Large and Fast working drive for 3-6 users

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Re: Large and Fast working drive for 3-6 users

Post by jedfrechette »

+1 for badam's setup. We have a very similar system using a couple of Supermicro boxes with TrueNAS Core on them. The main difference in our config is that we're using mirrored vdevs instead of raidz2 which uses more drives for the same amount of storage but has some performance advantages and makes it easier to grow the size of your storage pool over time.

One quibble though:
badam wrote: Thu Apr 07, 2022 10:37 am firewall will not change lan throughput. if you only wants to increaase lan speed there is no need to get hardware firewall.
This is only true if all of your machines are on the same subnet. If you use VLANS and have machines on different subnets, i.e. servers in one subnet and workstations in another, then you probably want a Level 3 switch to handle that routing between subnets. Otherwise, if you have a more common (and less expensive) Level 2 switch routing between subnets will need to happen on the firewall, which is usually much slower than doing it directly on the switch.
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Re: Large and Fast working drive for 3-6 users

Post by Mulattieri »

Hello
Fantastic advice
What Supermicro box do you use?
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Re: Large and Fast working drive for 3-6 users

Post by jedfrechette »

A local builder put ours together for us and I don’t remember the exact specs but they’re based on a chassis like this.

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/ ... 1cr24l.cfm

The main hot server has 256 GB of ram and the I think the backup server has 64GB.
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Re: Large and Fast working drive for 3-6 users

Post by Mulattieri »

Fantastic
Can you find some specs of that server? I don’t know if i have to build a machine like the Linus Tech video or buy used server
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Re: Large and Fast working drive for 3-6 users

Post by jedfrechette »

Our current systems were built a few years ago so I think there are probably better choices for the specific components now.

One of the things we also did, which in retrospect was a mistake, was to spec a CPU with a lot of cores. The idea at the time was that we would run some VMs directly on the storage server for tasks that needed super fast data access. However, once we got everything running it didn't make sense to actually do that. Since the storage servers are just storage servers we would have been better off using CPU's with fewer cores and higher clock speeds.

At the end of the day, I don't think the exact hardware is actually that critical for TrueNAS. I think getting a decent understanding of ZFS and the tradeoffs different configurations entail is more important for getting good performance. There are a few different ways to configure it "right", but there are also ways to configure it that will have awful performance and cause a lot of pain.

Check out Lawrence Systems, he's done a bunch of videos on ZFS and TrueNAS over the years and is a great resource if your interested in learning about this stuff.
Jed
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