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.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•9 months ago

    My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it

    Proxmox runs ZFS natively already so there’s not much reason to bother with TrueNAS IMO. If you need SMB shares and that sort of thing you can run a container and mount the ZFS volume into it.

    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

    If you want to easily add drives later on then as far as I know the only good option is the controller in HBA mode with unRAID in a VM. Hardware RAID or ZFS don’t make adding drives very easy.

    I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup

    I think ZFS RAID with HBA mode on the controller is worth it vs traditional hardware RAID, it’s more portable, less reliant on hardware.

    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?

    With 10 drives I would probably do ZFS RAIDz2 if this was my setup. (RAIDz2 has 2 parity drives like RAID 6).

      • @twilightwolf90English
        3•9 months ago

        I have this exact setup (R730 and ZFS), but I’ll have to disagree on not using TrueNAS. There are features you may want to use, and the logical separation of the zfspool from the rest of the server has been handy. I boot and store my VMs off of SSDs outside of the main NAS pool.

        If you want to use a NVMe boot drive on a PCIE card, the server isn’t natively capable of it. You need to use a USB drive to bootstrap it with Clover. I forget the exact technical details. I have had no problems leaving it in the internal usb port over a couple years so far.

        • The Stoned HackerOPEnglish
          1•9 months ago

          Thanks for the insight. It’s something I’ll definitely consider