I was kinda bored and wanted to build an abnormal config for a Truenas box. I didn't have the right parts on hand so I just slapped something together with what I had. Currently it has a Pentium N3700, 8GB DDR3, 480GB Intel SSD, and a flash drive for the boot drive. I wanted to throw in an NVME drive in the M.2 slot, but it only has support for SATA M.2 drives sadly. I think the ideal config would be a small SSD in the M.2 slot for booting and get a cheap 4TB SSD assuming the unit would support one that big.
One issue I ran into was the unit would have problems with large transfers over a long duration of time. When trying to transfer 16GB of files starting towards the middle of the transfer it would randomly dip from the 100MB/s down to as low as 9MB/s. I haven't been able to figure out why though. I thought it was thermal throttling so I tried turning the fan around. I tried disabling speed stepping. I tried disabling compression on the dataset. I might try finding a compatible M.2 drive to install Turenas on to see if that matters.
Overall it exceeded my expectations. I was shocked that it only drew 8-12W from the wall. I wasn't sure if it could saturate gigabit, but it did just fine. The cost to build one of these out compared to a prebuilt NAS with spinners is bad. It has inspired me to try building a more powerful model of tiny to try something even more abnormal though.
One issue I ran into was the unit would have problems with large transfers over a long duration of time. When trying to transfer 16GB of files starting towards the middle of the transfer it would randomly dip from the 100MB/s down to as low as 9MB/s. I haven't been able to figure out why though. I thought it was thermal throttling so I tried turning the fan around. I tried disabling speed stepping. I tried disabling compression on the dataset. I might try finding a compatible M.2 drive to install Turenas on to see if that matters.
Overall it exceeded my expectations. I was shocked that it only drew 8-12W from the wall. I wasn't sure if it could saturate gigabit, but it did just fine. The cost to build one of these out compared to a prebuilt NAS with spinners is bad. It has inspired me to try building a more powerful model of tiny to try something even more abnormal though.