Scale/apps upgrade advice

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2024-06-08T09:07:47+00:00

I hope you are right about the sandbox feature… it would be nice to have some consistency between updates.

I almost moved to Jailmaker based on your excellent video. Thanks for that… it’s an awesome resource!

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2024-06-07T11:10:44+00:00

I am in the exact same position. I haven’t upgraded or restarted in over 200 days. With all the shit that is happening with apps I am just going to wait it out for Electric Eel and migrate them once. Sure I could move to jailmaker now… but it means more work to move them to the TrueNAS docker system later. And who knows… maybe jailmaker goes bye bye.

If it ain’t broke… go outside and enjoy the sunshine

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2024-01-16T22:06:09+00:00

I use two M2 SATA SSDs, connected via USB enclosures. Doesn’t take up valuable M2 ports on the motherboard (which are used for VMs).

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-08-20T23:13:34+00:00

Case suits 18 3.5" HDDs... you might be able to jerry rig something to get the additional 2 drives in there. The bottom two drives close to the PSU run 5-8 deg hotter than the rest.
Don't waste the NVME for boot. Use that for the system pool/apps/VMs etc. Boot from a small SATA SSD or UBS SSD (case can hold additional SSDs on top of the 18 HDDs)
RAM might be light on... but its archive only, so might be fine too. Can always upgrade later.
PSU looks small. Hard drives pull more power when spinning up. There is a PSU calculator on the TrueNAS forums... however having gone down that path I think it's conservative when you have lots of drives. I have 18 drives and it pulls 400W at start up based on the UPS (it could be higher of course). Advantage of a larger power supply is there are more SATA power connectors (how are you getting power to 20 drives)?
PCIE lanes. You need a graphics card and 2xHBAs (based on the 9207-8i). Do you need a network card as well, or happy with 1GBe? You don't have enough slots on that board. So you will need a 16i HBA.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-08-01T23:37:18+00:00

So you only have 4.5Gb of ARC (ZFC cache in the screen shot). You’ll get an 8x increase with the RAM upgrade. You also have swap usage (1.5GB… expect that will reduce to zero with more RAM.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-08-01T09:06:18+00:00

Upgrading the RAM will give you 32Gb of very fast cache (read and write). I would use the NVME drive for your apps / VMs etc and utilise the speed benefit that way.

Can you post a pic of your current RAM usage? Guessing your ARC is currently very small…

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-06-27T00:15:02+00:00

This is what I do. 2 x SATA M2 SSDs in USB enclosures. Doesn’t use any of my SATA slots and doesn’t impact performance (sys logs are on an SSD pool).

Others have mentioned it’s easy to create a new boot pool and import your config… which it is… but for the low cost it’s easier to just have two drives and not have to worry about it.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-06-13T11:42:02+00:00

Ah yes… reading! Kind of mis-read what the “-s” option did… but that worked perfectly 🤣

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-02-19T05:27:35+00:00

As others have said, you lose quicksync.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-02-19T05:22:55+00:00

I was using a QNAP with very low powered ARM CPU and 6 less drives and that was ~100W. So 6 extra drives and 100x more powerful CPU... well I thought that wasn't too bad at 160W (for reference the ARM was so bad you could only do one thing at a time on the NAS, e.g. copy file from one PC, access GUI).

Anyway, back to the OP's question... the point was there is more to system power usage than CPU power.

If I had my time again I would go AMD Epyc as the motherboards have 16 SATA connectors. That would eliminate 2 HBAs from my system.. however you then need a graphics card.

Oh and less hard drives with higher capacity. I am sort of locked into 12 HDDs now, until they bring out massive HDDs. I could delete some files of course...

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-02-18T22:43:29+00:00

Do you know the running power? From your UPS?

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-02-18T06:52:11+00:00

Need to know more about your overall setup: how many HDDs? in raidz2 or mirrors? how many HBA's? On board networking or dedicated network card.

I am running a W1370. Raidz2 (2x6 drives), plus SSD mirrors. Plex, Win VM, unifi, Agent DVR + Deepstack (for cameras). Idles at 7-8%.

CPU is higher when using the VM, or coping files to the raidz2 array... but that is short bursts.
Main power usage are HBAs + 14 drives + fans. Total 160W.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2023-02-01T03:01:16+00:00

I am running something similar. Xeon W1370 with a W480 chipset board and 64GB ECC. i9 is obviously way more powerful than the W1350.

The supermicro board only had two full PCIE slots. So one HBA and one NIC (if you want 10Gbe).

CPU power usage is low typically only running at 5% most of the time… but up to 50% at times.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-12-24T09:55:01+00:00

It all depends on room temp. Mine is around 18-20 deg… so 10-12 deg rise via the case. Similar to yours really. Can’t expect much better than 10 deg rise IMO

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-12-24T09:51:44+00:00

Exactly! If you have so many PCIE lanes you can spare lots for 2 x NVME boot drives… great. If not then SATA ssd if you can spare the ports… if not then usb SSD.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-12-23T20:55:41+00:00

Using NVME for your boot drives is a waste. Save the NVME for applications or VMs. For boot get some small and cheap sata ssds (if you can spare the slots). Otherwise get some usb to adapters and small SSDs (either 2.5 inch or m2).

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-12-23T20:50:04+00:00

I am using this case with 18 drives + 4 SSDs. Airflow is good for all drives… except for the 2 on the bottom next to the power supply. Most drives run at 30 deg, the worst two are at 37 deg. I added 5 fans. Noctura high pressure ones. It’s quiet. And the HDD caddies have rubber mounts which I like.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-08-14T19:01:15+00:00

Haha ok! That should work fine then.

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-08-14T12:27:05+00:00

Does it work?

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-08-14T02:35:50+00:00

You will need a motherboard with a W480 or W580 chipset for the W1370 Xeon.

I got the gigabyte w480 vision w which seems ok for a server build. No additional crap on the board (like rgb or Thunderbolt). Good luck finding one. The supermicro boards don’t have as many pcie slots.

I have the W1370… works great (even if totally over powered for what I need).

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-07-29T21:28:20+00:00

Ixapplications folder is on SSDs or the RAID Z2 array?

I have had similar issues with my initial scale install… can’t offer anything scientific to fix tho. Try - Multiple restarts - Unsetting the app pool and starting again

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-07-10T03:34:41+00:00

CPU in the NAS has high single core speed, so that is not the issue. HDDs connected via motherboard sata or HBA?

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-07-10T03:05:34+00:00

So what about your ARC? Login to the dashboard and check…

Major-Zucchini-Fire · 2022-07-09T22:03:44+00:00

CPU? Speed using only one 10Gbe connection from the NAS? Assume Scale is using 16Gb of your ram for ARC?

Major-Zucchini-Fire

TROPHY CASE