UNRAID Vs TRUENAS: Which Home Server NAS Is Best?

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Are you Team 🔴 Unraid or Team 🔵 TrueNAS? Drop a comment here and also check out more videos in homelab kzbin.info/aero/PLarJAzZsWRGBQA-NljmwL_EvLTJYfR_tv

[@HomeSysAdmin]

I think my vote's going to TrueNAS. I may have to give it a try.

[@Fiberton]

Virtual machine gpu bug. They did a recent patch for it and fixed it for a lot of people. Hence your issue.

[@TekJumble]

TrueNAS for sure.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

@@Fiberton Good to know I was like... great always while filming a video.

[@tjb_altf4]

You know my dude :) Unraid for sure!

[@TrueNAS]

We're team #TrueNAS but we might be biased!

[@LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Same 😀

[@kbmorris21]

LOL. In my opinion you just can't beat BSD. That's the real differentiation between these two storage operating systems and the reason I side with True Blue TrueNAS.

[@NeptuneSega]

@@kbmorris21 Scale is Linux based and has more features. It's the future going forward

[@pprocacci]

@@kbmorris21 Yep, BSD is such a joy to work with. I'll be sticking with TrueNas Core ... well ... forever unless something drastic happens.

[@briccimn]

@@kbmorris21 but TrueNAS SCALE is Debian based, so no BSD underlying.

[@BrianJurkowski]

Another benefit UNRAID offers that's lacking in TrueNAS (ZFS) is the ability to mix-and-match drive capacities. I like not having to buy all my drives at once, and when I do buy new drives, I can get whatever capacity I want and add it to the array.

[@skyfox77]

This is the number ONE reason I chose Unraid, mix all sizes of drives.

[@lexatwo]

That's it. Main UNRAID selling point.

[@joemann7971]

​@@lexatwo Not necessarily. UNRAID is basically "just a bunch of disks" with parity protection. There is certainly more benefits than just that. For example, because each disk is independent, even if you decided to be a risk taker and not use parity protection, you'll never lose all your data even if you lose a drive. You'll only lose what was on that drive. Parity protection just adds so you dont lose any data. in case of a one or two drives fail, and even if you have 3 drives fail, you'll at most lose 3 drives worth of data. Not all of them (unless all you had was 3 drives. lol)

[@cluelessfish]

@@joemann7971 and this is what i hate with zfs ya dont know what is where !!

[@coc1909]

Wrong, TrueNas have the same ability. I have 2T, 3T and 4T disks in my pool(array).

[@AnthonyNelsonYYZ]

I'm Team Unraid. My installation has been around for 15+ years, evolving seamlessly alongside my needs. I've undergone 4 motherboard and CPU upgrades, incorporated new drive controllers, and accumulated a diverse array of drive sizes. What began with just 3 drives 1 TB drive has now expanded to a total of 14. All on the same USB key from 15 years ago. I also have a second Unraid server used for my business that I've been running for 10+ years. Never any issues on either.

[@thompson4620]

I am trying to decide on my system. My buddy and I are doing a multi location lab and are both tech savvy. My needs are speed and 100% reliable and will most likely go for TrueNAS. He is going for the ease and flexibility of unRAID and we will Syncthing between the two to make sure our data is backed up. How can I be certain that my backup is safe on his unRAID setup? If there is no "scrub" feature then how can we be certain that when we need that backup it's safe and there is no bit rot? Any advice would be appreciated!

[@iskiiwizz536]

what did you chose man, I want to create a home lab. Im scared of the type of file use by truenas for the raid. Is it a pain in the ass to add another drive? Do I need to use ecc memory for unraid ? Thanks

[@snakeatwar]

What USB key is it? That's a long time!

[@AnthonyNelsonYYZ]

@@snakeatwar Kingston DT108 4GB. Probably because the UNRaid usb only gets used at boot and OS upgrade. Probably reboot about 5 times a year.

[@ckckck12]

Does your unraid also not hit 10gbe? It was strange that the same hardware in unraid could not do more than half. To me that's an issue and maybe central to my use. I was wondering if the reviewer missed an unraid setting. Please advise.

