TrueNAS MiniX+ or...?

Hello everyone. Just today my Mom asked me to get her something to store literal decades worth of photos, including decades worth of film converted to digital, that will keep them safe and make them accessible on her computer or maybe even a picture frame thing that cycles through the photos randomly.

So clearly, that means a NAS device and ZFS. We are looking at tens of terabytes of data that is currently on two external HDDs connected to an iMac. Do I buy a TrueNAS Mini X+ and 5 20TB HDDs in a RAIDZ2, or do I build something, and run TrueNAS on that, or some other form of Linux with ZFS such as Ubuntu?

What would you do? I am familiar with TrueNAS as I run it on my HL15 here at home.

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ā€œGet Herā€

Do you want your second job to be maintain that for your mom. If not you really should consider the synology ecosystem

Ive learned normies dont like anything that isnt push button do and while us tech nerds think we are doing a good thing but teachingā€¦ the better thing we can do is not change their UX/UI or experience and manage things silently on our end in an automated manner if we can. Asking people to change what they are used to is like performing brain surgery with a sledge hammer

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I recommended a Synology NAS to one of my instructors earlier this year after he overwrote the answer guide for one of his exams. Dude is plenty smart enough to figure out Truenas, but anything bigger than a 2-4 bay Synology would just take time away from his actual job of teaching.

So I guess Iā€™ll m also in the ā€œorā€¦?ā€ group.

:yay:

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I will also be in the ā€œorā€¦?ā€ group and suggest a Synology NAS for the sole reason of keeping it as simple and as stupid as possible for the end user.

When suggesting anything to an end-user, always take into account the bus-factor of what youā€™re looking to implement. If you get hit by a bus and youā€™re mother has to solo manage it (assuming she isnā€™t super tech-literate), she will now have just lost you and years of memories.

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How would running a Synology be any better than running a TrueNAS device?

I also have intelligent siblings, one who also runs a TrueNAS device that I share space on for offsite backups.

And yes, I donā€™t mind helping her with it, why would I she is my mother?

image

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We get that we are all just saying we had identical thought patterns and it just didnt work out :joy:. We all learned that hard lesson and some of us have smart siblings too haha

But you ask a fair question

Lets answer it simply first with a TLDR. There is no best, there is no betterā€¦ Only trade offs and things you need to think about.

From am ease of use perspective synology has the VERY intuitive interface called the DiskStation Manager (DSM) and it is praised beyond most other products for its ease of use, making it accessible to even the most tech illiterate of people hands down no competition at all. It also has integrated apps like most dedicated NAS stuff does. It offers a rather a wide range of first-party applications too and they seemlessly integrate into DSM.

Examining truenas from the same perspective requires accepting to hard truths open source folks dont like to accept. It is FAR more complexā€¦ It has a much steeper learning curve with a more technical interface, suited for users who prefer fine tuned control. Thats great. No shame in that for users like you and Iā€¦ And ONLY users like you and I. Idk how to explain this to tech nerds enough. Simple to you is NOT simple to the average person and never will be haha. But ill get off my soap box in that

As for hardware and upgradability which pretty much should be your next big concernā€¦

Synology is an appliance. Which means its designed to be a turnkey solutionā€¦ Pre-configured hardware with optimized performance for DSM, though with limited upgrade options compared to custom builds should you make a custom system yourself. However its raid filesystem is second only to ZFS. In fact id say they are pretty neck and neck but built for different purposes. Thing is with a synology. You can mix disks of different size and not care as much. You can replace with a dissimilar disk too (only larger not smaller). Hit by a bus factor here means the end user can buy bigger hard drives and push button do ā€¦

TrueNAS on the other hand sacrifices that convenience but gives you a ton of flexibility and customization. You can choose any compatible hardware, offering flexibility but again the more you veer from the defaults the ever more difficult it gets for you to maintain it and also your momā€¦ Should you get hit by a bus

So now we are left with support. Synology destroys truenas in this aspect. You get extensive support, regular updates, and a broad ecosystem of first-party tools and solid documentation (true nas has this to a degree)ā€¦ And decent technical support on their end when you reach out to them

TrueNAS relies largely on community support, with commercial options available through iXsystems but they are expensive as all get out and when you rely on the community support you gotta get used to the kind of crud you see in opinionated forum posts as often your best pool of answers and thats sometimes painful to put up with.

So really Synology would be better if you want to prioritize ease of use, integration, and support and want a plug-and-play NAS experience with less technical involvement. Which is ideal for your particular use case

However should you decide you want to make it more than what you are telling us ā€¦TrueNAS might be preferable but only if you need verbose and detailed control over your NAS, are comfortable with DIY setups, and want to leverage ZFS features and the headache that can come with them and the steep learnning curve associated with all of its nuances and best practices.

Thatā€™s really all I can give you manā€¦up to you the decide how involved you want a hobby project to be

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I would say simply it depends, if she just wants it to be access able using a SMB share then TrueNAS would be just as good as other solution. If she wants to have it accessable using phones and whatnot it becomes more complicated and unless she knows how to update the firmware of a Synology/Asustor/* device itā€™s bound to be hacked at sometime with remote access enabled. I would however highly recommend using ZFS as it will simply keep data safe as far as software goes or possibly BTRFS in mirror mode. The ā€œFlexā€ RAID stuff DSM supports will likely become a pita to recover from if it decides to die compared to ā€œstockā€ ZFS or BTRFS arrays.

