- My first TrueNAS homelab was based on an Athlon 3000G and 16GB of RAM. And I ran Nextcloud, Home Assistant, and multiple other services with globaly no ptoblem. Your configuration should be OK.
- It'd be easier to stick to Truecharts. But I can't tell for community plugins, never tried them.
- Do not use that 1To SSD as boot drive, it won't improve anything over the 250GB SSD. Use the later, maybe buy a second one to make it redundant. Then use the 1 TB SSD for an Apps pool, and the HDD as a single RaidZ2 array for all your important datas.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I'm not an expert, but I've been using TrueNas Scale since I cut over from TrueNAS core, and before that Freenas, since about 2010. I have a bunch of lessons and assumptions, but someone can correct me if these are misguided, they're my tl;dr of knowledge.
- Your data drives should be in sets of 3 for a raidz1, or 5+ (I use 6) for a raidz2. While technically the minimum is 2 or 4 respectively, best performance and protection comes in sets of 3. This is a good synopses: https://superuser.com/a/1058545 In that case he points out that a 3-way mirror also works but then you lose a lot of the data integrity checking that comes with ZFS. I keep an offline spare; in your situation putting 3 drives in with a RAIDZ1 and keeping one in the drawer would give you ~8TB of capacity protected against bit flipping and drive failure. This is a better description of the raid levels: https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html
- In terms of just storage, that system will be fine, though ideally you get ECC RAM; that's often a bigger swap, so if you can't change that, so be it. It does matter in terms of integrity checking. The more containers you run, the tougher it gets to spec out. I have a separate proxmox hypervisor and routinely have 4+ jellyfin streams going at a time, so it wouldn't be enough in my case, but you'll have to experiment and scale. I will say, even though a separate proxmox box comes with a lot of headaches, it was more important than any schooling I ever did in terms of my IT career. Networking, monitoring, access control, suddenly I have a solution to every IT problem I encounter and I have experience with it.
- Personally, I do a 2-disk mirror for the OS, and then multiple 3 or 6 disk vdevs for data. If you lose the OS drive and it's just 1, that's fine if you have backups to just restore, but I find swapping in a cheap ssd is better. I use cheap-as-dirt 64G SSD's as the boot drives, and if one dies, you can swap it and replace it in the UI, no problem. You can technically use 2 mis-matched sized disks, but it'll fuss at you.
- Start with TrueNAS Scale as just a storage device; ideally that needs to be close to the hardware and not virtualized. In the beginning, especially since you're likely dealing with 1 pool, just make 1 vdev for everything. You can make folders in there, or datasets, and play with partitioning data, sharing data to other computers, etc. I use NFS sharing AND iscsi luns to my proxmox, and ultimately I'm in 1 big dataset with multiple vdevs in it. Add your things like homeassistant one at a time; going through it will show you how you sort storage, how you provision it, etc. Over time, things grow; this will not be your final configuration, most people expand over time. You may decide "I want bulk storage in one vdev, I want containers and vm's in another." When you expand, that's when you split things off and make more nuanced decisions. That will come from better assessing your needs.
You mention Jellyfin...my struggles with that were never storage. My struggles there were networking; it was a big part of why I decided to upgrade my server networking to 10G, which supported running Jellyfin on another hypervisor and having all that go over the network.
The hardware is a lot of overkill for a NAS with a few apps, but it will give you room to add lots of services later on.
Use the 250G as the boot drive.
That system is plenty capable, in fact you could drop out the GPU if you don't have anything that will specifically be using it. It's just going to draw power when all you need is a video-out port. The qty of RAM is particularly good, will provide plenty of cache for the array and the CPU is strong enough you could enable full-drive encryption and not have it be a bottleneck (assuming that is something you want).
TrueNAS' boot drive doesn't need much space or speed, might as well boot from the 250GB SSD and save the NVME SSD for w/e else you want.
For array-type, a RAID 5 (or ZFS equivalent) is going to be your best setup. Will use one drive as parity and the other three for storage. A single drive failure is allowed with no data loss.
Have you thought of trying UNRAID. It will introduce you to world of docker. Lots of videos out there to get you started.
Your hardware is fine for truenas.