[@denissaamiev5030]

Hi. Normally I'm not a video commenter, but I want to mention a few things. At 25:54 we can clearly see that the cache pool was left BTRFS instead of ZFS. Also, another very important topic is that while you make SMB read/write tests on TrueNas your writes are going directly to the ARC (RAM) which is significantly faster than any nvme storage (as you did on Unraid and configured in BTRFS). So, to be fair to Unraid you should fix the things made wrong on Unraid side and redo the tests. (Use ARC on Unraid too as a beginning)

[@DigitalSpaceport]

There were more than a few mistakes I made here but I am shooting the redo on the ZFS testing part right now and also have put in 40Gbit networking so we should be able to max out the caches and hit real disk perf also.

[@anishgeorge8695]

Please add the new video related to this in this video description directly. Thanks

[@frankniethardt1813]

Also to be as close as you can get to TrueNAS you would have done a ZFS Pool, not Array. Array disks are individual...

[@forhobby]

allways free open sources is better

[@tjb_altf4]

Great head to head, but would like to see performance testing redone using real ZFS pools in Unraid... maybe for their next release which has more ZFS features/changes :) #teamunraid

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah I am going to redo the ZFS with unraid pool since my performance comparison was rather off base using the array. I read last night looks like 6.13 will have it as main array supported.

[@dbishop9085]

@@DigitalSpaceport maybe... its been a good long while since this has been posited. Ive been waiting on something besides bit-rot filesystems on UnRAID for years now.... ProxMOX and truenas for me and I am an UnRAID user as well.

[@joespurlock4628]

@@DigitalSpaceport Just use a "dummy" USB drive for the UnRaid array device (and ignore it) -- you can create the ZFS pool(s) in 6.12. Admittedly still will not have all the ZFS "Goodies" til the next release brings those, but the comparison should be approaching apples to apples

[@ThereWillBeCake]

I am also pro reducing eWaste but the main problem is the cost of electricity. Most home lab tech's will want the lostest power consumption as possible which means brand new or very specific hadware options.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah there is a time to retire gear and head it off to the recycler. The 12th gen Dell stuff has been largely removed, the R920s. I still need to replace the R720XD and R520. The T620 I am torn on. 32 2.5" bays is hard to find in a case that can support this many GPUs.

[@BenSollis]

As someone in the IT arena for some 40 yrs or so.. I think, they're 2 different beasts. TrueNas Scale is for business+ use. The average 'homelabs' guy/gal is not going to be using 50/100 disks etc. On the other hand UnRaid, (my opinion) fits the 'homelabs' user perfectly. For me, with some 30 terabytes of photos, UnRaid is perfect. I can easlily set up shares and I can easily spin up various VMS, and finally a wealth of containers right at my finger tips. They say, Horses for Courses... In this case, unraid for homelabs, truenas for business+

[@Kfrankie46]

I am team unraid, primarily because of the way it handles different size hard drives and how easy the docker and VM management are, i do also have a truenas scale server though that i use as a backup server that has a copy of all of my data on it because of the file integrity checks that it does

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I like running my docker stuff via unraid as its fast to setup and manage huge amounts of docker containers and I like to test them out and delete them frequently. Portainers new limits make it less appealing and I enjoy the shopping I can do in UnRAID for apps I dont even know I need. 100% on important data hitting truenas however

[@dustojnikhummer]

Yeah hypervisor on Scale is pretty damn barebones. It has integrated Kubernetes, but I have always had issues with it. I do also agree on the "different drive size" but that isn't necessairly fault of TrueNAS, but ZFS. To fix most of that, I went with Proxmox and TrueNAS in a VM and a separate VM for manual Docker. I like knowing that if my NAS died, my data is safe because ZFS will import the pool with no fuss in any other system that supports ZFS.

[@ikkuranus]

I have been on Unraid for years. It's not a speed demon but the ease of use, ease of expansion and huge docker library make it all worth it. I only use SSDs for docker services and not to cache incoming files. I have migrated my cache pool from a btrfs mirror to a zfs mirror as btrfs isn't that great.

[@TheMongolPrime]

Team TrueNAS.

[@kellycurtis5289]

I have an all ssd server and tried unraid and it just kept throwing drive errors and failures randomly. after a week of swapping out drives (all of which were fine) I wiped the server and installed truenas scale. worked perfectly the first install. I thought the setup user interface was quite simple. every drive detected and functions perfectly. a few weeks into the new server and it is fast on a 10gig network.

