Terramaster NAS as low-cost Proxmox node? TEARDOWN and SW Install!

Рет қаралды 28,986

Күн бұрын

I get asked a lot about what hardware I recommend for homelabs and home servers. It's a very difficult question since it depends on what exactly you want to get out of your setup. But, whatever you choose, I'm starting a new series where I'll setup all of the commonly requested home server software in a single box. Since I want to try this on both used and new hardware, here's a low cost NAS you can buy brand-new and run your own software on it!
A few basics of this guy:
- Terramaster F2-223 - F2 means 2-slot cube form factor, -2 is dual core, 23 is the 'new' series (at least when this video was produced)
- Intel Celeron N4505 dual core
- Dual DDR4 sodimm slots, comes with 1x 4G stick and one easily accessible empty slot. I added an 8G stick to bring it up to 12G so I can do virtualization
- Dual Intel I225-v3 2.5G NICs
For more information such as cpu info, pci, ... see the blog post:
www.apalrd.net/posts/2023/ult...
A few upsides:
- They are pretty cheap for the HW you get new
- Mix of SATA and NVMe storage options, for bulk storage and high speed storage
- x86 processor so it can run Linux based OSes well
- Intel I225 2.5Gbe NIC is considered 'good' compared to Realtek chipsets, and widely compatible across OSes such as Linux and BSD
A few downsides:
- The included software seems to want to install itself on your drive as the boot disk, but I was unable to get it to do so in a short amount of time so I gave up and installed Proxmox (which I was planning on doing anyway)
- The internal USB seems to perpetually change some BIOS/UEFI settings back to default, removing it fixed all of the issues I had getting it to boot Proxmox properly
- The second RAM stick is harder to get to, although I don't think you realistically need more than 12G of RAM to go with this much CPU power. Maybe it would matter more for the quad-core version
My Discord Server, where you can chat with me or suggest topics if you'd like:
/ discord
If you find my content useful and would like to support me, feel free to here: ko-fi.com/apalrd
Buy the Terramaster F2-223: amzn.to/3CgJwg4
You should also consider the quad-core versions if you want to do more virtualization, so you'd want a model with the -423 suffix (F2-423, F4-423, U4-423).
The RAM I bought: amzn.to/3VMx91T (Pair) or amzn.to/3ZabG60 (Single)
Try to find an HP Microserver like mine on eBay: ebay.us/10HV63
This video is part of my Ultimate Home Server Megaproject:
• Ultimate (Proxmox) Hom...
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
01:50 - The Other Option
02:31 - Hardware Overview
04:34 - Teardown
08:24 - Hard Drive Trays
09:26 - Out of Box Software
12:50 - Getting Proxmox to Boot
14:08 - Proxmox Setup
14:55 - Power Consumption
15:37 - Mini Server Project
Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.
#homelab #homeserver

Пікірлер: 82

@awesomearizona-dino Жыл бұрын

Great review, well done showing full setup.

@KrumpetKruncher Жыл бұрын

Good stuff! I'm getting into a lot of NAS/TrueNAS/Proxmox adventures myself so this is a big help! Thanks and God Bless!

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

Glad you appreciate it! Thanks!

@petereisch7613 Жыл бұрын

F2-423 would really be pretty nifty. You're onto something good here.

@henderstech 11 ай бұрын

Thank you for this. This helped me with my decision.

@idontatalya242 Жыл бұрын

"There are instructions for it. I didn't read them." You, sir, are my spirit animal 😁

@mjmeans7983 Жыл бұрын

YT just recommended your channel. That's an interesting tool kit you have.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

This one - www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Pro-Tech-Toolkit/IF145-307 They make cheaper ones depending on what sort of work you do, but it's a great set for working with computers and small electronics

@JohnMitchellCalif Жыл бұрын

super useful, thanks! Subscribed

@bobbymoss6160 Жыл бұрын

10/10 for the box toss.

