I haven't used TrueNAS since it was still called FreeNAS.
I liked FreeNAS for awhile, but after a certain point I kind of just learned how to properly use Samba and NFS and ZFS, and after that I kind of felt like it was just getting in the way.
Nowadays, my "NAS" is one of those little "mini gaming PCs" you an buy on Amazon for around ~$400, and I have three 8-bay USB hard drive enclosures, each filled with 16TB drives all with ZFS. I lose six drives to the RAID, so total storage is about ~288TB, but even though it's USB it's actually pretty fast; fast enough for what I need to for anyway, which is to watch videos off Jellyfin or host a Minecraft server.
I am not 100% sure who TrueNAS is really for, at least in the "install it yourself" sense; if you know enough about how to install something like TrueNAS, you probably don't really need it...
This is fun for learning purposes, but even with the PCIe 3 bus the Pi just isn't that great a server when compared to an Intel N-series machine.
I have two "normal" NAS devices, but I would like to find a compact N100 board with multiple SATA ports, (like some of the stackable HATs for the Pi, some of which will take 4 disks directly on the PCB) to put some older discarded drives to good use.
My go-to solution software-wise is actually to install Proxmox, set up ZFS on it and then drop in a lightweight LXC that exposes the local filesystem via SMB, because I like to tweak the "recycle bin" option and some Mac-specific flags--I've been using that setup for a while, also off Proxmox: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2024/11/09/1940#setting-up-...
Shouldn't it be more of a "why" to install TrueNAS on a RPi?
The only reason I can see is "I have one that I don't use". Because otherwise...
Idle power isn't all that much better than a low power Intel N100 or something similar. And it's all downhill from there. Network transfer speeds and disk transfers will all be kneecapped by the (lack of) available PCIe lanes. Available RAM or CPU speeds are even worse...
I have been using a Raspberry Pi 4 (8 GB RAM) as my NAS for nearly 5 years. It is incredibly reliable. I run the following software on it: Ubuntu 64-bit, Samba, Jenkins, Postgres and MariaDB. I have attached external hard drives through a USB hub (because Pi does not necessarily have enough power for the external hard drive). I git push to public Samba folders on the Pi, and trigger Jenkins, which builds and installs my server using docker in the Pi.
On the one hand it is good to discover that someone is tackling getting TianoCore working on the Raspberry Pi 5.
On the other hand, they still have the destructive backspace behaviour, and inefficient recursive implementation, that breaks the boot loader spinners that the NetBSD and other boot loaders display. It's a tiny thing, but if one is used to the boot sequence the absence of a spinner makes the experience ever so slightly jarring.
It was a fun project and looked cool but never really worked that well. It was quite unstable and drives seemed to disconnect and reconnect a lot. There are probably better quality connectors out there but I think for a NAS you really want proper SATA connections.
I eventually built my own box and went with OMV again. I like it because it's just userland software you install on Debian. Some of the commenters here who think TrueNAS is overkill might want to check out OMV if they haven't already.
To be honest I still only have a few TB of storage on it, probably not really enough to be worth all the hassle of building and configuring a PC, but it was more about the journey which was fun.
Wouldn't straight ZFS with a vanilla OS make more sense for low power devices? TrueNAS, esp the kubernetes flavour seems to have a decent bit of overhead last I looked at it
I have actually made a Raspberry Pi based NAS and found it was a pain.
The SATA controller isn't terrible, but it and other hardware areas have had many strange behaviors over the years to the point of compiling the kernel being needed to fiddle with some settings to get a hardware device to do what it's supposed to.
Even if you're using power that is well supported eventually you seem to hit internal limits and get problems. That's when you see people underclocking the chip to move some of this phantom power budget to other chips. Likewise you have to power most everything from a separate source which pushes me even closer to a "regular PC" anyhow.
I just grab an old PC from Facebook for under $100. The current one is a leftover from the DDR3 + Nvidia 1060 gaming era. It's a quad core with HT so I get 8 threads. Granted most of those threads cause the system to go into 90% usage even when running jobs with only 2 threads, probably because the real hardware being used there is something like AVX and it can't be shared between all of the cores at the same time.
The SATA controller has been a bit flaky, but you can pick up 4-port SATA cards for about $10 each.
When my Raspberry Pi fails I need to start looking at configurations and hacks to get the firmware/software stack to work.
When my $100 random PC fails I look at the logs to find out what hardware component failed and replace it.
Amazing that you can build a career out of making useless things with RPi. I don't mean it as a negative thing about the author, but rather this kind of content.
It's a rare case when jack (RPi) of all trades is not at all better than master of one or even other jacks of all trades. Running anything but official distro is pain. Managing official distro is pain. Even you it wasn't it doesn't have enough raw power or I/O to do anything really useful.
It's an amazing "temporary" solution because it's so awful that you will actually replace it with a proper one.
QNAP TS-435XeU is a $600 1U short-depth (11") case with quad hotswap SATA, dual NVME, dual 10GbE copper, dual 2.5GbE, 4-32GB DDR4 SODIMM Arm NAS that would benefit from OSS community attention. Includes hardware support for ZFS encryption.
