Some changes happened!

Ever since the last server update, there's been small changes happening. When it was built, there were a few PCIE slots open, and only 3 spinning disks in there. It's since been upgraded from 3x10TB, to 3x10TB + 4x12TB (New RaidZ and a hot spare), as well as adding in an Intel Arc A380 for transcodes in Jellyfin! With more and more users on the server, it became very useful, especially with people streaming to remote machines or phones, and this allows for saving on bandwidth for both the VPS that's used as a bouncer, as well as for the user!

Software changes

TrueNAS has been through two major versions, and soon to be a third, and has been holding very stable with a PCI Passthrough SAS card. Software has changed a few times, and over all is mostly stable with a single primary docker VM, TrueNAS for storage, and various test/dev containers. VM storage has been kept easily in check with reasonable automations to keep docker containers clean. Spinning disk storage is starting to get a bit tighter than I'd like, hovering in the 60-70% range, even after media cleanups. There's bound to be a project in the future, either saving space somehow with software, or expanding the hardware.

Networking changes

The trusty old router also got an upgrade to 10G SFP+ networking, mostly due to ordering the wrong bracket for a spare card. It has been quite nice to not have a 3d printed bracket on my network card though, which did cause issues when cats played with wires and jiggled it in the slot, forcing me to reboot the router. Otherwise, it was incredibly useful to have, and saved me in a pinch years back enough that I forgot to order a bracket for years.

A 6 port (4 2.5G Base-T, 2 10G SFP+) switch has also been added to allow for faster communication between wireless devices, as well as a game box that's 2.5G, and frees up SFP+ ports for more important things, such as keeping the bandwidth free between the primary and backup machine to allow for fast backups, as well as having excess network to continue to offer services.

Adding more machines

As mentioned above, a backup machine has been added! It's running TrueNAS and contains only 2 16TB disks, and a single SSD boot disk. It runs the latest version a bit ahead of the primary storage to ensure stability, and help me adjust to changes before it becomes required. Thus far, it's not been an issue, but I'd rather it not be one later. I also added a mini PC that used to be the heart of my VZbot printer. It's only got a mobile dual core Haswell chip, and 6GB of RAM, but it's a great box for HomeAssistant to live on so I can reboot the big stuff without interruption. The USB Zigbee adapter also seems more stable, probably because the cats don't play with wires on this machine though.

Parting ramble, and more photos

Over all the setup has been quite stable for a while, and I don't want to make any real changes to it. Unfortunately, I'm out of places to stuff drives, so a case change may be in order. Currently, my two primary choices are the Rosewill RSV-H424 on the cheaper end, and the HL15 Beast on the high end. There aren't many cases that can store both an EATX board, as well as more than 10 drives, and I'd rather not limit myself soon as I fear that I will with any other choice in the market. It's certainly cheaper than upgrading all of the drives to 20TB drives in place, and would give much easier expansion long term. Ideally, I'd like to move most of the compute off of the storage server into a mini PC cluster, but with the price of computers these days, I don't see that happening any time in the next few years.