Best NAS Software: TrueNAS vs OpenMediaVault vs Unraid

[@paulscarlett4346]

Build a OMV Nas about 4 years ago replacing a Microsoft Home Server V1. First real Linux box at home. Worked well with Windows 10 and 11. Have since moved to Linux Mint as daily driver --- no issues using OMV.

[@kooldad1]

I use unraid because you can mix and match any size hard drives. So if you have random spare drives, why not use them for storage. This is even more appealing since it offers parity to protect the data if one of the old drives fail. I have gradually replaced and upgrades my drives and not had to worry about matching drives. None of the other solutions can do that. The unraid community is active and awesome!

[@boopfer387]

$250 however...but i did not know this about just adding drives! Yes i have a lot of opd drives. $250 here vs synology still sounds better.

[@nadtz]

I've been DIY'ing my NAS since ZFS support was added to FreeBSD. Manually configured at first, then used napp-it until FreeNAS came out and still using TrueNAS Core now. With Core effectively end of life at this point I've been playing with Scale and XigmaNAS to decide what I want to move to when that time comes but it's great that there are so many options now a days (be it off the shelf or DIY) that suit different needs for home/SOHO use.

[@HatStand1000]

I use OMV on an ODroid HC4... costed £80... works really well.

[@PatrickDKing]

I'm still undecided. For now I'm running Synology boxes.

[@PolarRed]

I've used them all and the only NAS I've had running everyday for years now is a Synology! I'm no fanboy, there's lots to rant and moan about when it comes to Synology, but DSM is streets ahead of everything else when it comes to a NAS OS!

[@mughug9616]

Have been using TrueNAS for a couple of years as a home network NAS supporting desktop and mobile PCs, Macs, Linux and Android machines,. First on a Raspberry Pi 4 and then an old HP Z230. Running 2 x mirrored SSD for system and 2 x mirrored HDD for data. Never had an issue and the e-mail notification setting keeps me up to data. Cheap, cheerful and dependable. So much so that if I had to replace the current system I would go the same way again. :)

[@Smittron]

Thanks for the video Gary. I'm running OMV as a local storage supplement to cloud storage for storing some of my more important files. I'm using a Celeron mini PC with 8 GB RAM, 128 GB boot drive and a single 1 TB SSD storage drive.

[@V1N_574]

I used truenas years ago and being NOT a power user it took me a bit to get it up and running and never really understood what was I doing. Then I heard of unraid which the fact that I had different drive sizes around my office was a huge plus for unraid, what I didn't expect was how user friendly it was for me compared to truenas. I've been using it for around 3 years now and I love it with a passion. I'm dying to test HexOS since the focus was home inexperience users and the base was truenas, that would be a great game changer although, the ability of unraid to spin down individual hard drives and expand your storage and user different drives sizes with ease, is a major feature that others don't have, not even HexOS.

[@sheldonkupa9120]

I wanted to make a case for a simple selfbuilt linux/sambaserver with cockpit: I use proxmox since many years. My harddisks with zfs and btrfs reside in this server. Nas software in a vm was not my taste. So I tried to install samba on a debian lxc container. After struggeling a while with file ownerships and user rights, i got samba customized to my needs. You could do that also bare metal with a linux distro of your choice. If you dont need the bells and whizzles, and dont have many nas users, i recommend that over a nas os. First you learn samba, and second you are able to troubleshoot much better. Just keep the smb.conf small and clean.

[@AlanKlughammer]

I have used Unraid for a long time. I like the UNRAID array system as I can mix and match drive sizes. You can make separate RAID or ZFS pools. I also like that it can be used as a server solutions with dockers and VM's. I found OMV too simplistic for my needs, and I found TrueNAS much more fussy in hardware requirements (you need matching drives. You need more ram for ZFS, preferably ECC, etc) No it is not free, but IMO, you get what you pay for.

[@alcorza3567]

I built a TruNAS Scale system with a Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G, 128 GB ECC RAM with a modest storage array. 1 x RAIDZ1 4-wide @ 10.44TB usable storage, 1 x RAIDZ1 3-wide @ 25.31 TB usable and 1 x Mirror 2-wide @ 500 GB usable (for apps and so on). They are replacing K8 with Docker in the upcoming Electric Eel version which is now available in RC. Very good OS. Stable and perfect for a home lab. Recommended though for users who are a bit more technically inclined. I learnt a lot during my journey with TruNAS. I used to use Unraid. Also a good OS... Biggest advantage is if your array dies, you don't lose all your data. You can still pull an individual drive and get all the files of it. You can't do that with TruNAS. But if you have ZFS configured right your data should be pretty safe.

