My biggest server build yet! 88TB TrueNAS CORE Build.

if there's one thing in this world i like more than a good beer it's a brand new server build and today that's going to be a pretty close contest [Music] [Applause] welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff so a couple of months ago freenas announced that they were doing something pretty radical with their code base now for those who don't know freenas is the free and open source variant of truenass the enterprise nas solution maintained by ix systems now while truenass and freenast did share a codebase and are very similar at their core they were still maintained as two separate pieces of software meaning that the development cycle was independent from one another meaning that to release a new version and integrate new features into a software base you had to have two different alpha cycles two different beta cycles two different release candidate cycles and then finally a main release of both software packages as a version 12.0 releasing in just a couple of weeks free nas will become trunas core which will be the free and open source variant of true nas enterprise they will share the exact same code base and exact same development cycle meaning that development should happen faster and releases more frequent luckily the version 12.0 release also coincides with my own storage needs as my current free nas build is about 80 full and in need of a serious upgrade so right here we have a serious upgrade on the table in front of me is 88 terabytes worth of hard drives and those are all going to go into my brand new trunas build which is also getting a significant upgrade not only am i adding a whole heap of new hard drives to the mix i'm also significantly increasing my cpu and ram horsepower as well inside my current freenas build is a z370 motherboard with an i3 8100 4 core 4 threaded cpu to go along with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 2133 non-ecc memory earlier this week i did a tutorial on backing up a proxmox server and migrating over to a new host and the reason i did that was so i could steal the motherboard out of that system my old proxmox server happened to be built with a gigabyte ga7pe sh2 motherboard which is a server c602 platform rocking dual 2011 sockets and 16 dimm slots to set up that server for virtualization i was using a pair of xeon e5 2658 core cpus the downside was they are only a base clock of 2 gigahertz with a total boost clock of 2.5 more realistically for an all-core boost they only reached about 2.2 however outside of some plex streaming it's pretty much just me utilizing the nas and i'm the only one with a 10 gigabit connection anyway so i decided to reduce the core count and significantly upgrade the per core speed i did that by picking up a pair of xeon e5 2643 four core eight threaded cpus however these ones have a 3.3 gigahertz base and a 3.5 gigahertz turbo and since we all know freenas loves ram i doubled that up as well moving from 64 gigabytes of 1333 ecc memory to a full 128 gigabytes unfortunately that didn't arrive in time to film this video so you'll just have to imagine it's there and i will be installing that later on getting ecc memory support was a major reason i wanted to get off of the z370 platform however another big bonus of the gigabyte motherboard is it also has a built-in lsi sas host bus adapter meaning i don't have to use an add-in card to connect all of my hard drives and having some extra pci elaines will uh definitely come in handy for the plans that i have inside this box starting on the far right is my hp dual 10 gigabit network adapter now i feel like i stole this adapter because i picked it up on ebay for just eleven dollars and fifty cents or rather i picked up three of them on ebay for just eleven dollars and fifty cents each so uh i definitely have network for days and it's nice to know that those deals are out there if you're wanting to upgrade to 10 gigabit networking i am doing something with this trueness build that i have not done previously and that's installing an nvme cache disk i picked up a silicon power 256 gigabyte pcie 3x4 drive and a q9 pcie to nvme adapter as my gigabyte board does not have an m.2 slot this will allow me to take a pcie 4x lane and convert it over to an nvme m.2 to utilize my cache drive and so i don't take up any of my valuable drive trays was something as stupid as a boot disk i picked up the sedna pci express to dual two and a half inch ssd adapter not only will it plug directly into pci express it has a built-in sata controller and mounts the drives directly to the board meaning i don't have to run any extra sata connections or any sata power to boot my system up so how many drive trays in the new server are we talking well to answer that i need a little bit more room meet my new trunesser this is my super micro 846 chassis it's a 4u box with 24 drive trays up front and an integrated sas backplane dual 1200 watt power supplies around the rear and inside it supports a standard eatx motherboard making it the perfect chassis for those who want to go a little bit overkill on things and last but not least let's talk about my drive selection now in front of me are 16 three and a half inch used pulled and wiped enterprise drives and that's usually the way i go when i'm building high capacity servers at least for myself there are a number of different options for hard drives out there you can buy brand new enterprise drives which are fairly expensive but pretty much guaranteed to last and much much higher capacity you can buy used refurbished enterprise drives like i have right here which gets you a pretty good value for the amount of terabytes you get or you could do shuck hard drives which typically gets you the best bang for the buck in space but not necessarily the best quality components as those are usually the cast off drives that are put into external enclosures in my case i picked up two different models of enterprise drives right here i have eight hgst he8 helium filled eight terabyte drives and these were about a hundred and thirty dollars a piece on amazon and did come with a one year warranty and a little bit further down the stack i have eight of these constellation es2 three terabyte drives now all of these drives have a sas backplane meaning you need to have a sas controller for them but the nice thing about these is these were only