@MarkConstable Жыл бұрын

Well done. I have a F2-423 and want MORE of them. Mine has 2x NVMe and 2x SSD with Proxomox installed on the mirrored NVMe drives and Ceph on the 2x SSDs in a 3 node all-flash cluster. I don't have a power meter, so it's good to note the power consumption. It took me 3 days to work out I need to completely remove the original USB device, so this video should save other new TM F2-* owners a lot of grief. The only downside is that I think the NVMe devices are only PCIe 3 with 1 lane, so the max read speed is about 800 MB/s, which is better than 500 MB/s for SSD, but not worth populating with the best high speed NVMe drives. That's worth a mention in the next video featuring this device.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

It does seem to be at PCIe x1 right now (lspci -vv, look for LinkSta), which is something I didn't even think to check. I put in an old drive anyway, so not a big deal for me, but definitely good to know.

@MarkConstable Жыл бұрын

You mentioned a 1RU model and sure enough there is a U4-423 with much the same specs BUT it only has a single NVMe slot. Damn! I got all hot and bothered there for a moment. I'll have to stick to F2-(2|4)23 as the dual NVMe is THE feature that got me to buy one. So far, the only rack-like option I've seen of any interest is a "NAS Motherboard N5105/N6005 4x Intel i226-V 2.5G Nics Dual M.2 NVMe Six SATA3.0 2*DDR4 HDMI2.0 DP Mini ITX" on Aliexpress for about $200USD. Teamed up with a short-depth 1 (or 2) RU would be tempting.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

I've struggled to find a half decent 1/2U rack case, I'm not a huge fan of the one I have and the low cost ones aren't great

@jettachamp26 Жыл бұрын

We are literally building very similar stuff right now. Appreciate the ceph deep dive. The terramaster is a decent box. I picked up a f5-422. Just remove the USB 2 inside and stick a USB 3 in the USB port. I decided to go with open media vault on the USB and decided to keep it as a dedicated Nas to connect to proxmox vs adding it to the cluster

@jettachamp26 Жыл бұрын

Keep up the great work!

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

Sounds like a good solution

@jettachamp26 Жыл бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures side note, the internal usb is only usb 2, so I abandoned it and just use the usb3 on the back. Unfortunately the f5-422 doesn't have an on board nvme port so usb is the only option unless you want to use up a drive slot in the caddy. Great little box for factor wise, even though its a bit over priced, IMHO worth the money for the choice to put your own OS if you know what you're doing

@evelbsstudio Жыл бұрын

@apalrd's adventures considering the new TOS software locks out RAM so you have to pay loads more to get terramasters RAM it's not worth getting one of these if you want to use there own software

@SandboChang Жыл бұрын

What a great discovery! I didn't know Terramaster has such a cheap NAS with Intel CPU enabling transcoding, plus there are two 2.5 Gbps ports.

@Sheelyuu Жыл бұрын

To be fair, concerning thin clients... "awful processors", and implicitly no expansion... well, I beg to differ. Running here some ThinkCentre M720q, i5 9600T, with either 16 or 32GB of DDR4, NVME SSD, low profile half height PCie slot (some small GPUs fit, some NICs too, or a PCIe to multi M.2 adaptor) , USB 3.1 Gen 1 and 2 (capture cards to pass through, more storage, you can do a lot there too). And the power consumption is great!

@greedyro Жыл бұрын

i would like to see a "all in one server" :D

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

working on it, Home Assistant and OPNsense are coming next, and a file server within Proxmox

@MRPtech Жыл бұрын

When i was in progress to get home server setup. NAS setup was my first choice, at that time all the NAS was super expensive or had no option to have Proxmox going. Now i have NUC. and i am happy with it. In case someone will ask what is the best all around mini home server setup device with easy to setup i will just point them to your video :)

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

Depends on your needs, if you don't want spinning drives you can get something like a NUC or one of those fanless 'firewall' boxes and do all-SSD. I wanted spinning drives for storing a media library in this context.

@alanstedman6716 Жыл бұрын

Nice. I have an f2-221 with TrueNAS scale on it, booting from and external ssd via a USB-SSD connector. Im going to follow your progress on this one, could be worth swapping to proxmox.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

I also use TrueNAS scale for storage only, but Proxmox is just so much better at virtualization and containers that doing a bit of manual work for the little Samba I do need might be worth it for an all in one solution, at least to me

@curtalfrey1636 Жыл бұрын

Thanks!

