My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
For me, s/FreeBSD/Debian/. Same reason.
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
261–270 of 315 posts
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#262Nice design! I recently switched my TrueNAS setup from a bunch of HDDs to a 8 NVMes (with an HHD volume now as only long-term "offline" archiving.) No more trying to optimize the system to get 10G speeds, it just is crazy fast, no matter what type of tasks I do. I haven't yet switched from my massive case yet though - I am not sure there is DYI cases that can handle 8 NVMes yet, but it is the future.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#263Could have saved hundreds if you bought a cheaper PSU and used CPU/mobo on ebay. Used DDR4 ram is also cheaper.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $10 / TB That's a remarkably good price. If I had $1.5k handy I'd be sorely tempted (even tho it's Seagate).
It's a good price but the Barracuda line isn't intended for NAS use so it's unclear how reliable they are. But it's still tempting to roll the dice given how expensive drive prices are right now.
Don't take manufacturers' recommendations so literally. I've been running 6 WD Greens in raidz for 81000 hours with no issues. Home media library etc. At the end of the day, any CMR disk is basically the same as any other, excluding manufacturing defects.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#265My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
I really didn't want to setup and admin my own Unix system when I was building my NAS, and TrueNAS made the software side trivial. It's basically plug-and-play and almost entirely configurable from the web interface. Why complicate your life needlessly?
But you are setting up and configuring a unix system, just with a third party gui bolted on.
Why do you think using FreeBSD as a NAS complicates your life?
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really didn't want to setup and admin my own Unix system when I was building my NAS, and TrueNAS made the software side trivial. It's basically plug-and-play and almost entirely configurable from the web interface. Why complicate your life needlessly?
But you are setting up and configuring a unix system, just with a third party gui bolted on. Why do you think using FreeBSD as a NAS complicates your life?
But there is nothing fundamental to configure in TrueNAS. Everything crucial to the base experience works perfectly out of the box: just install, connect to Ethernet, and visit http://truenas.local in your browser. I only have to make decisions pertinent to the NAS layer such as ZFS management and access control.
With a FreeBSD or Linux machine, even step one requires considerable thought. Are there web UI packages that I can use? Which one do I pick? Where do I install it from? How do I ensure that it runs on boot? Do I have to mess with the network configuration to ensure that http://mynas.local is accessible? How do I configure SMB? What's the deal with security updates? And so on, dozens of times over.
It's great if you're already in the depths of sysadmindom and know what you're doing, but man, I just want to put my files on some LAN drives and call it a day.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you are setting up and configuring a unix system, just with a third party gui bolted on. Why do you think using FreeBSD as a NAS complicates your life?
But there is nothing fundamental to configure in TrueNAS. Everything crucial to the base experience works perfectly out of the box: just install, connect to Ethernet, and visit http://truenas.local in your browser. I only have to make decisions pertinent to the NAS layer such as ZFS management and access control. With a FreeBSD or Linux machine, even step one requires considerable thought. Are there web UI packages t…
I have used many of the appliance operating systems in existence, including TrueNAS over the years, hence why I’ve come to the conclusion I’ve come to. I used to evangelise them, particularly FreeNAS and pfsense. I used them for years and I was quite happy with them.
But eventually you run into a bug with their (bolted on) interface and you have to dig inside the guts anyway. Except now it’s 10 times more difficult than just using the base OS, Debian FreeBSD or whatever, because of the extensive changes made by the appliance OS vendor…
If you are looking to replicate the exact same thing(why would a NAS need a web ui), of course there is considerable work ahead of you.
I believe you are overstating how difficult it is to configure a FreeBSD box as a NAS. Configuring samba for example is a breeze.
The questions you are asking are good questions that are answered by the manual. Keeping FresBSD updated requires the use of two commands, both well documented in the handbook, freebsd-update and pkg.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#268Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" r…
I have the Terramaster F8 SSD Plus with 8x4TB NVME SSDs as the drives. It's definitely not the most cost effective way to build a NAS vs spinning disks, but I wanted small and quiet, which this is. It would probably fit in a wall enclosure, so depending on budget/how badly you wanted it to fit/drive space required this would probably work as a solution.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#269There are literally TONS of various NAS cases for 3.5 drives - with amd64 or arm64 CPUs - some Mini-ITX or STX based ... what is lacking on the market are NAS cases for multiple 2.5 drives ONLY.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#270My advice, skip the TrueNAS and go straight to FreeBSD. It's a simple operating system to maintain and it requires minimal setup to use as a NAS.
And keep an eye on sylve, and the other NAS turnkey ports being worked on.