about 25 on ebay also these three terabyte disks will not be living in this truna server full time for right now i'm going to use them to help me transfer data from my old free now server to my new trunas install after which these are going to be pulled and put into a different server and help me do local critical backups of my truenastbox after which that data will be sent up to the cloud giving me a true 321 backup strategy for my home server because remember raid is not a backup and finally i'm just going to stop talking so we can get to that sexy b-roll montage and i'll see you after the break [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] all right moment of truth time i don't think that's normal how about you oh it's posting all right all my drives show up well that's a good sign but why is it beeping that's really loud in case you hadn't noticed i'm done done all right so apparently there's still work to do all right so after multiple hours of troubleshooting i wish i was exaggerating that but i'm really not uh this is the problem right here this is one of the two redundant 1200 watt power supplies that's in the back of this unit and apparently my case shipped with a dead one luckily these are pretty ubiquitous and fairly inexpensive on the used market so i have a new one on the way that cost me just about 25 on ebay so not the biggest deal in the world uh and this can run with just a single power supply this is for redundancy not for you know upping the total wattage available to the system the reason this took so long and was such a frustrating process to troubleshoot was actually the manual for the supermicro846 chassis it does mention a beeper alarm but the only beeper alarm mentioned is for the sas backplane so that's where all of my focus went when trying to figure out where this issue was coming from and sorry the super micro a46 chassis doesn't mention a beeper it's the manual for the backplane itself that mentions a beeper alarm however there are multiple variants of the backplane and my particular variant does not have the beeper alarm installed as only the first version of this backplane does the rest ask you to rely on a software solution to email or send some other kind of alert so the little jumper to disable the beeper and actually the beeper itself are not present on my backplane in fact the actual culprit was right here and this is the power distribution unit for the redundant power supplies remember i mentioned that the power supply was faulty uh that beeper was letting me know that one of my two power supplies was dead unfortunately that audible alarm is not mentioned anywhere in any of the documentation that i could find and it was just by happenstance that i pulled the cover off the distribution unit and saw that there's a fairly large beeper inside of there so old power supply out new power supply on the way and i think we're actually ready to fire this thing up alright so a couple hiccups along the way but overall i am very very happy with the way this build turned out now obviously the next step is to install trunas onto this box but unfortunately there is one last step that i have to do before i can do that all of the drives are recognized by the integrated lsi sas controller but unfortunately it is set up in ir mode which is the integrated raid controller mode and unfortunately zfs is not compatible with that even though all the drives do show up and i have not configured them in a raid there is still a cache element to that raid controller and zfs just doesn't like that it needs as close to bare metal access as it can get to all of the drives so the solution to that is to flash it into a true hba or into it mode as lsi calls it i'm hoping i'm going to be able to do that with this integrated controller if not i do have a couple of lsi cards lying around that are already flashed into it mode and i can just swap that out later on but we'll explore that and the truenast core installation in the next video as far as this video you know the buttons to click and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already on your way down to smash that like button and if you'd like to build yourself a server like this i will have amazon and ebay affiliate links down in the video description below with all of the parts listed now every single part inside of this server i did purchase myself and the reason i'm able to do that is because you guys support the patreon make sure to follow the link down in the video description below if you like the content that you see and you'd like to help support what i do and as a bonus you'll get exclusive access to my discord server where you can chat with myself and the other hosts from talking heads and that's gonna do it for this one thank you guys so much for watching and as always i will see you in the next video cheers all beer for today is from santiam brewing right here in salem oregon and thanks to the uh current pandemic this is a beer that normally is not available in cans but seeing as how no one can get it on draft right now they decided to can it this is the santiam prince charles we heavy it's a strong scotch ale at 9.2 percent and 25 ibus boy the aroma on this is nothing but toffee and malt and butterscotch all kinds of really rich very thick flavors very very sweet too oh that's good oh that is so good if you can find this beer get this beer i've had this one a number of times as they're one of the local brewers to me and uh man this is just delicious this is a very sweet beer obviously it's a scotch ale and it's 9.2 percent but uh it's still a very sweet beer you know what this beer reminds me of it reminds me of a really good glass of brandy where you want to pour just a little snifter of it and sit by a fire and drink that same little bit for like an hour and a half the flavors in this are very very rich it's a very sweet beer but it's not sickly sweet it's not you know so thick or so sweet that you don't want to drink it it's just you don't want to drink it too fast you want to sit there and really really take your time with this one and it really does reward you for [Music] that you

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 114,187

Keywords: TrueNAS Core, Server build, NAS server build, Dual X79, E5-2650, Home file server, FreeNAS, TrueNAS, 100TB server

Id: nQiWP8T9R60

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020