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I mentioned in my previous post that I had setup my friend and I’s servers with three distinct datasets: Data, Media, and Backup. Data was created as a dataset where all our personal documents would be stored. Media was created as a dataset for movies and music, which don’t require an offsite backup. This is where I put my collection of movies and series that I’ve ripped and make available to Plex. Backup is the offsite backup dataset. This is where my cloud servers backup, as well as as where our backups of each other’s Data dataset lives. Now, to be honest, I didn’t setup encrypted datasets on our servers, as I’ve not done it before and this data is too important to me to take a chance. Someday I’ll toy with it and learn that aspect of TrueNAS...

My server build turned into two server builds. My friend and I each acquired a used Dell PowerEdge R540 with nearly identical specs. My server came with:

2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4215 CPU @ 2.50GHz
48 GB RAM
10x Toshiba 8TB 7200 RPM SAS drives

Fortunately for me, I had some spare Intel 400 GB data center SSDs, so I jumped on Amazon and grabbed some generic 3.5″ drive caddies with 2.5″ adapters. The LED on the units isn’t as bright as the Dell branded caddies, but work just as well otherwise. I had to remove the RAID that was on the drives. After that I removed two of the Toshiba drives. Finally I put the two new 400 GB SSDs in.