[@francois.h]

unRAID user here. You could use cache pool to make a true ZFS array and get same performance as TrueNAS or super close. The points of unraid array are the ability to mix and match hard drive capacity, having a single filesystem on each drive which allow you to recover data on healthy hard drive when you loose more hard drive than the number of parity drive, it also mean that each file is on a single hard drive, so reading needs to only spin up that drive, allowing you to reduce power consumption. Unraid and TrueNas are not meant for the same usage.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

There was a followup video that did address this. Its fun to compare but you are right they do have slightly different target audiences and use cases no doubt. More dedicated videos on UnRAID soon. kzbin.info/www/bejne/hqCzfYqlosZrrLc

[@mrdriver511]

I have tried both Truenas and Unraid and kept Unraid I wanted to have Plex with HW transcoding and just couldn’t get it to work on Truenas while on Unraid i just unstalled the Nvidia driver and Plex container following the guid on the forum to set it all up and it works. For me Truenas was to complicated for what i needed it to do what i like was the user permissions

[@RonnieRedd]

Team TrueNAS for a long time. Linuxand BSD user for everything in the house. Would never use windows smb shares. Also NAS should be used for storage. Period. (IMHO). Currently Linux KVM for virtual machines.

[@wildmanjeff42]

Definitely need ECC ram on storage servers. Thanks for the video, just found your channel, will be going back through your videos !

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Welcome!

[@tomatobrush3283]

One major benefit to unraid is that the files are stored directly on the disk, so its virtually improbable to lose all your data in a single event. Even if you lose the parity drive, the data is still on all the disks. I've upgraded disk sizes including parity with no hassle and I get top performance from unraid these past 7 years. What put me off truenas was ZFS while a superior file system without a doubt in many regards, for non enterprise setup's where it is heavy on large file data storage, the benefits of unraid outweigh the benefits of ZFS for me. This also makes me sleep easy at night knowing if my unraid breaks completely, I can still plug the drives individually and retrieve all my data in the original folder structure from the disks. My setup is 8gbit HBA to 8 sata disks and a sata cache 512gh cache 500mb/sec. I could add NVME cache no point until I upgrade the network to 2.5gb+. I get about 220mbyte a second when doing a read from the array internally and I get a max 115/120mbyte second over 1gbit wired, through my home pfsense setup.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yes the inability to scale out a datasets without significant costs in truenas is for sure a issue that I am reading is getting close to a solution. TrueNAS is great for my iso files storage.

[@dredge999]

Turnon reconstruct write in unraid. Makes a huge difference for writes if this is not default in 6.12

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Im redoing the evaluation with UnRAID zfs in a pool, the proper way. UnRAIDs primary array is FUSE and was not really a fair comparison on my part. Video on that head to head ships this weekend.

[@ajslim79]

Kudos for the used Dark Mode

[@SV-lw8jo]

I am team TrueNAS because I only need a data storage system and it is free.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Super solid reasoning and a great product for data storage backends indeed

[@dunknow9486]

Well done comparison Can you do a video on Proxmox with hdd passthrough for UnRaid?

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Oh the kplop UnRaid setup, yeah sure it's pretty cool. Added to whiteboard.

[@complexity5545]

TrueNAS Core for hoarding data. TrueNas SCALE for VMs. I specifically use neither, but If I was a business that did not know how to do command line system administration, then paying TrueNas is the way. I run 1 zfs+freebsd machine on eypc 7702 with bhyve. I run 1 epyc 7702 with debian for VMs. Both use mellanox cards to talk to each other. In this day and age, a business really needs 2 boxes. 1 for dating hoarding and 1 for CPU intensive stuff (specifically for linux). You have good content.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah I think Truenas has a very compelling niche they have created. I use them for my mini data storage hoards management and proxmox for services. Mega cluster proxmox 8 video in the works.

[@T313COmun1s7]

Team Blue - TrueNAS, because a NAS should be a NAS, and not ProxMox. I have a machine for ProxMox already. I have VMs and LXC containers natively, and a VM running Portainer for Docker and Pods. It make zero sense to give up 50% of your NAS performance to tack on a function that should be on it's own box anyhow.

