Thinking of going to UnRaid from TrueNAS Core

Software & Operating Systems
, ,
1

I have been running FreeNAS for almost 3 years now and I kept hearing that they were working on GPU pass though for Jails like Plex, and the ability to expand storage with out having to add a whole bunch of disks at the same time. I share my Plex with a bunch of my friends and with everyone stuck home I’ve seen up to 10 people hitting it. I was hoping that the update to TrueNAS Core they would give you the ability to at least the same size drives to a pool and expand it without having to add a group of them and GPU pass through to Jails.

Currently i have (12) 2 tb ssd’s Main Pool and 8 4tb hdds Backup Pool and a couple VM’s on a Threadripper 2920X with 128 gig ram. And I need to add more storage for my media. Is UnRaid worth the price for “Unlimited” actually only 30 drives from what I’ve seen or should i keep waiting for TrueNAS to actually implement the adding of disks and real GPU pass though.

2

I personally have my TrueNAS Core virtualized on Proxmox with the HBA passed through to the VM. My Plex server, which is technically on a different node, is its own VM with a GPU passed through to it. The setup gives me a lot of flexability and doesn’t have me stuck with a shitty hypervisor management interface, which is the case of both TrueNAS Core and Unraid.

3

How is Proxmox to learn. It looks like there is 3 different ones so which one would I be looking at for it. Is there a license fee or something of that sort. and a little more explaining on how your set up is designed would be awesome. Can you record live tv from plex to your media pools?

4

Proxmox Virtual Environment. It’s completely free to use with optional paid support.

First time I set it up about 2 years ago it was a bit confusing since there are a lot optional things. Like I said before, the HBA is passed through to my TrueNAS VM. I have NFS shares set up which I use to store ISOs, vDisks, and Containers in Proxmox. Also a media share that my Plex server uses. Proxmox itself uses ZFS so you could technically could just use your pools directly as part of Proxmox I think. There might be issues with additional ZFS feature flags enabled in the TrueNAS build of ZFS versus the Linux version.

Relevant documentation to the PCI passthrough part: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#qm_pci_passthrough

5

Thanks I’ll have to look into it. Almost my whole house is windows computers so I need SMB shares for windows.

6

You can use SMB as well, I just like using NFS for the Linux specific stuff since it’s usually faster out of the box.

7

Came across a TrueNas Scale which is being built on Debian and from the sounds of it PCIE graphics cards to plex and what not will finally be able to be done. So I think I might hold out a bit longer before i make the switch to a paid nas os