Prices are too high. I would be going for DAS as I need a file offline server to connect with my 2 hacks. The problem is that I couldn't find any DAS system that will work with 2 systems simultaneously.
You can't find it since it's
Direct Attach Storage: By definition, it serves one and only one master.
Having several clients makes it a NAS.
So I thought NAS is the way to go. So far I have conclude to these specs which I believe that will be more than enough (spec wise from truenas system requirements).
Intel i3-10320
Asus Prime B560M-K
Corsair 16Gb DDR4 2400mhz
Be Quiet 400w Gold+ Pure Power 11
WD Sn770 250Gb (truenas instalaltion)
Fractal Design Node 804
This would be best followed up on the TrueNAS forum then.
Consumer motherboard and non-ECC CPU are not the best choice, though this is not fatal.
Minimal 16 GB RAM does not bode well for performance.
PSU is undersized for the 8-10 drives the case can hold.
Node 804 is reasonably convenient to work with if you install drives in groups of four and find a way to manage cables (SAS breakout cables to 4*SATA work great here!). Be aware that the top mesh leaves the drive noise out: I would NOT want to work near a loaded Node 804!
For 10G networking, add a suitable server-grade NIC: Chelsio T520, Intel X550, Solarflare SFN x122.
Solarflare NICs are especially cheap on eBay, but you may find good deals on second-hand ("clean pull") Chelsio (or Intel, but then make sure it is genuine!). Refurbished server hardware is the way to go to build a good NAS.
I think i3 is more than enough to handle speeds for both systems as this machine won't be used as VM or other apps (maybe Kodi later for tv entertainment). If you have any suggestions, please let me know!
If the use case is to serve two clients through SMB you're right: Few cores at high speed is all that's needed.
The main concern is that video editing
on the NAS is very demanding. You may not achieve the required performance without spending a significant amount of money.
Read speed about 500-600 MB/s, write 200.
These speeds are low in my case unfortunately.
Don't expect much better from "a RAID5 with up to 5 disks" though. (And with ZFS that would be raidz1, not raid5.) You'll need a lot more drives to saturate a 10GbE link—or go for SSD.
I work with 4k heavy files which sometimes are in raw format (braw, canon CRL) and I need speeds for 2x system editing simultaneously. I searched almost every Qnap product and they don't provide the speeds that are advertised except if you spend 2k+ (w/o disks) for a system like tvs-872xt which in my case is too expensive. I need true 10Gbit speeds for both systems so I decided to build my own nas.
Well, from earlier threads on the TrueNAS forum, the QNAP solution to your requirements that would have come to mind is the TS-h1290FX: EPYC, NVMe U.2 drives and potentially lots of RDIMM RAM. I guess that the TVS-872XT is a bargain in comparison.
5x Ironwolf 8Tb (7200rpm/256mb cache) with a RAID5 array. So 32Tb of use.
Motherboard has a 2nd m.2 slot (which takes out 1 sata port but again I have 5 ports for 5 Ironwolfs) which I can use for ssd caching but I'm thinking to do it later as I'm new to all this!
Using NVMe M.2 drives does not even cost a SATA port. But do not even THINK about a L2ARC ("read cache") before you have
at least 64 GB RAM!
(Also please generally mind the difference between "bits" with a small 'b' and "bytes" with a capital 'B'…)
