TLDR: If you were building a NAS for 8 HDDs and 1 SSD today, what case would you use?
I’m going to be rebuilding my system soon (currently using an old PowerEdge T610) using one of my other older (R5 1600) systems and I’ve basically hit a road block on picking a case.
I’ve got 8 HDDs that need to fit in the system after it’s rebuilt (plus at least one SSD) so I’m kinda limited in that regard.
The rest of the system is planned out (mostly because I’m reusing old parts) it’s just the case I’m stuck on.
I’m wanting to avoid rack mounting currently mostly due to space (and wanting to keep it under $200)
I was thinking maybe the Fractal Design Define R5, the Fractal Design Node 804, or the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 but I’m open to suggestions.
EDIT: And for those that want to know why I want to move away from the PowerEdge T610, it’s primarily due to repairability. Primarily the PSU, I don’t want to have to buy used PSUs in case mine dies again.
Fractal Design Define 7 XL
You can fit 18 HDDs into it plus 5 SSDs at the same time without custom mount points.
Though you do need to buy the extra brackets and trays.
Not my build exactly but a example.
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/97612-fractal-design-define-7-build/
Sweating intensifies
That’s a lot of drives, I’ll have to look into that one for sure
I run TrueNAS myself in this case. I have two v-devs of 8 drives each in raid 2.
Both v-devs have a extra spare each. 4 SSDs are used for quick read and write and the 5th SSD for os boot.
How’s performance on that setup? I own the case and am looking to do the exact same vdev setup this next year, but am wondering if the wider vdevs negatively impact performance in any noticeable way. Also wondering if 128gb of ram is too little for that kind of setup with 20tb drives, I feel like I might have to find out the hard way…
Performance is great IMO, I store all my Plex media on this setup as a network share and never have any issues or slowdowns. I only use the setup as a strict NAS nothing else.
I started with 9 drives at 12tb first, about 3 years later (mid this year) i added the second vdev to my main pool. 9 drives 20tb each.
V-devs do not require to be the same size between v-devs, but they do require to have the same amount of drives in each.
I have unraid and proxmox setups on other machines running independently. Plex and other software for example all access my TrueNAS over the network.
For the TrueNAS system IMO you don’t need much “horsepower”. I run it on a 12 year old motherboard, 12gb ram and a 60gb SSD to boot. Nothing special at all. Unraid and proxmox on the other hand is where I spend the money on ram and processing power.
My Network is gigabit and I get full speed on network transfers, looking to do 10gb in the future, but that would require 10gb NIC’s in all my PC’s and new network switches. Don’t see it effecting my TrueNAS sytem setup. Besides your network transfer is only as fast as the read/write of the drives.