[@huntingfighteroramara]

Team unraid definitely, There's literally one reason I'm split though which is the still missing support of true raid, i know they promised we'll get it but it's the only reason why i sometimes think picking truenas would have been the better call back then, once we get true raid on unraid I'm 100% unraid for sure

[@mytime34]

I just did some testing and found something cool. For my NVME drives, if I set them to BTRFS I only get about 600mb/s, but if I change it to ZFS format I get almost full NVME speeds. I tried this with 1, 2,3 and 4 drives setups and all of them tested great. When testing regular ssd drives, I found the similar results. BTRFS would limit to about 300mb/s, but ZFS was almost maxing out the drives (cache mode) If you decide to rerun your tests, can you try the ZFS format and see if that helps?

[@jacobp7289]

I got a nvme cache drive in btrfs and get full 10GBe speeds to/from it.

[@Andry0803]

i'm start to learning about home server and willing to make one. if the system disk that contain OS broken, when i reinstall unraid, can it read my drive content like if we reinstall windows? or the mainboard broken after replace new one, i wonder if we need reinstall unraid or not?

[@williamtopping]

Short Answer is No, Long Answer is Yes: If you're competent in CLI, and vigilant in backing up all the databases and configuration files (including the ones you didn't know you should be backing up). AND you have configured this correctly from the get go. Even then, no matter who you are, it's trivial to overlook something along the way. And searching forum comments on how to do this will give you differing answers. The only way you can be sure is you undertake a disaster recovery the first time you set it up. Documenting EVERY SINGLE STEP you took. If it works, congratulations, you can walk into any datacenter with A-Level skills, because if you can do all that, you will most certainly have them.

[@andyalias]

Unraid seems more easy beautiful GUI server focused where TrueNAS seems to be more storage function performance focused. I love beautiful easy to use GUI tech, but I chose TrueNAS. Preformance and function is just higher on my list.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah if your after storage functionality, you can't beat TreNAS on that front imo.

[@ryanmalone2681]

I have both, each running ~150TB of storage. TrueNAS can’t be beat for NAS-only. Shove in 1 TB RAM, get yourself a fast card and switch and forget about it. It’s fast and stable. What else could be more important? What I like about Unraid is that if you lose both parity drives, and then you lose another drive, you only lose that one drive. Same scenario in TrueNAS and you’d lose the array. Container and App Store is good. Things I don’t like, speed and stability primarily, which is kinda poor for a NAS. I’ve found that what’s better than Unraid OR TrueNAS, is an Unraid backup server with a primary NAS as TruNAS inside a VM in Proxmox, only used as a NAS, with VM’s and containers in Proxmox, using TrueNAS as an iSCSI target for fast storage outside of the Proxmox node,and as part of a cluster.

[@danrsteinmetz]

Team unraid I've been using it for about 5 years now on the same USB stick no problems upgraded hardware three times it's a breeze when I tried true nas I was very confused by the setup process and I felt it took a lot longer for setup and I was unsure why it took that much longer to do the same steps

[@subterficial]

I feel like I must be surplus hardware brained, but truenas core or scale just seem so much better in every metric other than being able to use random drives in an unsafe storage configuration. That ability to chuck random drives in a box as a way to make one large drive is a neat concept in a home box, but it seems to be immediately defeated by the fact that unraid is paid software, so the incentive there is lower.

[@josephp1592]

One OS you will find in enterprise environments, one you will only find on half ass home setups. Wonder which one is better

[@DigitalSpaceport]

flips coin.... openmediavault lol. No in all seriousness TrueNAS will be killer once they get a user friendly and functional docker implementation. Their app store is what makes unraid imo a fun to use piece of software for non serious data storage tasks, but the new price structure I dont think is good for users.

[@josephp1592]

@@DigitalSpaceport I can see that. Currently running docker and portainer with jailmaker

[@tfarchive1]

Fyi, you are not really using zfs with unraid unless you create a zpool in pools. You cannot create a zfs array in the main data array. You are using the disks with zfs format but not a fair comparison to truenas

[@OutsiderDreams]

I was going to say the day thing. Create a pool and use the spinning rusty drives in that pool instead of the main array. @spaceinvader one has a great video on how to set up zfs on a pool.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Very good points and picking a winner on this category was by far the hardest as I mentioned. Truenas has an amazing ZFS offering which I personally use and enjoy its feature richness. As I mentioned in the video it was my first time setting up the unraid solution for ZFS and I should have just stuck with it being the typical setup for unraid in comparison and precluded the ZFS aspect entirely. That feels like a much deeper topic than a high level overview video should get into. Their solution is indeed not feature rich in the pool settings to a surprising degree. While I do stand by unraid being easier to setup overall, I would switch this to point truenas based on lack of features in ZFS pools setup on unraid in a ZFS to ZFS direct comparison.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yes indeed I think there will be a direct ZFS to ZFS comparison video on this topic after I spend some time testing Unraid out more in their pool setup. I also need to switch to the 40Gbit nics to give a proper test that is not limited. I am not seeing several options in the unraid zfs pools configuration and I am heading over to catchup with the ZFS tutorial from @SpaceinvaderOne right now

[@undead574]

#TrueNAS 🤘

[@neccros007]

I always associated Unraid as a hypervisor with NAS features but TrueNAS as a NAS OS with VM support... Am I wrong?