Based on a Marvell/Armada CN9130 SoC which supports ECC, it has mainline Linux support, and public-but-non-upstream code for uboot. With local serial console and a bit of effort, the QNAP OS can be replaced by Arm Debian/Devuan with ZFS.
Rare combo of low power, small size, fast network, ECC memory and upstream-friendly Linux. QNAP also sell a 10GbE router based on the same SoC, which is a successor to the Armada 388 in Helios4 NAS (RIP), https://kobol.io/helios4/
No UEFI support, so TrueNAS for Arm won't work out of the box.
26 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadI really wish I just used something else or raw Ubuntu server.
The Time Machine backup feature corrupts itself.
You can’t have home assistant and Time Machine backups on at the same time. It just feels like a janky UI that has no polish too.
I liked FreeNAS for awhile, but after a certain point I kind of just learned how to properly use Samba and NFS and ZFS, and after that I kind of felt like it was just getting in the way.
Nowadays, my "NAS" is one of those little "mini gaming PCs" you an buy on Amazon for around ~$400, and I have three 8-bay USB hard drive enclosures, each filled with 16TB drives all with ZFS. I lose six drives to the RAID, so total storage is about ~288TB, but even though it's USB it's actually pretty fast; fast enough for what I need to for anyway, which is to watch videos off Jellyfin or host a Minecraft server.
I am not 100% sure who TrueNAS is really for, at least in the "install it yourself" sense; if you know enough about how to install something like TrueNAS, you probably don't really need it...
[0] https://github.com/9001/copyparty/
Probably not a great idea given how ZFS is architected for memory utilization and ECC. :-)
I have two "normal" NAS devices, but I would like to find a compact N100 board with multiple SATA ports, (like some of the stackable HATs for the Pi, some of which will take 4 disks directly on the PCB) to put some older discarded drives to good use.
My go-to solution software-wise is actually to install Proxmox, set up ZFS on it and then drop in a lightweight LXC that exposes the local filesystem via SMB, because I like to tweak the "recycle bin" option and some Mac-specific flags--I've been using that setup for a while, also off Proxmox: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2024/11/09/1940#setting-up-...
The only reason I can see is "I have one that I don't use". Because otherwise...
Idle power isn't all that much better than a low power Intel N100 or something similar. And it's all downhill from there. Network transfer speeds and disk transfers will all be kneecapped by the (lack of) available PCIe lanes. Available RAM or CPU speeds are even worse...
On the other hand, they still have the destructive backspace behaviour, and inefficient recursive implementation, that breaks the boot loader spinners that the NetBSD and other boot loaders display. It's a tiny thing, but if one is used to the boot sequence the absence of a spinner makes the experience ever so slightly jarring.
* https://github.com/NumberOneGit/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePk...
* https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePkg/U...
* https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114658278210981731
* https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114659884938990579
It was a fun project and looked cool but never really worked that well. It was quite unstable and drives seemed to disconnect and reconnect a lot. There are probably better quality connectors out there but I think for a NAS you really want proper SATA connections.
I eventually built my own box and went with OMV again. I like it because it's just userland software you install on Debian. Some of the commenters here who think TrueNAS is overkill might want to check out OMV if they haven't already.
To be honest I still only have a few TB of storage on it, probably not really enough to be worth all the hassle of building and configuring a PC, but it was more about the journey which was fun.
The SATA controller isn't terrible, but it and other hardware areas have had many strange behaviors over the years to the point of compiling the kernel being needed to fiddle with some settings to get a hardware device to do what it's supposed to.
Even if you're using power that is well supported eventually you seem to hit internal limits and get problems. That's when you see people underclocking the chip to move some of this phantom power budget to other chips. Likewise you have to power most everything from a separate source which pushes me even closer to a "regular PC" anyhow.
I just grab an old PC from Facebook for under $100. The current one is a leftover from the DDR3 + Nvidia 1060 gaming era. It's a quad core with HT so I get 8 threads. Granted most of those threads cause the system to go into 90% usage even when running jobs with only 2 threads, probably because the real hardware being used there is something like AVX and it can't be shared between all of the cores at the same time.
The SATA controller has been a bit flaky, but you can pick up 4-port SATA cards for about $10 each.
When my Raspberry Pi fails I need to start looking at configurations and hacks to get the firmware/software stack to work.
When my $100 random PC fails I look at the logs to find out what hardware component failed and replace it.
GTFO, as you re-key your installations this fall with Microsoft's permission. =3
It's a rare case when jack (RPi) of all trades is not at all better than master of one or even other jacks of all trades. Running anything but official distro is pain. Managing official distro is pain. Even you it wasn't it doesn't have enough raw power or I/O to do anything really useful.
It's an amazing "temporary" solution because it's so awful that you will actually replace it with a proper one.
Based on a Marvell/Armada CN9130 SoC which supports ECC, it has mainline Linux support, and public-but-non-upstream code for uboot. With local serial console and a bit of effort, the QNAP OS can be replaced by Arm Debian/Devuan with ZFS.
Rare combo of low power, small size, fast network, ECC memory and upstream-friendly Linux. QNAP also sell a 10GbE router based on the same SoC, which is a successor to the Armada 388 in Helios4 NAS (RIP), https://kobol.io/helios4/
No UEFI support, so TrueNAS for Arm won't work out of the box.