So I have been searching for the parts here in Brazil and Paraguay (cheaper parts and accessible for me) and came to some options. A RPi here in Brazil is costing almost the same as a Intel Pentium or Celeron system, should I still consider it or the Intel processors are better suited for the task?
AMD apu's are either not available or too expensive, that's why I opted for Intel.
I do not have an older system to repurpose, just my 2700X, which I assume is really overkill by the comments in this thread.
So I came out with the system below:
Intel Pentium Gold G6405/G6400
Gigabyte H410M H V3 (confusing name as it's a H510 chipset)
Some Kingston, Sandisk, whatever is cheaper 120GB SSD for the OS
RAM I'm going for some cheap DDR4, but got confused. The TrueNAS site specs lists 16GB as recommended, 8GB minimum (I was hoping for 4GB, is 8/16 really necessary?)
The least powerful PSU from brands I know and found here is a Cooler Master Elite V3 400W, if anyone can suggest a better suited PSU I appreciate
A case, to be decided, not relevant to the discussion
And one 8TB HDD for starters.
Depending on your suggestions/replies I could go for an i3, even if it's overkill, but because it's available and buying in Paraguay it's about the same cost as the Pentium in Brazil. I really appreciate some suggestions, but availability here is really bad, specially nowadays.
The rule of thumb for RAM for any ZFS system is 1GB of RAM per TB of raw (not accessible, raw) storage capacity. So for a single 8TB drive, that means a minimum of 8GB, and if you want any room to add storage later on you're going to need more RAM. This isn't a cut-and-dried rule - AFAIK it will
work with less, but it will hurt performance (significantly, from what I understand), as ZFS actively manages its caches in RAM (i.e. what tells your system where files are accessible etc.). Pushing that to a swap file will make file accesses chug. Every build recommendation I've ever seen starts out with that 1GB per 1TB line. Here's the current RAM usage on my 32GB RAM TrueNAS system, which has 14.5TB of installed storage and is not currently being used in any meaningful way. As you can see it will use more than 1GB/TB if it can too.
The only services I'm running are UPS monitoring, SMB shares, scheduled SMART checks and an OpenVPN server - everything else in that 'services' is the OS. So if I were to guess, 4GB would be enough to run the system and a bit more, but I doubt it's anywhere near enough to get decent performance with 8TB of storage.
As for storage: if you care about the data you're storing, I'd strongly recommend something more robust than a single drive. Essentially, using TrueNAS for a single drive is just
massive overkill, and you'll be losing out on its main advantages, as you won't have any redundancy and won't be able to really make use of ZFS. I run my backups/important files storage on two mirrored drives, which is kind of a minimum if you are concerned about data loss. After all, a single drive can die and will take everything stored on it with it when it goes. ZFS really shines for larger arrays as an alternative to more complicated RAID setups, but that's way out of my budget and needs - and yours, I would assume. But I would strongly recommend doubling up that 8TB drive even if it's a significant cost to you.
One thing this is starting to demonstrate: TrueNAS might be free, but running it is
expensive. As I said, the only reason I got into it was that I already had the hardware and it would be cheaper than buying an off-the-shelf NAS. For your use, I honestly think you'd be better off looking at an affordable 2-bay or 4-bay NAS instead, as you're not starting out with spare hardware on hand and don't need tons of drives.
ou need video to set up the system, make the boot drive and get the local ip. After the set up you can remove the GPU and it will work fine headless. But it takes like 6 min to boot so keep that in mind. Also if you need to reset the password you will need to command line access. So in the beginning its nice to have a monitor.
Yep, that's the disadvantage of not running server hardware with IPMI - if the web UI stops working, the only recourse is to connect a monitor to see what's happening. I've only had that happen once, and it was pure PEBKAC, but it's still not fun. Definitely need
some kind of acces to a GPU - though as I said Displaylink adapters are reportedly supported (but likely require some kind of tuning for TrueNAS to recognize them).
