I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge R730 at a killer price, and intend it to be the cornerstone of my home lab. I plan to use it as both a NAS and a container server so I can set up whatever I want with it. I’m a bit unsure of what a good setup here looks like, so I’m hoping for a bit of guidance.
As my R730 has 16 drive bays, I intend for 10 of those to be high capacity HDDs for the NAS with the remaining spots for SSDs for the containers. The R730 will also have a PERC H730 RAID controller. I want a full featured NAS solution (although I am open to more lightweight solutions) so my go to thought is TrueNAS. My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it, but I am unsure if this is the best method. Does anyone have any insight on how well this works or if there’s a cleaner solution?
Addendum: Anyone have any recommendations for RAID setups? I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I’d like to be able to add these without much hassle, but I’m unsure what to go with. It seems that ZFS can handle it well alone, but I don’t want to have gotten the good raid controller for nothing so I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup. And if I’m using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here? Based on my research, it sounds like I’ll need a lot more drives for a proper RAID setup and it’ll be less flexible, but I would like some second opinions.
Be aware! The dell R730 most likely comes with a raid controller which is not suited for ZFS. You need a true HBA instead. Some raid controllers do let you set them up in JBOD mode but it still is not suited for ZFS as you need a proper HBA and or a raid controller where you can flash the firmware to IT mode.
For ZFS storage and many apps and more Truenas scale might be interesting to you.
I’ve been reading that the updated firmware for the PERC H730 has no issues in HBA mode, and there’s a thread from December in the Proxmox forums on using an H330 and H730 and they seem to work fine. I’m trying to get more clarification in that thread, but I’ll also do some testing myself.
I run my 730xd with a H730 in HBA for months and Truenas has never had an issue.
It seems that the issues may be quite a bit deeper than they seem. That the cache on the H730 can cause subtle issues. Are you able to get SMART information from the H730 for the disks?
There might have been some firmware version messing with cache, ok. But I run latest firmware and yes, my SMART is clean and my scrubs are clean.
Ok cool. I need to update everything anyways so once I get around to that I’ll test the H730 a bit but it seems that the newer firmware should be ok for ZFS
Take a look at the following topic. It is not just relevant for TrueNAS but ZFS in generel. https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/whats-all-the-noise-about-hbas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.81931/