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.
Its cheaper, has better visibility for drive health, and things like CoW means a file is extremely unlikely to be corrupt on a power failure (with hardware raid, you are relying on the battery in the raid controller for that protection. I guess you could run CoW ontop of a hardware raid). CoW also helps spread wear on SSDs.
ZFS will heal data if it finds corrupted blocks, not sure that a hardware raid does.
ZFS is the same anywhere, and is adjusted via software (as opposed to the dell PERCs which i believe require booting into essentially bios. Certainly ive never had the work through iDRAC), and you dont have to learn that raid controllers control UI (altho, they are never difficult).
Its also another part that could fail and require like-for-like replacement. ZFS on satas just needs to be able to access the drive.
I looked into it ages ago, and ZFS on HBA made so much more sense than a $300 used raid controller.
For me only the case of inability to reassemble RAID array on different server (with different controller or even without it) for data recovery shouts a big “NO” to any RAID controller at home lab.
While it is fun to have “industrial grade” thing, it isn’t fun to recover data from such arrays. Also, ZFS is a very good filesystem (imagine having 4.8 TB of data on 4 TB mirrored RAID. This is my case with zstd compression), but it isn’t playing well with RAID controllers. You’ll experience slowdowns and frequent data corruption.
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.
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?
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
Thanks a ton! I’m on the proxmox forums trying to figure out if I should stick with the H330 that came with the server and return/sell the H730 I got, or if I should use the H730. Seems there’s a recent thread where they’re figuring it out so I’ll get to the bottom of it.
Turns out they put the H730 in the server already so I never got an H330. I want to test the SMART data but it looks like the newer firmware should be fine.
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Go always with software RAID where possible to avoid vendor lock-in.
Can you elaborate on the scenario this is solving for? Isn’t software RAID a performance hit?
Its cheaper, has better visibility for drive health, and things like CoW means a file is extremely unlikely to be corrupt on a power failure (with hardware raid, you are relying on the battery in the raid controller for that protection. I guess you could run CoW ontop of a hardware raid). CoW also helps spread wear on SSDs.
ZFS will heal data if it finds corrupted blocks, not sure that a hardware raid does.
ZFS is the same anywhere, and is adjusted via software (as opposed to the dell PERCs which i believe require booting into essentially bios. Certainly ive never had the work through iDRAC), and you dont have to learn that raid controllers control UI (altho, they are never difficult).
Its also another part that could fail and require like-for-like replacement. ZFS on satas just needs to be able to access the drive.
I looked into it ages ago, and ZFS on HBA made so much more sense than a $300 used raid controller.
For me only the case of inability to reassemble RAID array on different server (with different controller or even without it) for data recovery shouts a big “NO” to any RAID controller at home lab.
While it is fun to have “industrial grade” thing, it isn’t fun to recover data from such arrays. Also, ZFS is a very good filesystem (imagine having 4.8 TB of data on 4 TB mirrored RAID. This is my case with zstd compression), but it isn’t playing well with RAID controllers. You’ll experience slowdowns and frequent data corruption.
Good to know, I appreciate the help! Do you think ZFS is a reasonable alternative to using RAID here?
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/
Using ZFS on Proxmox for couple of years under different workloads (home servers, productions at job), it is very good.
Just tune it as you need :)
Thanks a ton! I’m on the proxmox forums trying to figure out if I should stick with the H330 that came with the server and return/sell the H730 I got, or if I should use the H730. Seems there’s a recent thread where they’re figuring it out so I’ll get to the bottom of it.
Imo get the H730 if it’s financially reasonable. The passthrough is better supported in my experience. You can resell the H330 fairly easily.
Turns out they put the H730 in the server already so I never got an H330. I want to test the SMART data but it looks like the newer firmware should be fine.