to make a meaningful saving on size/power/noise/failures.

Is there anywhere in particular I should be looking at for all-in-one NAS enclosures this size ? If I'm better of homebrewing something with generic parts, any cases with lots of 5.25" bays in this size range ? What hotswap bays are good ?

Likewise, any suggestions for RAID cards would be welcome.

Performance wise, I am not looking to achieve anything extraordinary, the heaviest load would normally be a couple of simultaneous backups over ethernet, nothing modern hardware should have any issues with. It'll need a Xeon to have ECC anyway (will probably look to put 64GB in, I don't use dedup) so likely performance will be adequate for my needs.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

There are many ways to skin that cat, I went this route right now - still waiting for most parts already ordered:
1) Qnap TVS-872XT - got it 2nd hand from eBay - asked for $1500, accepted 950+ship/tax - it has core i5-8400t - doesn't support ECC, but could run QuTS Hero with ZFS
2) 64gb Crucial memory, 2x Micron 7300 Max 800Gb m2 ssds and 8x 14tb sata drives.

After many years of running my own FreeNAS and qnap(s) for customers, I've decided to bite the bullet and get a relatively small, power-efficient NAS which I won't have to guess which drive failed but actually seeing the matching light.

There are several Qnap models with Xeons. There is also TS-873A with Ryzen v1500, but it supports unbuffered ECC memory - the only reason I didn't get it was it's M2 slots are pcie x1, and i5-8400t is 75% faster

 

[RubenTheRat]

There are several Qnap models with Xeons. There is also TS-873A with Ryzen v1500, but it supports unbuffered ECC memory - the only reason I didn't get it was it's M2 slots are pcie x1, and i5-8400t is 75% faster

Thanks for this, I hadn't realised there were Xeon based Qnaps, their hardware is nice, but I couldn't really deal with their locked down OS I don't think, unless things have changed? I had a small one some years ago and recall it being linux based but vulnerable to firmware updates etc breaking custom stuff. Can you run a vanilla linux on any of them?

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Then you might want to wait for Truenas Scale to become available for Truenas mini XL boxes (I estimate RC should be ready in weeks and Release in a few months)

Otherwise, you basically go the usual DIY route with u-nas or alike box and embedded mini-itx like X11SDV-4C-TLN2F

 

[RubenTheRat]

Then you might want to wait for Truenas Scale to become available for Truenas mini XL boxes (I estimate RC should be ready in weeks and Release in a few months)

Otherwise, you basically go the usual DIY route with u-nas or alike box and embedded mini-itx like X11SDV-4C-TLN2F

Thanks. Truenas Scale looks a bit bleeding-edge for me, but thanks anyway, I am too lazy to learn new stuff I don't need to as well and don't really plan to ever cluster because of admin burden so I'm gonna keep it a little simpler and more standalone.

Thanks for the specific recommendations regarding the unas and the mini itx board.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

Thanks. Truenas Scale looks a bit bleeding-edge for me, but thanks anyway, I am too lazy to learn new stuff I don't need to as well and don't really plan to ever cluster because of admin burden so I'm gonna keep it a little simpler and more standalone.

Thanks for the specific recommendations regarding the unas and the mini itx board.

For me, the key with Truenas Scale is not the clustering part, but Vms and containers management under Linux with ZFS. including hardware (gpu) pass-thru to vms/containers.
I do 100% agree that its current Beta status is a bit too cutting edge for me as well, this is why I went with qnap - I got a good deal and I don't mind locked-down Linux. Don't intend to customize it beyond running things from GUI.

 

[RubenTheRat]

For me, the key with Truenas Scale is not the clustering part, but Vms and containers management under Linux with ZFS. including hardware (gpu) pass-thru to vms/containers.
I do 100% agree that its current Beta status is a bit too cutting edge for me as well, this is why I went with qnap - I got a good deal and I don't mind locked-down Linux. Don't intend to customize it beyond running things from GUI.

Thanks for this. That's good info, yes the VM and container management does look nice, but my VM server (Proxmox) is a separate box with its own storage for the most part, I snapshot the VMs the NAS over NFS every couple of days for backup, but that's the extent of the interaction, I did consider at one point merging it with the NAS, but I decided against for various reasons.