Don't use RAID: https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/ First thing I was thinking about was the chassis. Considering I don't live in the USA right now I need to buy something that can be shipped to Europe someway. I found some good candidates, even from old posts on other forums like this on LTT, and at the end I think I will go with the Node 304.

With the above in mind, we can define our ideal CPU: the highest possible single-thread performance with good multi-thread performance. As it turns out, that CPU is currently Intel’s i7-8700K. No other x86 CPU matches its single-core speed, and with six cores total it is a more than decent multi-core contender, too. Component Selection

If you need Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, I can recommend the Asus PCIe network adapter AC2100 (PCE-AC58BT). It works out of the box without the need to install anything from the CD (!) I found in the box. Just connect the external antenna (excellent signal strength!) and the internal USB cable (required for Bluetooth). MSI B360M PRO-VDH / Pentium Gold G5600: from my understanding it should be plenty powerful for now. The intention is to play with it some time and upgrade the board to Fujitsu D3643-H or Fujitsu D3644-B and maybe upgrade the pentium to a i3 9100 when avaiable. I know these combinations get quite low in idle power consumption, but it would have me start with a consumer board. A definite no as I've come to understand here, or....? I would advice just using 1 RAIDZ2 vdev with 6 drives, that leaves you the option to upgrade to 2 or even 3 vdevs in the future. reading various official hardware sizing guides and user builds I find it hard to decide how much CPU horsepower I'll need for my use-case.

So simply put: If you keep writing constantly, the disks never idle and thus never reach a chance to spin down. Regardless of how spindown itself is handled... (For spindown, a disk needs to be idle. If no disk ever idles, it wouldn't spin down regardless of the spindown setting).

About the Author

Now, really, I've heard all the stuff about how I'm wrong or how I'm an idiot or how I don't know what I'm talking about, and I can serenely listen to that all day long. If you look at 24-or-more drive arrays, the *lowest* thing I have seen is an 850W nonredundant PSU on the Storinator Q30, which is only possible because they stagger spinup (this is also not their default option, which is a dual 1400W PSU). Your typical Supermicro 846 is a pair of 920W PSU's (1840W available to spin) or 1280W PSU's, HP is IIRC redundant 1460W, etc. I have a hard time thinking all these other electrical engineers are crazy too. Burn-in and testing: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.17750/ So I've been looking into second hand. The nice supermicroboards can't be found second hand for a reasonable price at the moment. And as I've come to understand over here, the consumer boards I'd better not use as well. This kinda answers the question already, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. With the very limited budget I can get (both secondhand): ZIL and SLOG: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/some-insights-into-slog-zil-with-zfs-on-freenas.13633/