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Nice build. I recently built my second NAS (from a used R720 from ebay). The total (without disks) is pretty similar to the build documented in this article.

Nice build. I recently built my second NAS (from a used R720 from ebay). The total (without disks) is pretty similar to the build documented in this article. Having a large NAS has had an interesting (though predictable) impact on all the computers around it: Pretty much every bit of data lives on the NAS (accessed either by CIFS, NFS, or iSCSI). When I had to reinstall Windows, it was mostly painless because all my important data and Steam games library was on a remote iSCSI disk. When I replaced the drives on my linux servers, I didn't have to backup hardly anything, as I worked almost exclusivly on NFS-mounted directories. When bringing up a new raspberry pi for projects, it also has instant access to more terabytes of storage than it could ever need. Also, for a homelab, getting 10GBe fiber between two machines is surpringly cheap and easy. For certain workloads, it can be a noticable speed boost over 1GBe.

Macha 4y ago
How is performance, especially with regards to load times, if your steam library is mounted remotely? I ask because the difference between a SSD and a hard drive can be massive in this regards, so I'd be really interested to know if the network latency is also a comparable hit.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I'm not a hardcore gamer by any means, but I really wonder how much influence drives actually have on games. My gaming computer had an old SATA SSD (Samsung 840 Evo IIRC). Some games took ages to load (particularly Fallout 4). I switched to a much faster NVME drive, and subjectively, it's not any faster loading games. I'd say this was a very underwhelming purchase.
  - Macha 4y ago
    There's certainly diminishing returns between "an SSD" and "a faster SSD" (unless the slower one is DRAMless or QLC), but hard drive to SSD is still a big gulf
- eminence32 4y ago
  The performance is fine. It's been years since I ran my steam library on HDD, so I don't have anything really to compare to (except my own expectations and impatience). The NAS is running 7 SSD drives in zfs raid, and exports a 1TB volume over iSCSI, via a dedicated 10GBe fiber link. Anecdotally, I will often boot into games faster than friends who have a local SSD (so I think this means that I've gotten disk perf to be "good enough" that other hardware components start to dominate things like load times)

Macha 4y ago

How is performance, especially with regards to load times, if your steam library is mounted remotely? I ask because the difference between a SSD and a hard drive can be massive in this regards, so I'd be really interested to know if the network latency is also a comparable hit.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
I'm not a hardcore gamer by any means, but I really wonder how much influence drives actually have on games. My gaming computer had an old SATA SSD (Samsung 840 Evo IIRC). Some games took ages to load (particularly Fallout 4). I switched to a much faster NVME drive, and subjectively, it's not any faster loading games. I'd say this was a very underwhelming purchase.
- Macha 4y ago
  There's certainly diminishing returns between "an SSD" and "a faster SSD" (unless the slower one is DRAMless or QLC), but hard drive to SSD is still a big gulf
eminence32 4y ago
The performance is fine. It's been years since I ran my steam library on HDD, so I don't have anything really to compare to (except my own expectations and impatience). The NAS is running 7 SSD drives in zfs raid, and exports a 1TB volume over iSCSI, via a dedicated 10GBe fiber link. Anecdotally, I will often boot into games faster than friends who have a local SSD (so I think this means that I've gotten disk perf to be "good enough" that other hardware components start to dominate things like load times)