[@peterpv0001]

Although I like the idea of these simple ready-to-go NAS solutions, in my view there's always some functionality missing that I currently use on my NAS. My NAS is a custom-build PC from cheap old hardware (3 rd generation core i5, 16 GB RAM) running Linux Mint. As Mint is just Ubuntu which is just Debian I can install almost anything I want. Configuring those services can be a pain when it is my first time but in the end I uslly get it the way I want it. And when it works I know HOW it works which is a plus for me.

[@markmonroe7330]

Been rocking OMV in my test lab and have been very happy with it. I would have no issues with using it in commercial production. I have or have had most of the big names in commercial production and really like OMV.

[@brandonchappell1535]

Truenas all day bby !! Now with docker (well stable is a couple weeks away, im on RC2), and its free

[@esra_erimez]

I have had good luck with TrueNAS, I tried Unraid but could never figure it out. I've head of OpenMediaVault never used it.

[@superangrybrit]

I have a CM4 8gb ram Lite with a fresh official RPi 64gb microsd card coming in next week. Ima try my hand at OMV. Cheers! 👍

[@DIYglenn]

HexOS looks promising! Didn’t know about that one.

[@Andy_Panda]

I use OMV for Samba file shares and CasaOS for container management on my Seeed Studios reServer.

[@Winnetou17]

3:30 HDD, or SSD or M.2. But I want DVD, or OCD or SATA. ok ok, I guess I already have the OCD For those that didn't got the joke, he's putting in the same list two disk types and a connector+form factor. What you put into an M.2 slot is (in the overwhelmingly amount of cases) also a SSD

[@LordApophis100]

I started with a QNAP and once I got used to it switched to TrueNAS Core. But to have more versatility I installed it in a Proxmox VM with passing through the SATA controller. Now I can play with other things and let TrueNAS do what it’s best at: storage server

[@olafschermann1592]

How compares a container storage like Ceph, Longhorn, GlusterFS compare to those NAS systems?

[@fairmania]

I have used OMV for a couple of years now, originally using a RPi 3B+ and more recently a USFF Fujitsu unit, both with a single 4TB drive in a USB case formatted in EXT4. The data is backed up separately elsewhere on smaller drives, but I need to get a better solution for that later on when money allows.

[@knofi7052]

I have tried many solutions including ready to go Synology and Qnap boxes. From all of that I prefer using OMV or DIY Linux installations.

[@NFvidoJagg2]

Currently running TrueNAS scale. one pinch point i've run into, is the OS by default assumes it's an appliance, and makes the OS file system immutable and removes access to apt. so if you need to modify it to work with old hareware. (e.g. GTX 660 for jellyfin encoding). you have to make the OS file system mutable and re-enable apt. and you have to redo your change everytime you update the OS. Good for security, but a pain if your using a custom build with unsupported hardware.

[@talbech]

Built a TrueNAS Core (Will eventually change to Scale) off a Dell R730. Works really well, but you need to be aware of the controller version and disks supported.

[@musiqtee]

I stumbled across FreeNAS 6+ years ago. Knowing _some_ *BSD from MacOS X since 20 years back, and looking deeper into ZFS - FreeNAS it was. A used HP 360 g6 beast at first, but suddenly we had a “market” for electricity, so I ditched the server. Reverted to old PCs, clustered ProxMox, TrueNAS virtualised with janky passed-through disks. That downgrade was three years ago, and they still run backing each other up (ZFS snapshots) locally. Not very fast, but plenty for my homelab, TimeMachine and (not-so) smart house shenanigans. Cloud free & software rent free - and pretty much care free. Not perfect, but what really is…? 😊

[@zakit]

Openmediavault supports ZFS on Linux via plugins. I have it working like that in 2 machines, 4 disk RaidZ1. Works as a charm

[@garyreinsch510]

I may be crazy, but I use all of them. Unraid on a HP microserver 4 X 4TB drive dual core, Unraid on Poweredge 730 with 6 X 10TB drives 65GB Ram, OMV on an old N54L HP microsserver 4 X 4TB drives 16GB, and TrueNAS Scale on Dell Poweredge T130 4 X 4TB drives 32GB ram. I enjoy keeping up with the NAS market. I almost forgot, a Synology DS1621XS+ with 11 X 4TB dirves 32GB ram. I backup the synology to iDrive on the cloud. Now tell me I'm crazy!!!!