As much as hardware goes it likely donā€™t matter at all, youā€™re likely going to be involved in hardware failures and spending another 10 minutes extra removing a cover is probably not worth 200+$ for a hotswap that you honestly will very rarely utilize and is another point of failure.

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They can be configured to auto-update, and the remote access is a fairly standard hole punch system that talks to a Synology-hosted server so the client can find the NAS. As opposed to ā€˜open this port on your firewallā€™ exposure to the internet, it has to reach outwards.

Whitepaper on QuickConnect (their remote access thing):

Itā€™s just md and lvm, and choice of ext4 or btrfs inside that. Any linux box should be able to recover it:


To the OP: If I was setting anything up for a non-techie, itā€™d be Synology, not TrueNAS. PLL is right: Synoā€™s price is because the software is turnkey, push-button, braindead easy to do. Color inside their lines, buy their drives so thereā€™s no ā€˜scaryā€™ warnings in the UI about hardware that isnā€™t on their list. Set up scrub schedule and smart testing, then set up email notifications so it can yell at you when those are misbehaving. Run it til the hardware dies (IME: even with the intel Atom c2000-series bug, the first one took 10 years to do so).

Itā€™s for us techies where TrueNAS might make sense. When you want to cosplay as a sysadmin at home, or color outside of the lines of what you can do on a Synology. And even then, speaking from personal experience, itā€™s a lot of extra fuss and not feature complete. Even before we get into the constantly shifting environment as Scale matures (k3s and gluster, wait no gluster, wait no k3sā€¦), and its quirkiness.

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Blindly trusting auto-update is bound to fail badly so while it may sound like a good idea it rarely is in the end.

IME, Synologyā€™s updates arenā€™t ā€˜push it and see what breaksā€™, they will block the auto-updates if thereā€™s a functionality change (recent example: the media codec rework) and force admin interaction to approve those. So on one hand, I get your point, but again if weā€™re talking about ā€˜hands off appliance for non-techieā€™ and the choices being ā€˜never update (and likely guarantee getting owned ā€“ see D-Link in the news lately)ā€™ or ā€˜auto-update and hope they do QAā€™, itā€™s a risk either way. Choose oneā€™s comfort level :person_shrugging:

I would leave remote access disabled and not tell them itā€™s an option unless directly asked about it, but maybe thatā€™s just me.

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Yeah, but that depends on the requirements :wink:

So I want to say this is a shining example of how I believe questions should be answered on this forum.

While the OP had a preferenceā€¦ Providing options. Not forcing one way or the other. Not gunning to defend what you ā€œlikeā€ and giving people the information of all the options they have and let them decide for themselves is what I would like to see replicated in most help threads :+1: i think its part of what makes the community great. Just i have a lot of bad examples on hand too

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Ha, this made me laugh. No, not at all the first time. Itā€™s been years, probably even decades that I have been helping my parents with tech stuff. My Dad was pretty good at unplugging and replugging their router until I set it to auto reboot once a week. That solved all the problems with that thing. I like to set things up to be set-and-forget devices in that they work and do their function without any need for intervention.

Yes, just an SMB share, nothing fancy or technical requiring uch of anything. The goal here is access but mostly also preservation for the long term. Some of the actual photos are a hundred years old? maybe? Not the digital versions of course, but theyā€™re not something we want to lose as the originals age out of existence.

I gravitate towards ZFS and TrueNAS because itā€™s what I know and I donā€™t think there is another file system available to us in a home environment thatā€™s as robust as ZFS for data preservation. Actually, there may be some out there in the enterprise environment that are the same or more robust but I donā€™t want to learn them just for this. I actually do pay for support from iXSystems already, they helped my Brother and I get up and running and sharing space on each others TrueNAS devices and I am sure they could assist with adding another TrueNAS device to the mix.

I think the Synology device would actually be more of a headache and worry for me as it isnā€™t ZFS and I would need to learn a new system. She will not be managing it herself, she will call me.

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Well zfs is more than just a filesystem . i rarely compare it against other FS because its like luks, dm integrity, dedup, raid and a filesystem all in one. Its difficult to fairly compare it except to maybe btrfs? So yeah if ZFS is the absolute need go truenas. Whatever you buildā€¦ Log the steps. Automate it within reason (as in robust) ā€¦ And keep the documentation around. Breakage will happen and youll thank yourself for keeping a journal

Also ZFS is not a backup. Do not trust it as such. You still need to have a 3 2 1 system

Thats a topic for another thread and hey if you need help @LinuxNoob1 theres the linux sysadmin thread. Good spot to stop for questions

I hear you. Itā€™s best to go with whatever is the most painless if things go sideways. HexOS may be worth investigating as an option here if you want to stick with TrueNAS and ZFS.

This all makes me think that TrueNas should look at an ā€œapplianceā€ or ā€œkioskā€ mode for the interface. Enable that and it becomes an true appliance with ease-of-use for parents etc. Remote into it and be able to get to the True interface with all the switches and tweaks ā€¦

Well, unless you need to WebUI I would highly recommend FreeBSD but I guess that falls under ā€œnew system to learnā€ but itā€™s low maintenance and just works.