Unraid appears easy to setup but boots off usb drive and cost money. Truenas appears harder to setup but runs off hard drive. I want to try truenas but I don’t want to fight it to set it up. I want to use it to back up photos and videos. I currently have hard drives on order. What is the opinion here? Any advice would be useful.
You’ll have to learn stuff whichever way you go, if funds are available,perhaps get a Synology for a turnkey solution. You can still use the drives you’ve bought.
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TrueNas is easy to install and setup complexity depends only on your needs. I had to fight to find a way to properly setup SMB shares on my network to avoid family members mixing up their files. Other than that has been easy and really guided.
If I were you I’d try TrueNas and if it’s not for you, just get Unraid.
Also keep in mind that Unraid is an hypervisor first. TrueNas is a NAS operating system first.
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Unraid fan and long-time user here.
Previously I was using FreeNAS (precursor to TrueNAS?) but none of them played the long game (3 rebuilds on different hardware over about 4 years). Configuration was a nightmare (FreeNAS), as was file recovery/transfer.
I recently updated my Unraid server OS with 800+ days uninterrupted uptime and was understandably nervous, but the upgrade went through without incident.
I only have 8TB (3x4TB HD’s) with another 2TB hot-spare, and 2 SSD’s as cache pool. That’s the 6-device limit for a $59 per year license, and I’d willingly pay the next tier ($89 for up to 12 attached storage devices) if I had a machine with more SATA ports. As far as storage licensing goes, that’s cheap-as. Remember, the license pays the developers to support and improve the product. If you don’t want to pay anything (freeware) don’t expect it to be around in 2-3 years.
Yes, Unraid boots from USB-FD (not counted as a storage device) but the OS is just loaded into and runs from a RAM-disk - the USB-FD then sits idle (no write-backs wearing it out). My hardware has an internal USB port so the boot drive is out of sight and not vulnerable to breakage.
Having the OS boot from one of your storage drives is sub-optimal. For starters it uses one of your precious SATA slots, narrows the choice of drive formatting, the HD presumably can’t (shouldn’t) be part of the RAID array and so adds to risk of failure if that drive dies. Plus, it’s only 100MB or less, which is a waste of even a 128GB SSD if it can’t be used for storage.
Finally, the whole Linux/open-source environment is full of useful stuff, and Unraid slots you straight into that with pre-built Containers and VM’s available for free along with other useful apps such as auto file backup and versioning to external (secondary) drives.
Yes, I’m an Unraid convert personally (and with no affiliation). It gets my vote.
Unraid user for the last 4-5 years, I was coming from Ubuntu server with software RAID (made with md).
What made me switch?
the maintenance part. my disks were full, with md, I used to easily just add a disk. now, I used up all my SATA, so my only choice was to change all disks to bigger ones. Not having the funds at that time, I went the Unraid way for the ability to use different sizes disks. I can not be happier as this point works flawlessly.
VM and Docker also works very well and simplified quite a bit my infrastructure.
I am actually now looking into Unraid for my office too.