I’m looking for an off-the-shelf 4 or 6 bay NAS with upgradeable RAM that runs TrueNAS (for ZFS). The QNAP TS-664 looked very nice, but the price of the 4G version (with 2 RAM slots) is currently 25% more than the 8G version (with soldered RAM). I’d like to have 16 or better 32GB of RAM.
Do you have any recommendations?
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“very nice” with a 4110 Passmark CPU? Seriously, I mean you get 6000+ in some passively cooled tablets from 5+ years ago. That will do only to use it with the most basic RAID, probably with something like ext4 on top of it and to use it as an appliance. If you want ZFS and to run something else too not just to serve some files you’d better build a half-decent reasonable machine.
No specific recommendations for off-the-shelf offerings, but I see you’re in Europe and concerned with power consumption? You may want to look at Wolfang’s Channel on youtube - he has a few NAS builds that are extremely low power, and I’ve found his videos informative. Specifically, you will want to look at his “Building a Power Efficient Home Server” video.
Of course, the above is not useful if you’re looking for prebuilt units.
Thanks, i found Wolfgang’s video extremly useful and now decided to build one myself. The Topton N5105 looks really good with its 6 sata ports. Just need to decide if i get the bigger Fractal Node 304 or the smaller (but nicer) Jonsbo N1 case.
The whole project is a bit of a stretch between low power, low noise (living room) and enough cpu/ram for good zfs performance.
Topton N5105
Yep, this board looks perfect for your stated use case! You give up a bit for the form factor, but just put those sweet sweet power savings towards your next upgrade.
One last thought - I’ve watched a few reviews of the Jonsbo N1 and I think there were 2 flaws with it: loudish stock fan, and if you are using all HDD slots drives can overheat due to bad airflow (front panel is solid - not vented - for some reason!)
Newer generation Intel boards should be quite a bit better than my numbers, too.
A modern, barebones board with no extra cards, 1Gbe and an NVMe idles at 10W with an ATX PSU. A dedicated NAS can not really do a lot to lower this a lot.
Sorry, I was strictly speaking newer Intel SFF mobos vs the Haswell one I quoted. I get 15-18W idle with SATA SSD, 1Gbe, no PCI card/no HBA, and an ATX Gold PSU. Two different (i3/i5) Haswell era SFF PCs I tested are both in this range. Once CPU is used at all, they both jump up to the 25-28W range.