Selfhosted

tl;dr

I feel like I’m losing my mind trying to find cheap NAS hardware for a TrueNAS Scale setup. Maybe my reqs are too much? I was hoping for:

• Dual m.2 for mirrored boot
• ECC support
• 6 SATA ports (ideally on the motherboard, but would consider HBA; all ports should be useable with both m.2 slots populated)
• At least 2.5 Gbps NIC (though ideally just having a PCIe slot to plug in a 10 Gbps NIC would be great)

Has anyone had experience finding something that meets these reqs and is relatively low power without blowing their budget?

Longer version:

Hi everyone,

Thanks so much to everyone who was able to give me some guidance on my earlier posts. After building out my networking backbone around a Protectli box running OPNsense, I have been working to try to build out some relatively low power machines for storage and compute respectively (TrueNAS Scale on one and Proxmox on the other).

On the Proxmox front, I went a little crazy and grabbed the Asus NUC 14 Pro with the Ultra 5 125H (plus a stupid 96 GB of DDR5), which I think is actually going to be way overkill for my needs, and might still end up returning for something cheaper, we’ll see.

But on the TrueNAS front, I feel like I’ve been banging my head against the wall for at least a couple of weeks. Wanting ECC support has meant that I’d been leaning toward a Ryzen system (which apparently are actually reasonably performant on idle power draw, especially after the crashing at idle bug got patched in BIOS a few years ago). I’d been leaning specifically toward the B550 chipset, but after checking at least a dozen motherboards, I have yet to find one that actually meets the criteria above (several of them, like the ROG Strix B550F and the B550 PG Riptide seem like they meet all the requirements, until you realize populating the second m.2 slot disables two of the SATA ports; the closet I’d thought I’d come was the B550 A PRO, which looked perfect until I realized in the fine print that the board doesn’t actually support ECC (WHY MSI????).

Even I’d found the perfect B550 mobo, I was also still playing around with cost vs. power efficiency on the CPU side (guides I’ve seen recommend the Ryzen 5 4650G, but they feel a little expensive for what they are; I’d also been considering the 5750GE, the 4350G, but then the 4100 was also extremely cheap). Apparently some of these have a decent idle power draw, though it’s been hard to find anything concrete (I just have seen that chiplet tends to be worse than the monolith design).

Minus the lack of ECC support, there’s some really attractive NAS boards running either the N100, N150, or N305 that seem promising, but I am (probably unreasonably) being a stickler on the ECC criteria (if I weren’t I would totally be interested in one of the HKUXCR boards that have on board 10 Gbps and 6 SATA ports on an N100). And if I were to break the rule on ECC support, at that point should I just seriously consider trying to connect a bunch of drives to my NUC via Thunderbolt and then virtualize TrueNAS? I had been pretty firmly recruited to the camp of “separate compute and storage so that when you inevitably screw up something on Proxmox you don’t lose all your storage” but there’s definitely benefits in upfront cost and power savings to just doing one thing.

I feel like I must be shopping for things wrong. I’ve been a little more hesitant about used hardware than I probably should be, mostly because I know that (at least currently) if I’ve screwed anything up (or if anything I bought was already screwed up) I can still return it relatively easily. Ebay seems like some of its refurbished items now use some sort of autowarranty through Allstate, but some quick searching seemed to indicate that they’re a bit of a hassle to deal with and you have to go back and forth several times before actually getting a reasonable response.

Any tips any of y’all have on finding good value parts without driving yourselves crazy? Is this just something that comes with more time? Anything else I mentioned that seems like a glaring issue that I haven't realized?

Oh, realizing budget might be helpful, but I would love to see if I could find something at was like max $400~500 USD if not less if possible all in (minus the HDDs). As it is, I was planning on starting with 4x 14 TB drives and then keeping the same hardware and expanding my VDEV as I need more space, and those alone are like $1k new or (more likely, what I’ll go for) like $600 (though used HDDs also make me nervous, but I don’t know if I can justify the $400 difference). But maybe I’m stupid for forcing the 6 SATA ports if I am only going to be populating 4 to start with.

Thank you anyone who actually reads through this obnoxious text wall, and extremely grateful for any thoughts!---