[@boopfer387]

No not at all. Synolgoy vs unraid. What are your thoughts?

[@garyreinsch510]

@@boopfer387 I consider my Synology my primary NAS mostly because I bought it new and the OS is very approachable. My two Unraid servers are somewhat disappointing on performance when transferring about 7TB from one them to others NAS's. It is fun to use(Unraid) but is not as fast as Synology or TrueNAS. All are hooked up with 10GB network cards to Qnap 10GB switches. Hope this helps!

[@simplereef4854]

I tried FreeNAS about 15 (or 20 years ) ago. I was disappointed because FreeNAS only supported 100 MB/s data transfer back then. I have since moved to Synology and have never looked back. I might try Openmedia Vault in the future.

[@RockTheCage55]

If all you need is storage & not extra services & don't care you will have identically sized drives i definitely would choose TrueNAS Scale. I tend to use iSCSI & NFS a lot & need to speed that truenas scale offers. If you need different sized drives flexability & don't need the speed that comes with striping data across drives (in generally your speed won't be any faster than a single drive) & need all kind of services i would choose unraid. I wouldn't ever pick OMV. Its interface is beyond clunky & i pretty much could do everything it does manually on just any linux server instance.

[@dansanger5340]

I installed OMV on an inexpensive N100 2-bay NAS device using a Btrfs mirror. It's been very reliable so far. OMV doesn't support ZFS out of the box, but it's supposedly something you can enable with plugins. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to work, and didn't want to risk breaking my install by trying anything further.

[@zakit]

I had 2 machines on Zfs RaidZ1 over 4 drives. Used the plugin. But it needed a specific kernel to work. Probably it would work with newer kernels but I guess something would have to be recompiled

[@dansanger5340]

@@zakit Yes, if I remember correctly it was something like a Debian Proxmox kernel. I tried installing them and the system would no longer boot. So, I chose some kind of OMV recovery mode option in Grub, pointed it back at the old kernel, deleted the new kernels I installed, and gave up.

[@boopfer387]

I am interest in a system i can keep adding drives like synology. I have also seen you can run synology os on your own system.

[@GaryExplains]

You can keep adding drives to ALL NAS systems. I guess you are saying you want to be able to add drives and they appear as part of the same volume, regardless of the size of each disk, plus you get redundancy.

[@pantoqwerty]

Xpenology is the clone of the Synology OS you can use on your own hardware. Anything that uses mdadm to assemble the array will allow addition in the same array. TrueNAS has drive addition coming in the next version (currently RC). Tom Lawrence has done a video on this.

[@jpdrsn33]

I have a Synology, it was meant to be easy (migrated from TrueNAS), but I would've configured it faster in plain linux.

Soon TrueNas will get support for expanding the RAID volume. But you need to have the same size as the other drives. Unraid can mix drives, as long as they are smaller or same size as the parity drive. I also don't think Unraid uses XOR for the second parity, the documentation says something about a Reed-Solomon code. I don't think OMV can create parity in real-time, so I ended up with Unraid, but I might look at HexOS at some point, as TrueNAS is easy to do wrong the first time.

[@thr0nic]

Can't you already add vdevs to existing zpools?

​@@thr0nic You can add another one sure, but in Electric Eal you can expand an existing one with more disks.

[@thomassheppard1159]

Built a NAS running Unraid because of its docker support

[@An.Individual]

Big drawback with OMV is that it will not allow RAID when the HDD's are connected via USB and ofcourse you must use USB with a Raspberry PI if you want 3.5" HDD's

[@Funkfreed]

does that mean I can use my external hard drive as a storage?

[@martynpage4823]

Nice review....you failed to mention there is a huge company behind TrueNAS...a large team behind Unraid and OMV has the developer and mainly one other helping with plugins.....TrueNAS isn't really being so honest in the name.....😀For all the bells and whistles it can't do anymore than OMV

[@astralpowers]

I tried building my own NAS using TrueNAS Core, but I initially had issues with connectivity. I ended up installing Windows 11 and running TrueNAS on Hyper-V, so all my hard disks are used by the TrueNAS VM, while Windows sits on the NVMe ssd. I'll see if I want to use TrueNAS as the host OS, but it takes some effort. I'll try out TrueNAS scale one of these days.

[@nathsabari97]

My jellyfin server runs on windows 11 ltsc. Windows is just an amazing OS it works well on whatever you throw at it, also i am familiar with it if something goes wrong.

