Home NAS

I wanted some flexibility on storing and accessing my data. Moving USB drives from machine to machine seems so archaic with the advent of high speed networking.¹

R510

One system that could take advantage of a 10 gigabit card was my planned file server. Starting off, I purchased a 12 drive bay R510 and ensured it contained an H200 and packed it with RAM. I bought four 8TB WD external drives and shucked them after ensuring they passed a drive test overnight. I also installed a 10 gigabit Mellanox ConnectX® 2 card and used a DAC to connect to the switch. After adding a copy of TrueNAS this has become my home workhorse, and now manages serving file shares, hosting backups, and my Plex server calls it home.

Hardware

I chose a 12-bay R510 with dual L5640 CPUs and 64GB of RAM to run TrueNAS. The hardware is certainly older now but it does well to serve files. My next machine (and pending migration to TrueNAS SCALE) is lying in wait, but that’s for another post.

I also have a Mellanox Connectx-2 card installed, for a single 10Gb port. This is directly hooked into one of the ports on my switch, facilitating multiple simultaneous 1Gb links.

My current drive setup involves just four 8TB WD white label drives. I thoroughly tested these before shucking them, and while I’d prefer to have the longer warranty afforded by purchasing proper drives I didn’t want to spend the premium for them.

Boot drives consist of two mirrored SSDs. I started with flash drives but I ran into reliability issues, where one or the other would regularly drop out. The configuration and setup is stored directly on the pool drives, so there’s no need for fast hardware here.

Software

It’s a bog-standard TrueNAS installation. What more could one want? A single pool is set up between my disks and sliced as-needed for things like media and backups. VLAN trunking isn’t fun to set up (I gave up and just used a separate NIC for certain traffic) but I’m going to be giving that another whirl with SCALE.

Jails

Just as the rest of the world moves to container orchestration, I’ve decided to pick up jails and adopt a lot of pets as a result. They’re fragile and even the official (at least as-listed in the UI) plugins/jails tend to break on upgrade. Looking forward to SCALE and just running containers instead.

Plex

Gotta have Plex. I migrated from Google Music (where I was one of those weird people that only listened to music I uploaded or purchased via the service) so Plex was a nice spot to land with the shutdown of Google Music. I might migrate to a different solution someday but for now it’s been a great way to consolidate my library first and play it on all my devices second.

Nextcloud

I’m also slowly ejecting from most public clouds for fun, and I needed a good replacement for collaborative file sharing and document editing. Nextcloud seems to hit all of that well enough!

Gitea

Forge wars aside, I ended up standing up Gitea as a way to store my own code. I’ll hook CI up someday, but probably only after the SCALE migration.