[@kerryh8er04]

I've been pretty happy with TrueNAS. A little more limited, and maybe more complex to learn. But it's been really solid.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah for storage tasks it really does have all the bells you need to get a well tuned ZFS setup going.

[@darthkielbasa]

I prefer Unraid. I’ve used Truenas Scale and it’s a great OS. However, being a recent convert to nerding, Unraid is more intuitive in my opinion. Also, GPU passthrough to VMs and Docker is simple enough for a knucklehead like me. Thanks for the content.

[@Maisonier]

Team blue

[@alice20001]

Oh, this is the coolest video I've seen comparing the two. Great to have a look at the hardware.

[@talktomenowxbmc]

This is not how you should setup ZFS on Unraid. Drives formated with ZFS can be part of an Array but they will be affected by speed limitations set by Array/Parity. Correct way is to set them up as Pool outside of an Array as a separate entity.

[@Quettesh]

My unraid USB drive failed after 5 years, so I said to myself, it is time to move to TrueNAS Scale. It was the biggest mistake I could make. It felt like comming from a polished experience to a random fan project full of bugs. TrueNAS feels like just a storage, if you want to run apps, you should install docker in VM, because Apps implementation is buggy as hell and TrueCharts is not even close to Community apps on Unraid. One simple example - if you want to create a bridge interface, you can't do it from the UI, it will not work properly. Also you can't pass the GPU to the VM, because Truenas for some reson needs a GPU to run?

[@headrushE]

Great video - this made me pull out my old r520 and fill 'er up lol

[@comp20B]

I use both since they each have their strong points, which you covered really well. TrueNAS -> Extremely important or data needing high-performance (photos and videos etc) UNRAID -> non-critical data or data not requiring high-performance (plex media files)

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Wow I am seeing that I am not alone in this trend and thats really cool. Can I ask... do you use proxmox at all?

[@comp20B]

@@DigitalSpaceport I've toyed with proxmox but I don't currently use it. I use unraid for all things docker. And I use Windows Server HYPERV for all my VM's. I also stick with all Dell server hardware.

[@AlyredV2]

This is what I had set up until recently. I found I was using my TrueNAS Scale less and less, and the complexity of VM and rolling out containers were frustrating enough that I'm currently moving my TrueNAS server to Unraid 6.12.1. Yes, the speed isn't quite as fast (though a lot of that can be mitigated by using fast, large NVME cache drives), but the power saving features are nice as they don't have to keep all the drives running 24/7 due to the array configuration. With the new RaidZ pools, I'll be storing my important data on SSD Cache. Otherwise, for corporate rollouts with huge drive arrays or where I need Kubernetes, TrueNAS Scale is definitely my choice.

[@skaterpunk0187]

Pretty good video, and does show good differences. Though you did say comparing zfs to zfs but that's not really true. The drives in unRAID were formatted to zfs but unRAID really uses shfs (traditional unRAID array). Shfs allows the cache to be used first then moved to the array later. Disk shares can be enabled and the cache drive can be shared. You will get full throughput on a 10GBE writing directly to the cache share. It does require a but more effort. If you want to mover to work correctly the same directory format, I don't recommend this method unless for very advanced users. A true zfs to zfs in unRAID add the drives to a new pool after the drives are added to the pool click the pool options and you'll get the zfs options you want (like Truenas) riadz, raidz2, etc. They both have their uses. I upgraded from dual xeon to and epyc I love all those pci-e lanes.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah I realized after the fact that ZFS was pool only in the current version of Unraid (correction benchmarking video in works) and SHFS while cool does always have that userspace performance hit thats pretty big. Im planning on using the 40gbit nics in the next video so we are not just up against the wall of 10gbit nics 😀 100% agree the name EPYC describes these chips capabilities perfectly.