[@davidmalaky]

I can recommend using Unraid, it is pretty solid (I was only struggling with XFS filesystem crashing on me)

[@elminster8149]

Use TN Scale, it has better HW comparability as it's based on Debian rather than freeBSD. It's also free.

[@pantoqwerty]

Connectivity issues are generally caused by the Realtek NICs in common use on PCs. Freebsd doesn’t like them and works on first install then pretty much never again. A cheap Intel PCIe NIC card will fix that. The hardware compatibility list is a must-read for Core

[@bertblankenstein3738]

I have a pc and a pi, i put a hdd in each. I connect to each one and copy my data to it.

[@rickyeastwell8034]

OMV does support OpenZFS

[@GaryExplains]

Via a plugin, no?

[@rickyeastwell8034]

Well to say it doesn’t have OpenZFS is false as it’s part of the Debian repo. Sure you can install a plug-in if you want to manage it via a GUI.

[@GaryExplains]

@@rickyeastwell8034 So a new user who has installed OMV, can configure, format, and share ZFS pools out of the box? I will save you the time, no, they can't. Whereas they can with TrueNAS etc.

[@bindumiller]

I just built a 4 M2 drive NAS on a Raspi5 on a Geekworm adapter using RAID5 and got it working but there were many problems to get it configured. Took me about a week. I had to reinstall several times, but in the end, it seems to be working correctly now. I see many problems with the install process, and there really are not any good, simple guides to help a first-time Linux user like me. It is frustrating that nothing is explained in ways that an inexperienced NAS user could understand. I see this problem all the time with tech stuff, that the help or guides are all written by programmers who know too much about the program and are terrible communicators, and leave out crucial steps that, apparently, they think "Anyone would know this." They really can't relate to someone who doesn't know the jargon or the basics.

[@GaryExplains]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Were you using OMV or did you do everything manually?

[@bindumiller]

@@GaryExplainsI used the OMV. I'm not knowledgeable enough in Linux to do much manually. The main issue was in setting up the RAID. I consider myself a beginner in Linux but really I have been building my own computers for the last 15 years. I set up a retail NAS about 10 years ago with RAID5 and it was fairly easy, but OMV was a nightmare. No one explains that setting up a Raid involves multiple steps that each one involves a separate setup. I wanted 5 partitions, but nothing says "partitions" in the interface. There is Shares, File Systems, shared folders, LVM, etc. The Disks Tab showed the disks but also showed the mem card as a drive--I didn't notice this and it got included in the RAID--creating all kinds of problems. Once the

[@bindumiller]

It seems like a lot of the steps could be combined, so it is not so complicated, as it is in other programs. Also, once I had shares and File Sys set up, and there were error messages, I would not let me uninstall shares, Filesystems, or anything. You should always be able to uninstall partitions. Also, the shares are not listed by their share names in the file Sys tab, which would have been really helpful. Then, when I decided to start over, there was no way to reformate the drives--I was stuck with the same shares as before. I have many more complaints about this. I realize that volunteers are using their free time to program this, and I honor that, but hopefully, as a consumer designed program, they will be able fill in a lot of the holes in the program design.

[@GaryExplains]

I see, yes OMV does take a layered approach: partitions, disks, filesystems, shares, and each needs to be configured separately.

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

I just have an old PC with four 16TB disks in mdadm RAID-10 (aka RAID-1+0, but Linux RAID-10 can handle odd drives as well). Then I have kvm+libvirt for VMs and that's about it ;) PS: i really wouldn't recommend the unraid stuff. They are basically doing RAID-4, meaning the parity drive will see a *ton* of IOPS and unless it's superior in I/O speed to the data drives, it'll act as a very efficient bottleneck. Better DIY it or just run OpenMediaVault. That's my suggestion (after dealing with mass storage on Linux for 20+ years)

[@Carolus_64]

I started very long ago with a small pc running Ubuntu server and 2 disks in raid1. All done in command line this system served me a lot of years. Now I switched to OMV but not so much satisfied. I don't understand why I have to rebuild the dashboard each time I connect to web interface with a different pc

[@ansoncall6497]

I've built my own NAS using Odroid H4+ and my own custom designed, 3D printed case, which was really fun to do. Running Truenas Scale, which has been...okay. There is a big learning curve. I use it to replace expensive cloud solutions so I'm using Nextcloud which installs as an app and is well supported. What I really want though is an integrated solution for cloud services in these NAS solutions that will do the heavy lifting (make it simple) of getting around local network limitations and being behind a CGNAT. I don't' want to configure port forwarding or find a difficult to use reverse proxy that I have to set up myself (Still haven't gotten that working). This is where synology and other paid solutions excel.

