So. After the last post, I went “first principle” on things. Now, I have moved to UnRaid and was finding a lot better stability, user experience, and overall performance.
Except, still getting some reboots and corruptions. First principles time. As a multi-week side quest, I pulled it down, opened it up, and started running full diagnostics and setups and resetting everything. BIOS was definitely outdated. I had done memory tests and and seen multiple failures, and then remembered I hadn’t updated the BIOS since building the system. Yes, I know, there are a lot of rookie system builder mistakes on this path, as it had been a very long time since I assembled any PC, and when I last did, the intricacy of DDR5 was most definitely not a thing.
So. Back to the BIOS update. Then memtests again. All green…. except the fade test. Weird. The server was running pretty solidly when I did boot it up at that point, and a fade test is a pretty exhaustive test of the RAM. And I did finally get the odd crash with ZFS finding inconsistencies in the memory with the very large disk cache.
Two years in, I decided to see if Corsair warranties were a) still in force and b) covered the fade tests. Answer: Yes to both! As I had gone through everything recommended and that crucial asked ahead of time and done it actually multiple times while trying to troubleshoot, they were very quick to open up the RMA. I sent the RAM in, they sent me a replacement kit (64 GB of RAM, and for interest, I had bought it for $254 two years ago, and it is now over $1200 (CAD) for the same kit. Needless to say, this was an insanely valuable warranty and replacement, and props to Corsair for amazing customer service throughout.
When the new kit showed up, I again dutifully took the time to test each stick multiple times, ALL tests green this time including the fade, and then for good measure tested them as a set multiple times, also all green. And the server booted up cleanly and has been running brilliantly since. Time Machine has been ALMOST flawless. There are known issues where interrupted backups due to sleep or network outages can screw up the sparse bundles. A verify was able to repair it once, but I also take periodic ZFS snapshots on UnRaid, and that was able to keep most of the longer term backups while recovering from a corrupted sparse bundle. I need to automate the ZFS snapshots, but that’s not part of the ZFS admin plugin, so that requires a bit of sysadmin work I haven’t gotten to.
Other bonuses? MUCH better community support and lower technical/time barriers to doing things with the server. I’ve since added docker containers for ForgeJo, Postgres, and a Jellyfin server and put a number of my DVDs onto the network. SO much better.
So overall, TrueNAS probably had a lot of the issues due to my hardware problems, but when it comes to adding docker apps, UnRaid is SO much more user-friendly, and has a much more vibrant user contribution community from what I have seen for things. I might be wrong as I didn’t dig in for hours. The results were just smoother and quicker and … well…. friendlier. And I’m decently technical on server administration.
So if I was to recommend a setup for someone, I’ve still got a fairly capable server two years in. I’d probably go with less RAM and possibly even just DDR4 RAM depending on budget, and maybe less disk, but the overall setup, with UnRAID using zfs, is a much more capable and solid upgrade from the Time Machine server I had previously.