It was finally time to make the living room more silent, by replaing my old TrueNAS Core (based on FreeBSD) with the newer TrueNAS Scale (based on Debian Linux).

Instead of building it myself again, like my old
SUPERMICRO A2SDi-4C-HLN4F with 32TB on Raid-Z1,
I decided to buy a complete Hardware-NAS-Chassis with 10G Ethernet.
After some studying, I decided for the previous Kickstarter NAS project UGREEN NAS DXP8800 Plus, which allowed me to swap the firmware back to my beloved TrueNAS.

All the harddisks had to go, I want solid state only, for power saving and mostly for accoustic reasons.
So, I bought 8x 2,5 inch SA500 NAS SSD’s from Western Digital for the 8 slots, still with slow SATA interface, and built a RAID-Z2 this time, for long term archives.

And for fast and temporary data like AI/ML LLM+Diffusion models, backups and software archives, I bought 4x 8TB Western Digital SN850x NVMe SSD’s.
To be able to use 4 M2 slots, I bought an extra PCIe adapter with bifurcation capability.

I did also replace the original fans with more silent Noctua NF-A12x25 fans.

And to round things up, a 10GBit/s switch needed to be used with my MacStudios, so they have lightning fast access to the LLMs 😉
An SFP+ version might have been cheaper, but I decided to use the YuanLey YS100-0800T with 8x 10G/5G/2.5G/1G ports, so I can also get more speed for my Proxmox nodes which currently do 2x1G bonding, but are 2.5G capable. Plus my Ryzen Windows machine has a 5G port.

Of course memory is maxed out with 2x32G, although I’ll not use it for containers anymore, only for ARC cache. My MacStudio Podmans are good enough for that, and have faster access to their local TB5 storage enclosures.