@JonathanSwiftUK Жыл бұрын

Awesome.

@michaelrasmussen3347 Жыл бұрын

Nice video. Can I make a suggestion? Not only do performance test but also make various performance comparisons with other solutions.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

I'm planning on a series of different home software (Home Assistant, OPNsense, and Jellyfin over the next few months) and I'll run them both on the microserver and terramaster with some performance, power, and capacity / utilization metrics as appropriate

@XiaOmegaX Жыл бұрын

It's getting hard to find name brand 2280 SATA drives anyway, so NVME support is preferred unless someone has a ton of SATA M2 laying around for whatever reason.

@shephusted2714 Жыл бұрын

for hw nothing beats hp8300 from walmart - about 100 bucks - add a few things to make it excellent - they use about 50w - 90w loaded - broken laptops are another option - no screen- no problem for a headless server - the refurb boxes are way better value and allow you to add more storage - you probably want 10th gen refurb for nvme optimally? for a nas it may be optional just use good ssd pr add in pci-e card with nvme - not bootable on older platforms but still low latency and no moving parts #rop sled

@bluesquadron593 Жыл бұрын

I think you can further reduce the power consumption by spinning down the hard disk.

@KameraShy Жыл бұрын

I was wondering about that. I presume his measurement was with the disks spinning.

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the recommendation, this indeed looks very nice. Is the power supply made by some decent brand or it's worth replacing it with something better? There's a regular DC barrel jack on the back if I'm not mistaken. That Terra Master logo and name is obviously a Cooler Master ripoff, the hardware inside the case is probably fine though, but I'm not really trusting running no name Chinese power supplies 24/7.

@BigRyanGamesMinecraft Жыл бұрын

Hair is amazing

@fossdom5568 Жыл бұрын

I did the same on my F5-221 ,increased ram to 10gb , replaced the usb , and installed OMV and using as a NAS As TOS is crappy OS

@ichamachtir7609 Жыл бұрын

Did you found how to activate the pci passthrough?

@copper4eva Жыл бұрын

Have you considered getting a used Optiplex or similar HP/Lenovo desktop? It seems like the Optiplex 7040 SFF is a great choice, for example. You can get them for under $150 or so on ebay, and get a quad core with DDR4 ram. I've even seen some listings under $100, usually without a hard drive or something. I plan on building a proxmox cluster with optiplex's. They typically have a pcie x16 and x4 slot in the SFF chassis. Which gives great options for high speed networking and DAS expansions. Probably the main disadvantage with the optiplex boxes is they only have one hard drive bay. So I think a external DAS is the way to go. I haven't looked into DAS's much, but I assume you could split up its drives across multiple computers. Edit: forget to mention they’re also very power efficient. But I couldn’t really find some precise examples of what they idle at.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

If you're limited by drive bays, I think the best option would be to use a big HDD and then cluster with Ceph. If you can get at least 1x NVMe + 1x big HDD in a node, the total capacity should be pretty good.

@copper4eva Жыл бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures That is a good suggestion. Pretty close to what I was thinking of doing in fact. Something I did not consider before, but I could use the NVMe as both my boot drive and ceph storage correct? I didn't realize that was an option till this video.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

You can use put Ceph on a partition. That's fine. With NVMe drives only, Ceph also recommends creating multiple OSDs on the same disk, since NVMe can handle multiple queues and the OSD process isn't highly threaded.

@bamx23 Жыл бұрын

Hey! I'm following your adventure here with Terramaster NAS and have a question. Do you think it makes sense/possible to run OpenSense in Proxmox on this device? Two network sockets make an impression that this hardware can work as a router.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

It's certainly possible using the dual NICs. Dual NICs aren't strictly required for a router anyway, but having them means you don't need any managed switches.

@udosuessenberger4218 Жыл бұрын

hi Apalrd, thank you for this valuabe content, I do learn so much even if I have sometimes a hard time to follow the english explanations andrepeat and repeat it. I am new and try to do as close as you do. Unfortunately directly after proxmox installation my storage is named local-lvm but yours is local zfs. I tried to wipe all disk and did several new installs but can not be it local-zfs. My local drive is not a NVME instead a SSD. Is that the mistake or what do I do wrong ?

