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 -
- What do you think about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS? Any reason to prefer one over the other?
- 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.
- 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.
I use Truenas scale.
For virtualisation, most people use a community run set of apps called Truecharts. I will say that documentation/support for this is rubbish. They have a discord server only really there. Very hostile community in general.
Not sure why kubernetes is used. Docker is being phased out and will stop being supported in the future.
Also, the latest version of scale broke onedrive backups, which were handled by the gui, and now you’re on the own to run rclone via the cli. Definitely, the devs are not working on a fix as stated in forum posts. This is a pretty fundamental requirement of an at-home NAS for anyone using onedrive for photo backup say.
Ix system forum devs are rude. I haven’t posted there but searching through other people’s threads for solutions to my problems show dismissive unhelpful answers by the devs/users.
All this is to say Truenas virtualisation is compromised, poorly documented, and run by a hostile community of devs both in true charts and the ix systems forums.
I regret not trying a different nas os, but I’m a bit invested now.
The comments on the community and OneDrive implemention are helpful. I do remember seeing one post from someone asking about running only one hdd in TruNAS. You’re right, the comments were very rude. I guess it’s a bigger problem than I realized.
I don’t have any experience with Kubernetes, I’ll check on that.
If you had to start over, what NAS software would you look at?
I think the IX Systems would rather Truenas scale be an enterprise OS, and have short patience for people learning the ropes.
Kubernetes to me is a lot more complicated than Docker, but I’m sure in an enterprise environment where you have many systems to administrate it is superior. Docker would be a better, simpler solution for a person at home with one computer being used for their personal virtualisation.
I think going back in time I would go for Unraid, and use Docker containers. Apparently it is better documented, more beginner-friendly. It is a one-off payment, but it is reasonably cheap. Community seems much friendlier too.
Bear in mind I haven’t used unraid, so potentially there is a grass is always greener situation going on here.
That said, I have thought about running a VM in TrueNAS so I don’t need to muck around with kubernetes and using a discord chat for troubleshooting.
All the best!
FYI, unRAID is moving to a subscription, so if you want to try it out, it might be good now before they change.
Also, I thought I read that docker/portainer was possible on TrueNas. You might check it out if Kubernetes is giving you trouble. I might be wrong, but I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work on the base Debian install.
Oh damn, that’s disappointing about the subscription.
Yep Docker is currently possible, but there’s plenty of threads discussing that it is being phased out.
But yeah, I suppose the solution could be a VM running Debian and then Docker within that.