What is the technical upside of using TrueNAS instead of samba? If you want to optimize for control, it seems a bit weird to me to settle for an "all in one" software stack.
Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
41–50 of 316 posts
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#42I also run a home NAS in a Node 304. I went with a supermicro mainboard for ECC support which means I had to swap the three fans that come with the case because the mainboard only supports PWM fans. Non-PWM fans would only spin at full speed otherwise. Regarding the SLOG device, you probably don't need it for a file server, but if you do you can definitely free a drive bay for an HDD by just using double sided tape s…
I occasionally look at the PCIe-to-SATA market and find it confusing. It appears polarized into either cards from a reputable brand and very expensive, even with few SATA ports, or cards from an unknown brand and relatively affordable. What's your experience with this and what can you recommend (2-port or 4-port)? Are the cheap cards safe & reliable or are they to be avoided?
I've been running older SAS cards for years and it's been doing just fine. They go for cheap on eBay. Each SAS port serve four SATA drives, using SAS-to-SATA cables.
Just make sure to get one that runs in IT mode or you have to mess with the firmware.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#43Thanks for including energy usage in the article. I carry USB-C SSDs around the house for backups and storage of archived files. Of course this is a bit of a hassle and I played with the idea of either buying or building a NAS. My current standby consumption for all computer stuff (access points, router, switches, a dozen or so microcontrollers and various SmartHome stuff, but not TVs, running computers or gaming con…
I agree and plan to buy a Kill A Watt P4460 meter. My HPE Gen 9 servers were free, but I still would like to know the operating cost of a single server.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#44> I see people talking about snapshotting, but I haven’t found a need for it. I already have snapshots in my restic backup solution. They’re not especially convenient, but I’ve been using restic for two years, and I only recall needing to recover data from a snapshot once. The ease at which you can revert mistakes using ZFS snapshots is much better compared to restic. You can pretty much navigate to the correct snaps…
If you setup SMB right (TrueNAS configures this out of the box, SCALE is great if you need a Linux NAS), you can use Windows Shadow Copies to access ZFS snapshots and browse or restore file contents from them.
Also possible with BTRFS. I set this up once for a small business with hourly snapshots during working hours. This way users could just restore older versions of files they accidentally deleted, overwrote or messed up in some other way.
Another benefit: Those snapshots were read-only, so they also served as a protection against ransomware.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#45What is the technical upside of using TrueNAS instead of samba? If you want to optimize for control, it seems a bit weird to me to settle for an "all in one" software stack.
Samba config files are painful, it's pretty old school. On top of that you need to setup users/groups etc...
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#46What is the technical upside of using TrueNAS instead of samba? If you want to optimize for control, it seems a bit weird to me to settle for an "all in one" software stack.
Not really sure the comparison is valid. TrueNAS uses Samba to provide SMB network shares.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you setup SMB right (TrueNAS configures this out of the box, SCALE is great if you need a Linux NAS), you can use Windows Shadow Copies to access ZFS snapshots and browse or restore file contents from them.
Also possible with BTRFS. I set this up once for a small business with hourly snapshots during working hours. This way users could just restore older versions of files they accidentally deleted, overwrote or messed up in some other way. Another benefit: Those snapshots were read-only, so they also served as a protection against ransomware.
I don't think BTRFS supports NFSv4 ACLs yet (ie, Windows ACLs are natively supported on ZFS, there is patchset so Linux also supports it but BTRFS obviously has no integration for a patchset that only exists for ZFS).
Having NFSv4 ACL access is a huge plus since you can configure permissions natively from windows and have them enforced even on the shell.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#48Why is there a need to proselytize about ZFS in every thread on this topic?
Because people don't know about cephfs yet, and the silliness of degraded raid setups. i.e. trusting a zfs community edition in a production environment can be a painful lesson. ;-)
I know about CephFS, but performance was abysmal compared to ZFS for a home server. On a single box with 4-8 drives I didn't come close to saturating a 10G link, which ZFS managed just fine.
It was also very complex to manage compare to ZFS, with many different layers to consider.
I'm sure it shines in a data center, for which it has been designed. But unless something radical has changed in the last year, it's not for a budget homelab NAS.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#49Author here.
I consider myself an intermediate homelabber and a TrueNAS beginner. I just built my first NAS server, so wrote this to capture everything I wish I'd known at the start. I hope it's helpful for anyone else thinking about building their first NAS server.
Any questions or feedback about the post are more than welcome.
Re: Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server
#50> And if you’re dumb like me, and you’ve used a Synology-proprietary storage format, you can’t access your data without another Synology system
I wonder what he means by this. If he's referring to SHR, then it's just standard mdraid and Synology themselves have instructions on how to mount the volume in Ubuntu https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover...
edit: He later mentions encrypted volumes but those are also just using standard encryptfs https://www.impedancemismatch.io/posts/decrypt-synology-back...
This is one of the reasons I feel comfortable recommending Synology devices - there's not a lot of lock-in