Hi everyone,
I’m currently in the process of building my first proper home lab on a Star Tech 18U open rack. I will be building an AMD EPYC-based server for media hosting (Plex & Jellyfin alongside Sonarr, Radarr, and Sabnzbd) and self-hosting (Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, etc.). Hardware transcoding is essential for me, as I expect to have multiple 4K streams running.
Additionally, I value security. From my research, a few things about Unraid bother me: the reliance on a USB drive rather than an installation on the hard drive and the apparent lack of security, as everything runs as root.
I do like TrueNAS Scale and have previous experience with OpenMediaVault. However, the steep learning curve and the inability to add drives later on hold me back. At the moment, the server will start with a WD Ultrastar HC560 20TB, but I expect to add more of the same drives as the server grows. This seems difficult with TrueNAS?
Within the rack, I’ll have a Minisforum MS01 running OPNsense bare metal and a Ubiquiti Pro Max 24 non-PoE switch.
I’d like to get some thoughts on which OS to go with.
Thanks!
You’ll find a lot of TureNAS fans here in this little corner of the interwebs… (Myself included).
Single drive at a time expansion of pools is on the roadmap (Electric Eel) for maybe even the next major TrueNAS scale version, so that will theoretically be possible. We’ve collectively been waiting for so long who knows when that feature will truly arrive. As you start out, you could always go for mirror VDEVs and grow like that.
There seems to be a little bit of a resurgence in the discussion about Unraid lately. Perhaps they are pushing their marketing arm to try and generate more relevancy. Unfortunately for them, personally I don’t see the value in their paid product. It’s gotten far too expensive for the only tier that is worth it (Perpetual license with no restrictions). And there’s nothing in their solution that you couldn’t roll on your own. Whereas TrueNAS feels more polished.
You are likely to get a lot of TrueNAS recommendations around here. The real key to determining what to go with is to ask your question or at least do your research across various forums and sites on the net. Decide what’s valuable to you for your use case and perhaps most importantly, be happy with your decision.
the issue is really the fundamental difference in the way these things work. not to go on a tangent, think of it like this.
TrueNAS is about data integrity. you can add disks at any time, but they must be in groups (as small as 2 even) so always allow for data integrity. second to data integrity is security. you MUST understand security structure.
unraid is a ‘good enough’ model to encompass most things most people want. adding whatever drive is available whenever you happen across it. allowing anyone that connects to your network to do anything with very few additional steps. Data, security, ease of use, reliability, all follow the ‘good enough’ strategy.
when you know what you are, picking a path will happen. choosing incorrectly lays a path of frustration before you.
2 Likes
I think you should re-think this: if you want to put together an hypervisor machine that runs all your services first you shouldn’t use TrueNAS. It’s a NAS OS first, so it’s very unflexible when it comes to running services on it. It has been an after thought for a while now, but they’re bringing Docker to it with 24.10 (IIRC) and now it supports jails (think of it as an hybrid between a container and a VM).
So if you’re fine with the roadblocks and limitations you might find as you start hosting services sure, go ahead and pick TrueNAS. It’s getting the much needed love and attention it deserves now and for the forseable future.
If you’re not my suggestion would be to build a NAS machine and an application host machine, using an hypervisor or another OS.
Unless you’re handling thousands of concurrent users a machine like that is totally wasted running OPNsense on bare metal, in my opinion. That could easly be a VM in Proxmox. And you could use the remaining CPU power to run all your services with ease and with the transcoding power of it’s iGPU.
I’d go along with MetalizeYourBrain Try Proxmox, you can set up a mirror of ssd’s or nvme’s for proxmox, throw in a HBA and connect some spinning rust drives to it and pass it through to truenas for your network storage, you can then create shared on the storage and use that for any vm’s or docker containers you create such as plex ( it’s really easy to pass through a video card to a comtainer for hardware transcoding in proxmox ). There is a little bit of a learning curve with Proxmox but there is for any of the other possible solution you could try. Don’t forget backups though.