[@ArjunKS-wi5en]

My ISP has a double NAT. Can you pls guide on how to access the drive outside the home network.

[@elminster8149]

Use something like Tailscale or Netbird, there are loads of instructions online and on YT.

[@DavidM2002]

Have you tried Tailscale ?

[@johnfr2389]

Still no firewall on TrueNas. And no real antivirus solution either.

[@GaryExplains]

Interesting comment. Why would you want a firewall on a NAS?

[@pantoqwerty]

The only reason I can see for a firewall on a NAS is because you intend opening up access outside your network, which is generally a bad idea. Connecting via VPN is always better. They’re not going to include antivirus as that isn’t a NAS concern, it’s a client issue. Snapshots and backups solve the data issues of viruses. Most antivirus software is useless. You could probably run an app, container or VM that scans the storage if you’re so inclined.

[@johnfr2389]

@@pantoqwerty Some customers who have to comply with NIST and other such standards are asking for AV on their NAS. There are other ways to comply, by having a real-time AV scanning all new writes done on the NAS is a convincing option.

[@PolarRed]

And the winner is.... DSM.

[@markloughtonUK]

Started with OMV (on Pi4) then moved to CasaOS. I have a windows 10 PC that backs it up. Works perfectly well for me.

[@cmaxxen]

Parity drives are RAID. RAID levels seem be forgotten knowledge.

[@GaryExplains]

I guess you are referring to RAID 2 or 3? I don't think Unraid is either RAID 2 or 3, hence its name.

[@marksimmons9413]

@@GaryExplainsno RAID 3,4,5,6 are all parity schemes. If it has a parity device and uses it to recover from a failure then it’s definitionally RAID.

[@GaryExplains]

Not all RAID levels use a parity drive, but are yet still RAID. So I don't think the use of a parity drive by definition means RAID.

[@nadtz]

@@GaryExplains RAID 'technically' means you can recover from N disks failing, the different implementations came later so Unraid is still RAID but without the benefits of striping/mirroring (which kind of defeats the original idea but that's another discussion).

[@GaryExplains]

@@nadtz That is a fair point. I guess in my mind RAID (from a real world and practical point of view) was always redundancy + performance. Not just redundancy. I will be more careful in the future.

[@zmeygavrilych]

I don't think NAS on RaspberryPi is a good idea. It will be slow and laggy.

[@GaryExplains]

Really? Have you tried? I have been using a NAS on a Pi for a long time, works great. The Pi 4 and 5 have a gigabit ethernet and you can even get NVMe HATs for the Pi 5. Why do you think it will be slow and laggy?

[@davidmalaky]

@@GaryExplains I am sorry but you cant be serious suggesting average usecase is using NVMe drive... average joe buys NAS to connect 2+ HDDs which are in fact going to be sluggish on RPi. I would not recommend it even for media storage as the load times are gonna be nightmarish

[@GaryExplains]

@davidmalaky Are there not single bay NAS solutions, even from Synology etc. Personally I use two external HDDs connected via USB. Remember the Pi 4 has USB 3.0 which is 5 gbps, more than a 1 gbps network can handle. Works great.

[@alpha13sierra]

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB with 2 x 4TB HDDs, using Raspberry Pi OS Lite and it works perfectly fine. I use it to store all sorts of media, backup for my personal computer etc, and the speed transfer is good (110 MB/s), it's reliable, quiet and maintenance-free.

[@GaryExplains]

@alpha13sierra Exactly!

[@PihkalTheTihkal]

So, 2 days after I've purchased a HPe Microserver to be used as a NAS, here you are making a video about which software is best... Dammit Garry, get out of my head! 😀😀😀 Anyway, I was thinking about using TrueNAS Core as it has many many features and is free, but I'd rather not use FreeBSD. OMV I've used in the past on a Pi and it's ok but I find it to be rather basic. Didn't know HexOS existed, TrueNAS on Linux, sounds interesting IF it's free. I'm aware that TrueNAS Scale also is Linux based but to my knowledge it isn't free. You didn't mention Xpenology, it's supposed to be the Synology NAS OS, but you can install it on whatever hardware you like, haven't looked into thoroughly. As you can tell I'm still undecided on this but hey, still waiting on the delivery of the server so there's still time to think.

[@elminster8149]

TrueNAS Scale is free.

[@PihkalTheTihkal]

@@elminster8149 Thanks! You're right! That must have been completely wrong in my head for some reason. Thanks again for pointing this out to me!