I’m in the process of migrating my system to some new hardware. I was curious on everyone’s thoughts about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS Scale.

Here is some background - I’m currently running a mini-computer, with Debian, attached to an external hard drive. I host Plex, -arr suite, PhotoPrism/Photo backup space, Syncthing and some other apps. It runs fine, but could probably use some more memory. I also haven’t had a lot of luck backing up all my family’s data (on and off different cloud services) in one place in a way that avoids duplicates. My 4TB HDD is at about 80% full now. I have an offsite synology that I back up to using Syncthing. Syncthing has been having some problems lately, so I’m looking at some other options for that too.

I’ve been wanting to move my storage to an internal HDD, so I bought a larger used computer and a hard drive so that I can clean my setup a bit. It has an i3 8100, 500GB M2, 256 SSD, 8TB HDD and 24GB ram. To experiment, I’ve been running Proxmox and set up a few VMs including TrueNAS.

Proxmox has been pretty amazing. I thought I would have a TrueNAS VM, my Debian-based Plex/-arr VM, and then another Debian vm where I could just test different software that I wanted to host. I haven’t really experimented with the LXMs yet.

I started testing out TrueNAS and saw that it also offers virtualization. If so, I probably wouldn’t need Proxmox for my purposes.

With all that, here are some questions -

  1. What do you think about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS? Any reason to prefer one over the other?
  2. What do you think about having a Debian VM to host my Plex and -arr suite? What are the pros and cons of that method vs. hosting the apps on my TrueNAS or Proxmox as containers? I think mainly it would just be portability and isolation.
  3. Currently, my external HDD is formatted so you could also plug it into Windows and read the contents. If something happens to me, I would like my family to be able to easily access the data. I need to figure out a good way to ensure it is easily accessible to them.

Thanks in advance!

Edit for posterity: after this post, I tried TrueNas, but was annoyed because the HDD was constantly being accessed. I tried unRAID after that, but had a similar problem with HDD access noise. I tried several cache drive configurations , but I couldn’t escape the constant 5-second access pattern. I finally went back to Proxmox and will cobbler together my own NAS setup. We’ll see how it goes.

  • @machininOPEnglish
    2•9 months ago

    So is your TrueNas in a Proxmox VM? Did you try VMs in TrueNas?

    I guess I’m trying to see the benefits of VMs in Proxmox versus VMs in TrueNas Scale. My use case is not very complicated, so I’m wondering if I can simplify the setup by just using TrueNas.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•9 months ago

      Proxmox has a built in backups system, and also handles LXC containers.

      Also proxmox can run ZFS just like TrueNAS, so there is little reason to use TrueNAS instead of Proxmox unless you’re just wanting a pure NAS with nothing else.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•9 months ago

      TrueNAS isn’t supported as a VM. This doesn’t prevent people from doing it anyway, but it might be relevant for you.

      I’ve seen performance comparisons on the web and there is a slight advantage to Proxmox, but nearly insignificant. It really boils down to what you’re more comfortable maintaining.

      Note that your can run docker containers for the services you run in your Debian server. Docker will run faster than any VM.

    • Mike WooskeyEnglish
      2•9 months ago

      I currently only use proxmox for VMs. Proxmox hosts a TrueNAS VM, TrueNAS controls all but the main (small) drive on the box, proxmox then has access to the other drives through TrueNAS. Kind of neat.

      But I think it would indeed be simpler to only have TrueNAS and use it for both nas and VMs. I have no experience with TrueNAS’ VMs.

      • @machininOPEnglish
        1•9 months ago

        Thanks for the feedback. More to think about…