[@0bsmith0]

Only TrueNAS Core.

[@temp50]

All I can see in Unraid's app list is security holes. Sorry to say that but if something is "easy to set up" or "fancy" usually means a security problem as well.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I'm genuinely curious to learn more. Which apps are security holes?

[@Tecnoc22]

I would strongly disagree for most users. Software that is easy to set up and keep updated is ideal. If they have to do some complicated setup they are probably going to follow some guide to maybe get it running, and then never touch it again or update it because it is working.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah this person didn't come back and list even a single "security hole" app, let alone a list. UnRaid is very good for end users looking to have a simple setup that's easy to maintain.

[@AkTheQ]

Neither. Proxmox already has ZFS filesystem (same as Truenas) which can be used directly. No additional software needed to be installed. As for the filesystem itself, ZFS is easily superior after the Raidz expansion comes.

[@Whitefeather008]

Just so you know iDRAC 7 supports virtual media. No need to burn a cd or make a usb stick, you can just mount the iso in the web console, you can even set the boot order.

[@ElementalITcc]

you are running the file move test in unraid while it is performing a parity sync, you are not writing to ARC - but straight to cache disk (and you formatted the cache btfs)... seems fair. lol. I will say the out of the box performance greatly favors truenas... All the "but you have to do x" in unraid so it has the same transfer speed is not something a new user will know.

[@rwiersema]

I'm team both, depending on the situation. I use TrueNas to run my family cloud on 2 identical machines in different locations. I run UnRaid for my 'large media files' and VM's/Containers and chuck all my older drives in there.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yes Linux ISO storage is particularly good with UnRaid I find.

[@waynefong5960]

I’m team Debian and mdadm. Why mdadm u might ask? Nothing special, it’s just that I’m more familiar with it and I have backup strategies.

[@UdoHartmann]

Neither of them, Team Proxmox :) I did some tests with TrueNAS, ans UnRAID, though. 1. TrueNAS can be used free of charge. I'm not aware of an option not to pay for a legally used UnRAID (and you'll have to pay more for more Disks...) 2. UnRAID is able to build Data pools out of a bunch of Disks, where TrueNAS (and Proxmox as well) need Disks of the same size (or at least the pools built with zfs will only use the smallest disk size over all disks used in an array). 3. ZFS has other benefits, especially when it comes to snapshots and remote backup. To get frequent snapshots is a no-brainer with zfs. To get pull replica of your datasets or zvols, is essentially two lines of code (or simply use ready-to-use scripts as for auto-snapshot). It's all about data integrity and to fight against data loss. So, it highly depends on your needs, which one you will chose :)

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah snapshots are amazing with ZFS as a result of COW

[@RobertnJackieTownley]

ZFS keeps ChangeBlockTracking that keeps a list of disk blocks that have changed. That means sync can compare list of changed blocks to remote list of CBT to know the blocks to send without actually reading the disk to compare. Much faster even for encrypted drives. ZFS encrypts each block separately so the cbt list is the same. Just wish xcp-ng and XEN api took advantage of that.

[@billc.riemers3245]

I'm not really interested in a parity solution. That means if a disk fails, your array is down until the array can be rebuilt. But TOS 5 has RAID T. And Btrfs has a modified Raid 1 solution that can mirror different sized drives. I don't know how RAID T works, but the BTRFS system works simply by making sure each and every file exists on at least two devices. So no matter which device goes off line, you still have your data in your live running system. TrueNAS does not support anything quite like this. Does Unraid support something similar? For my immediate needs I have an F4-423 arriving today. I am still trying to decide how to populate it. I have a mixture of 8TB and 17 TB drives available. I need at least 20 TB of disk space available. And I will have a 1 TB nvme I can use for caching, or storing items like the plex database that really benefit from read/write speeds. My primary initial case is just simple file shares, and plex. But that may change quickly as I begin to take advantage of other things the hardware can do.

[@durtaii250]

Gotta say thanks for thus video it tells me I need to run both. Not getting what I want out of just one of them

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I feel the same way exactly

[@haydenc2742]

Do an Unraid/TrueNAS "IN" PROXMOX virtual with passthru... This way you can have a NAS inside your virtualization hypervisor! Very great video and howto...I use both..well mostly UNRaid...but have both a baremetal TrueNAS Scale and a virtual TrueNAS in PROXMOX on an older machine with a 4x passthru to SSD's... Keep em coming!!!!

