I “upgraded” my Truenas server to a Core i3-10100 system with 16GB DDR4 non-ecc from my pervious one of Xeon E5-1660 v4 with 32GB DDR4 ECC. I think the newer CPU should perform fine with running a NAS and a couple light apps. If I need more ram I can get some from ebay. For now, the huge win is in power savings. The server went from about 100 watts at idle to 70 watts with the same hard drives (3x8TB, 2x14TB, 3 SSDs). This is based on the output of my UPS which has a few other things plugged into it as well

My Truenas server started shutting down randomly. In the logs it looked like the system was being gracefully shut down but I was not issuing the commands. I checked access logs and it didn’t seem like anyone had gained access.

I tried a few things (re-installing the power button, upgrading Truenas to the latest version, etc) and the shutdowns seemed to go away. One day, the system shut down and would not power back on. I wasn’t sure what was happening. In my mind it was either the motherboard or the power supply. I decided to test out with a new power supply since I had one. I had to buy adapter cables because the HP Z440 doesn’t use regular pin outs.

I ordered the cables on amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PBH6VPV). When they arrived, i replaced the power supply, added the new cables and nothing. I put in an offer on an ebay computer from Mclean-Surplus. The next morning they had accepted the offer and I picked up the computer. It is ASRock H410M-HDV/M.2 Desktop Core i3-10100 3.6GHz 16GB RAM 500GB HDD NO OS that I got for $127.

When I got back, the old system booted fine (which was annoying since I had already bought a replacement). The odd thing was my 3 drive pool was only showing 1 drive. I could not figure out why. After much googling, trying the drives with external adapters and booting the new, backup system, with Ubuntu to run gparted and smart tests I still had no idea what was happening. All 3 drives spun up with the external adapter. Only 2 of the drives showed up in ubuntu when I was running SMART tests. Whenever I put them back into my NAS box, only 1 would show up in Truenas.

Finally, I realized that I am running shucked drives and it is recommended to cover the 3.3v pins (https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issue-in-White-Label-Disks-/). With my previous power supply, all the hard drives were plugged in with SATA adapters. With the new power supply, some drives were on a sata splitter but some were directly plugged in. The drives that were not showing were directly plugged into the power supply’s SATA power cables. Once I moved them to a SATA power splitter all 3 drives showed up in Truenas. I was relieved to not have lost all my data. I know the saying is MOLEX to SATA lose all your data, but in my case I couldn’t access any of my data without that adapter.

I have since bought a few SATA power splitters to skip the molex to sata. So far I am happy with the upgrades, even though I have a consumer-level CPU now and half the ram. Going from 100w to 70w seems like a huge win.