@udosuessenberger4218 Жыл бұрын

please consider as closed or too dumb. In the next try I used the options tab besides the Target Harddisk instead of trying to reformat with gparted all the time. Sorry Sorry Sorry

@buildfrom Жыл бұрын

Think this video is on similar lines to what alpalrd's adventures did with his Terramaster NAS.

@zeli Жыл бұрын

Great content! It'd be sweet to have 3 of such NASes (I've previously been eyeing some cheap Chinese glorified NAS 'crypto-box' for this role, but this looks way better!), run Ceph with erasure-coding, and have them as the data storage solution. Won't be able to do that anytime soon, but I can always dream!

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

Someday I'll get there. Low power, >1G Ethernet, can build an NVMe + HDD cluster with HA on the same nodes. Pretty reasonable for a home or even small business system.

@hazemturki 4 ай бұрын

Hey @apalrd, just ordered the r1 aooostar. And I am considering running the same setup you have in this playlist. So my question is, what's your overall review of this setup now that you have it up for a year or so. Do you still recommend it?

@apalrdsadventures 4 ай бұрын

I'm currently using it for my home automation stuff (Home Assistant, Frigate, my task tracker, and video editing NAS). So I'm pretty happy with it. Not enough RAM to run many VMs, but it's enough to keep my core stuff up and not mess with it while I tinker with other systems.

@thadarkone5087 Жыл бұрын

hey i have 5110p phi coprocessor you ever get yours working ?

@nikolayvvasilev Жыл бұрын

Hi, I like your videos. I have a question about the Proxmox installation on the NAS. As you skipped the Proxmox installation part in the video, did you install ZFS as the root file system? I thought you can't have, because you are using only one ssd for the install and at least 2 disks are required. So did you create the rpool on your own? Also is it ok to use the Proxmox installation disk for VM's and containers? I read somewhere that it's better to separate them. I install Proxmox on 2 32GB flash drives as Raid1 and create a VM ZFS pool with a single NVme. You can do the same with the NAS with the front USB's. All the best 😊

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

I used the installer with ZFS. It does not mandate 2 disks, you can install ZFS on a single disk. Select ZFS RAID0 and only the disk you want to boot from There's nothing wrong with using the install disk for VMs/CTs and I'd definitely go with that approach on a home server (preferably on a mirrored drive - I have one NVMe but having a mirror of two for boot + VMs/CTs would be ideal).

@nikolayvvasilev Жыл бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures I guess they recently added the option to install on Raid0.

@ArcticJS 10 ай бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures thanks for this comment!! i wasn't sure how to install with zfs on only one ssd but figured out i could just deselect the second drive option as it was on my usb drive by default

@masterTigress96 6 ай бұрын

Interesting video, I wondered the same thing about some of the Qnap offerings given their awful reputation with security. However, did you check if the "usb thingy" was a SATA DOM? If it really was a USB then forget about installing Proxmox or anything else on it, but if it was a DOM, and if it was large enough in capacity, you could have used that to install Proxmox to and then you would have had a little more space on your SSD for other things. Not that Proxmox is resource hog, but still for efficiency sake, it would have been nice.

@apalrdsadventures 6 ай бұрын

It's actually USB and is really small. It seems to be only a efi partition or something like that, since TOS downloads and installs itself to the data drives.

@masterTigress96 6 ай бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures I feared that would be the case. It is just a one time use case and after that forgotten about by users who use the product for the intended use case. Too bad, would have been a small but nice little bonus. Thanks for responding and happy holidays.

@undergroundnews_dk Жыл бұрын

This is a cool server - how about the GPU - is it usable also ?

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

I'm currently testing it with Jellyfin and it's very usable for transcoding. Some quirks like enabling the huc/guc firmware blobs in the kernel cmdline for quicksync to work but that's required for anything with an Intel GPU of this generation. I'm running in LXC so not using PCIe passthrough.

