Rescued the drives from the trash, all functional, less than 1 year old. I am looking to set up a multimedia server and NAS, but I need hardware suggestions. Looking to keep the spend here under $600. The synology drive bays are giving me some sticker shock. Was planning on using TrueNas.

  • dev_all_the_ops@alien.topB
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    11 months ago

    Do you care about power consumption?

    If not, grab a used Xeon workstation off eBay or Facebook. Grab a pci HBA card and you are set. Note that TrueNas needs lots of ram.

    Personally, I wouldn’t want to pay power for an empty drive, so I’d setup the 3 12x drives in a zfs pool and store/sell the 16g drives until you actually need them.

    • xoflram@alien.topOPB
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      11 months ago

      Any reason to use the three 12 Tb vs the four 16 Tb?

      How much ram is recommended? 32 gb of DDR4 “enough”?

      Thanks for the response!

      • dev_all_the_ops@alien.topB
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        11 months ago

        8gb is bare minimum for ZFS. 32gb would be great. ZFS will use all of it.

        I would use a minimum of 3 drives because then it is easy to expand later (opposed to starting with 1 or 2).

        You could start with the 16tb drives if you want. Personally I like to save power and every spinning drive takes 5-15 watts of power.

        • AdmiralPoopyDiaper@alien.topB
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          11 months ago

          Somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, ZFS likes RAM, and yes it’ll use a lot if you let it. So the moar the better, obviously. But to suggest anything under 8GB is unworkable is a bit in the dramatic side. You may not get optimal performance in all cases but the system will function well enough to saturate a Gbps LAN and honestly if your budget is $600 with some found rust I doubt OP’s requirements are to stream several full bitrate 4K videos simultaneously.