I currently have a Lenovo P360 Tiny loaded with an Intel I9, 64GB of RAM, and two 1TB NVMe drives. I also built a PI NAS using a Raspberry Pi 5 with a SATA HAT and four 2TB SSDs running OMV and configured in a RAID 5 with all of my media on it. The media is shared to the TrueNAS server using an NFS share. I'm running Plex and a host of other apps on the TruNAS machine, and it works just fine sharing the media from the PI NAS, but it's definitely not the most efficient way to do things, which got me brainstorming. I want to build a custom server, with the guts from the Lenovo, using a PCIe SATA expansion card, and move my RAID into one box with the server. My first question is, has anyone here done something similar? I have the 230W power supply for the Lenovo, which would be more than sufficient to power it all, but it would get tricky wiring and powering the hard drives. I would prefer to remove the Lenovo guts from it's chassis and install it in either a 3D printed case, or something like the Jonsbo N2 case, and use an SFX PSU to power it all. But I haven't been able to find anything on power headers on the Lenovo motherboard to power it from a standard PSU, or even what form factor it is for mounting in a case. So again, just wondering if anyone here has done something similar and might have some of these answers. Thanks!!
Log Lenovo P360 Tiny SFF Custom TruNAS build
- Thread starter bobtiff79
- Start date
Believe it or not, I'm in a similar boat. I have a Pi4 with 4 2TB HDDs sitting in a neat case the size of a soda bottle, but I want to employ my P360 Ultra to various server duties as I prepare to upgrade to an AM5 based platform, maybe. Unfortunately, you'll need to keep the power adapter. ATX PSUs (which is to say, all of them) convert wall power to a maximum of 12V. The Lenovo DC power in on the P360 series requires an input voltage of 20V*X amps (where X determines your total wattage). For instance, my P360 Ultra uses a 20V*15A power brick, which equates to a max sustained output of 300W. If you have a 230W brick, that means you have a 11.5 amp power brick. The problem is that without a board diagram and very creative soldering techniques, there's no way to interface it to an ATX PSU without a boost converter to increase the 12V running voltage to 20V; and even then you'd really want a high quality one that won't send noise downstream into your computer. This also neglects how the computer would signal the PSU to turn on given that the POWER_GOOD wire on the PSU needs to be attached somewhere to signal it. That doesn't mean that you can't shuck the motherboard, make a 3D printed case for it and attach it to some 3.5 inch disks with your PCIE x16 slot, as the average power consumption of your current system could probably handle 3-4 big HDDs on the 230W supply, more if you use Intel XTU to force the CPU to not turbo and stay at the 65W power draw. However, at that point why not leverage the external IO (eg USB3/TB3 ports) and connect some enclosures so the calculations are not necessary? I get external facing connectors probably aren't as nice, but they are a far easier solution to use as you could just sit your Tiny on top of the disk enclosure and leave it in a closet with your router/gateway and other accessories.
I still use my Ultra for gaming, but when I relegate it to server duty it will probably look something like this:
CPU: i9-12900T
RAM: 2x32GB DDR5-4800 ECC SODIMM (filling all 4 slots cuts memory bandwidth from 4800 to 4000 MHz)
GPU: GUNNIR Intel ARC A770 16GB (when I can get my hands on one lol)
Internal Storage:
1x Optane 900P 480GB (L2ARC/ZLOG Cache)
2x WD Black SN850 (hi speed array)
1x SATA SSD (attached to internal SATA port, provides spare port for OS storage)
External Storage:
Don't really have a need for massive external storage yet, would most likely wait for pricing on:
Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for M.2 SSDs on one port, may also attach another OR daisy chain a Sonnet Solo 10GBe NIC if needed
USB3 enclosures for HDDs (4x 10GB/sec ports, could hold 4 5TB drives each at max throughput)
I still use my Ultra for gaming, but when I relegate it to server duty it will probably look something like this:
CPU: i9-12900T
RAM: 2x32GB DDR5-4800 ECC SODIMM (filling all 4 slots cuts memory bandwidth from 4800 to 4000 MHz)
GPU: GUNNIR Intel ARC A770 16GB (when I can get my hands on one lol)
Internal Storage:
1x Optane 900P 480GB (L2ARC/ZLOG Cache)
2x WD Black SN850 (hi speed array)
1x SATA SSD (attached to internal SATA port, provides spare port for OS storage)
External Storage:
Don't really have a need for massive external storage yet, would most likely wait for pricing on:
Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for M.2 SSDs on one port, may also attach another OR daisy chain a Sonnet Solo 10GBe NIC if needed
USB3 enclosures for HDDs (4x 10GB/sec ports, could hold 4 5TB drives each at max throughput)
Yeah, I've realized that trying to use the Lenovo guts is really a pain, and the SODIMM RAM is a bottleneck anyway. So I've decided to buy an ITX board and RAM, transplant my i9 from the Lenovo to the new board, and build by server with that. All in it's only going to cost me a few hundred after buying the board, RAM, and power supply, and I'm 3D printing the case. Most of the HDDs I have on hand, I might pick up a couple more. I'll need a PCIe SATA expansion card as well, but that's about it really. Once it's done my new TruNAS server will look like this:
CPU: i9-12900
Board: ASRock H610M-ITX/eDP
RAM: Crucial Pro 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600)
OS Drive: WD Black SN850 1TB
Virtual Disk Drive: WD Black SN850 2TB
HDD RAID: Five - Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - Set up in RAID 5
3D Printed NAS Case
Overall this should work way better, and I'll be getting the most out of this processor with this setup vs. in that little Lenovo body.
For a wide list of reasons, I recommend against hardware RAID setups for NAS usage, mainly because with most consumer solutions (eg chipset RAID) there is not visibility on Intel platforms as to what the array is currently up to. While SODIMMs may be a barrier to max expansion, remember that the Tiny has a W680 chipset on board, which supports ECC memory on the i9-12900. That to me is far more important than the actual form factor of the memory, but your Tiny should theoretically support 64-96GB at 4800MHz in a dual slot config.
TrueNAS handles your RAID for you in software with a storage format known as ZFS. I strongly suggest you give it a look
TrueNAS handles your RAID for you in software with a storage format known as ZFS. I strongly suggest you give it a look
So I finished my server with the above specs, and configured my pool as a RAIDz1 which gives me roughly 15TiB of storage. I'm using a 500GB SATA drive for the OS drive and the 1TB WD SN850 is my cache drive. Overall I'm really happy with this setup and I'm enjoying configuring and learning TrueNAS so far. My next hurdle is transferring all of my media from my Pi NAS to my TrueNAS server. From what I'm seeing Rsync is the best way to do this, but I can't figure out how to make it work. I've downloaded the Rsync app and setup the module on TrueNAS, and setup a task in OMV on the Pi NAS to push my media from my Media share to the new server, but it's not working. I can't really find a lot online on how to do this exactly (OMV transfers to TrueNAS) so it's kind of frustrating, getting files onto a NAS should be easier than this lol
Similar threads
