I want to create a NAS for my family at home. I am already pretty sure about using TrueNAS as software, but the hardware is still open.
What hardware do you recommend for 2TB of usable Storage (+a second drive for mirroring the first one) that is used by 3 people for pictures, videos, and documents?
If you want to roll your own, I’ve had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.
I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.
Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn’t be a smart move.
Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they’re not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn’t cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.
Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.
My TrueNAS setup uses a used Ryzen 3200G and mATX motherboard I got off of ebay for about $100 total. Honestly, any CPU with integrated graphics should be fine, so maybe something like the Intel 8500T, which was specifically a low power SKU could also work. Unless you plan on doing a lot of video transcoding, then you might need something more powerful (or a low end GPU like the Intel Arc A310 or a Radeon 6400 to go with it)
I’m not so sure how TrueNAS Scale determines how much RAM to allocate for ZFS, but at least with Proxmox, the wiki says you want to have at least 2GiB + (1 GiB/TiB of storage) of RAM to be able to be allocated.
If you’re looking to use 2TiB of storage, that would be at least 4GiB of RAM dedicated just to ZFS cache, so 8GiB of RAM would probably suit you. You might need to get more RAM in the future if you want to go with more storage at that time.
As for a case, anything will do as long as it can hold however many hard drives you ultimately wish to put in it.
I believe the RAM calculation is less important for ZFS these days. I capped mine at 16GB for 64TiB useable pool and had no issues. (This was zfs on linux which i think Truenas Scale is based off anyway).
Regardless unless the same data is often being accessed the caching aspect may not be that important.
General consensus ive been seeing recently agrees with you that you really can get it running on surprisingly low end hardware these days, and finding less than 8gb of RAM in the ddr4 or 5 era is perhaps difficult enough that my above point is moot
Consider how the NAS will be used. Is it just file storage, or will you want to stream from it?
If just file storage, you can use lighter hardware.
I’m running a 5 year old Dell Small Form Factor desktop as my NAS/media server. It’s power draw is under 12 watts unless I’m converting files. There’s room for 3 data drives (boot drive is M2). It has no problem streaming, unlike my consumer NAS. And it cost way less.
Probably just go with SSD storage because 2T is fairly low for hard drives these days. Still a pretty good idea to do a mirror.
Pretty much any CPU that isn’t a raspberry pi will comfortably max out a gigabit Ethernet connection.
Also have a backup plan.
HDD has 100x the storage capacity vs SSD. What are you talking about?
100x ? Did you sleep for 15 years?
A 2tb SATA SSD has a comparable price to a 4tb SATA SSD.
If it wasn’t for the Al bubble the prices would be even lower
OP asked for 2TB and that’s easily done with SSD these days
…What are you talking about?
If you’re set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.
If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.