@IainMacLeod091709 Жыл бұрын

Have you ever tried xigmanas? Thoughts on it as a solution?

@KameraShy Жыл бұрын

I use XigmaNAS on my Dell R510 and R710 rack servers. Very similar to TrueNAS since they share the same heritage. I picked XigmaNAS because I liked the user interface better. I have not been able to find a side-by-side comparison as well as how to convert from one to the other if that should ever be necessary.

@hpsfresh Жыл бұрын

Haven’t you tried second m.2? Does it also supports name?

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

They both support NVMe

@hpsfresh Жыл бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures thanx

@halsmypal Жыл бұрын

I got an F2-223 recently. I still can't figure out how to get it to boot from NVME after restarting. Somehow it keeps on looking for a USB drive after restarting and the only way to get it to boot from NVME is after each restart, to go into the bios and manually set the NVME option to something other than Disabled. In my case, it's "ubuntu." Have you figured out how to make it boot from nvme automatically each time?

@halsmypal Жыл бұрын

This happens even if I remove the internal boot usb drive.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

I had to switch the boot option to NVME and also select the specific NVME drive as the NVME boot option (there's an option to select which nvme drive of the two slots, and it seems to not work reliably if that option isn't set). The internal USB drive also undoes this setting each time it boots, so it needs to come out also.

@ER-vh6vc 6 ай бұрын

This NAS is without ECC - do you think it is safe to use ZFS?

@apalrdsadventures 6 ай бұрын

The only danger in using ZFS without ECC is that ZFS will tell you when your data is corrupted for some reason and any other filesystem will silently ignore it.

@ernestoditerribile Жыл бұрын

Way better is to use a SAN solution instead of a NAS, like NetApp or Oracle. Way more performance. Even a nice Z16 will do nice as a storage server.

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

This started as a NAS but now it's a hypervisor with storage, and it's quite cheap for something new with modern power efficiency

@ernestoditerribile Жыл бұрын

@@apalrdsadventures I know, you can’t compare both systems. It was a joke. A good 24 bay NetApp FAS costs at least €50.000 retail. So they aren’t comparable. Mostly used for large databases with PetaBytes of storage. Medium sized businesses usually only run 112 bays with around 90-160Tb of storage. Small companies run Synology most of the times in 4, 8 or 12 bay configuration. If you don’t have more then 50 users it’s fine. But when you go over that certainly look into Oracle or NetApp(the best for SAN)

@mbvalency Ай бұрын

why don't you have a home (box) for your computer? (I have a ton of them by the way ;))

@NetBandit70 Жыл бұрын

If you learn how to scrounge and make connections, you can have used IT hardware coming out of your ears for free or cheap. Better than a $250 'NAS'.

@jettachamp26 Жыл бұрын

True, but cheap/free up front can cost a lot ok the energy on the backend unless you have cheap/free power like off grid solar. I've passed up a lot of old server hardware purely because the noise and energy cost would be unacceptable over just the first year of use

@apalrdsadventures Жыл бұрын

The difference in power costs alone between this and my HP microserver (which is pretty quiet and low-power as far as used IT hardware goes) is $35 a year where I am *at idle*, and electricity is relatively cheap here compared to the rest of the US and especially the world. I have plenty of used hardware, but I don't want to run any of it as a full-time server.

@NetBandit70 Жыл бұрын

@@jettachamp26 No duh. Be smart about it. And the flipside is true too. A used Skylake workstation could handle Aplalrds workload of that NAS, his micro server, and all his thin client things combined. Not to mention he could eliminate some network hardware... all a savings in power.

@XiaOmegaX Жыл бұрын

I pulled a T440P out of a dumpster and it's loaded with 3 SSD's now. It's only SATA 2 bus for 2 of the ports, and one of them is a sata-only 2242 slot, so it's a bit wonky, but it's fine.

@93vxhybridhatchback Жыл бұрын

@@XiaOmegaX I bought a t440p a few years ago, upgraded to a 35w CPU,16 ram,two 1tb ssd and 256 wwan port ssd. Its a freaking powerhouse. Triple boot and can play emulators with the gt 7** dgpu. If I don't sell it soon it'll be a VM test lab.