Hello Everyone, I am new to the Level One forum. A bit of background, I have been building and maintaining computers for about 15years, but my experience with Linux is extremely limited and goes back more then 10 years when I played around for awhile dual booting my home pc.
I am looking at building a home server to start playing around more. The immediate usage will be media/file sharing+PLEX and network storage, but I also plan on hosting some VMs and experimenting quite abit. My current build list is below and I would like some suggestions/feedback along with some feedback on UnRaid vs TrueNas.
Build List:
Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3900X (owned)
Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING B550-PLUS
RAM: G.SKILL Trident Z Neo 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR4 3600
PSU: EVGA 800 W (owned)
OS SSD: 250 gb (owned)
Cache SSD: Samsung 990 PRO 500 gb or 1tb (not sure on this one)
HDDs: Seagate IronWolf 8 tb x3
GPU: QUADRO RTX 4000 or RTX 2070 (really need help on this one, i would be getting basically either for the same price give or take $50. The Quadro is from a workplace CAD station)
Any feedback would really be appreciated. All the parts labeled (owned are either coming out of my system for an upgrade or are laying around collecting dust. That along with my growing movie library really prompted this, aside from that it is an excuse to build a server to play with at home and learn some more.
For most things, UnRAID or TrueNAS don’t require any knowledge of the OS. For troubleshooting and the more special cases, the terminal is always helpful, but both are designed as storage appliances with point&click. unRAID is more casual and TrueNAS more enterprisey…get get both ISOs and check out what WebUI is most comfortable to you. L1T community is more leading towards TrueNAS or Proxmox obviously…because Linux is strong here.
Whatever floats your boat. I couldn’t work with unRAID personally.
Hardware is solid judging from the list. 64GB allows for some room to run stuff. Looks like a good server to me. You didn’t mention networking…having good bandwidth from your server is a nice thing.
Yeah you don’t learn things this way. Cut yourself off from a fallback option for 3 weeks and suddenly you’re feeling at home. Worked for me. #nevergetback
My added 2cents.
Try both (and more if knowledge and experience is as important as the end goal).
IMO unRaid is the more user friendly gui while truenas has better array transfer speeds.
UnRaid has a larger community of applications due to its support of docker contaiers where truenas uses jails (last time i checked the app selection was not as wide as docker).
Truenas uses Bhyve virtualization based on freeBSD and unRaid use KVM virtualization based on Linux.
Neither is better or worse than the other but each has cases one is more apt at performing well in such as truenas acting as an iscsi storage for a business would be the logical choice due to its underlying design and purpose.
One small note about your hardware and unRaid. It resides/boots on a usb drive, runs in ram so you must have one when you give it a drive.
You have to differentiate between Core and Scale. Core is the TrueNAS we all know and love. THE storage appliance. Scale is the new product with Linux, bugs, GlusterFS, k3s and Docker.
I never understand that argument. If it’s missing half the stuff, going into the terminal to fill in the rest isn’t what I call user friendly. Yeah the GUI is great if you just want half the stuff (but has to be the correct half).
If you want to actually learn (play around more) start by installing a “server” OS and go from there. Be it some kind of Linux distro (I don’t know what’s because suitable there, Alpine or Arch maybe) or FreeBSD. As for video card AMD or Intel is probably a better choice however that also boils down to what your requirements are, if you need/want hardware accelerated encoding you need to be careful about what hardware you select and driver support.
Depending on your comfort level I would say look into Proxmox…generally speaking once it is setup there isn’t a ton of command line stuff that’s required - though there is some you may want to do - but its damn intuitive in my opinion if you’re somewhat familiar with VMs anyway. I went from VirtualBox to Hyper-V (bleh! hated it!) and then once I went to Proxmox I never looked back. I have four home servers now and all of them run Proxmox. The advantage here is it allows you to test the waters with a whole tons of different OSes and see what you like, keep some installed, remove them if you hate them, etc.