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I have ran both virtualized IN proxmox in the past. TrueNAS I am not sure its a good idea to however but UnRAID is A OK running like that. It is probably better with like a V4 Intel XEON vs what I had used for TrueNAS. UnRAID is my fun box. TrueNAS makes me money.

[@williamtopping]

I would advise against TrueNAS in a virtual server with passthrough drives. I cannot speak about UnRaid, that may be different due to the nature of Unraid. There is a good number of stability issues with regards to doing this. Also you can kiss goodbye to certain functionality of TrueNAS (migrating pools, etc) due to fact it's not actually directly connected to the drives. What I'm saying that is if you will be stuck with whatever setup you have with a virtual TrueNAS on that machine. With bare metal TrueNAS you could migrate to a larger/biger machine, or even cluster if you're on bare metal. Of course this might be out of the scope for what you're saying. But even home users will be upgrading the current server machine at some point. It's THEN you realise it's a bad idea.

[@ronsafranic5177]

You didn't even mention the reason I chose Unraid for my server. Not all of us can afford to do a server build with a half dozen or so 22TB hard drives at one time! Unraid will let you create an array where every disk is a different size and down the road you can expand the array in just about any way you wish! The only modifications you can do to a TrueNAS array expand your storage is to create another array!

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Okay excellent point! I forgot that was actually a big reason I got into UnRaid at first also. The flexible scale up is indeed very nice.

[@christopherhunt147]

Team Unraid. I can actually use it. I can't seem to wrap my head around Truenas. Unraid fills all my needs. I have tried and continue to try to learn Truenas but they really need to work on ease of use. Unraid is super easy. I get Truenas is more corporate type NAS but.. Not all of us are "It" team memebers. I am just a home user. OMV works well too. There are others that work. As far as my opinion to which is better?? The one you can use and are comfortable with that fills your needs. Neither one will do any good if you can't use it.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

This is probably one of the most important metrics. What you like using. It is interesting the user interfaces are drastically different for each. I do like the speed of checkbox and multiselect you get with Truenas for disk selection, maybe we get that some day with unraid.

[@christopherhunt147]

@@DigitalSpaceport I think the disk selection is because Unraid isn't raid where as Truenas is. They just work different.

[@technerd9655]

Watching this, and my experience with Unraid is the total opposite, I can't wrap my head around it, managing the storage arrays is totally confusing, needing to install apps just to browse the storage from the webui is totally insane to me (not sure if this is the case with TrueNAS also). I find Unraid not user friendly at all!

[@chrishorton444]

Team Truenas I have close to 300 drives between one scale and one core servers.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

252 drives here on a single scale. Runs great and doesnt need attention often.

[@mhotter22]

I can’t even afford to watch this 😮

[@DigitalSpaceport]

LOLOL

[@AlNemec]

I am team unraid. I love the apps and how it handles docker but the biggest reason is that its so much easier to build an array out of a variety of different sized disks and change and add to them throughout the life of your NAS.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

dual parity made UnRAID viable imo for important data and yeah that app store for docker is amazing. Thanks for commenting!

[@cluelessfish]

For me its truenas as I do not wanna run my os of nan flash ewwww but an 1 up on truenas is unrade you can mix and match drives of diff sizes having to have drives all the same is a annoying peve

[@RiffyDevine]

Just a question but that server as you have it setup if just sat in a rack by itself, how loud would you say it is just doing normal NAS tasks?

[@DigitalSpaceport]

The R520 can be IPMI tuned to adjust fan speeds to whatever you want, so it can be very quiet. I had an R720 in a rack in a closet in a work studio about 10 ft from me and had the fans set to 20% static. Was barely audible. The loadout with cards, ram, cpu will dictate what is a safe level to run the fans at.

[@AtanasPaunoff]

FreeNAS user for many years and I am using TrueNAS Core now... Didn't get a reason to migrate to TreNAS Scale which you tried in the video.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I dont think there is a reason to migrate. I was installing new and scale seems like it gets a lot of their focus now. I also like that as a more standard debian base I am likely to get better support for any cards I want to add in.

[@chrishorton444]

Scale allows gpu pass through, which core doesn’t. Truecharts makes adding apps much easier than creating jails on core.

[@nathanacreman632]

Defintely a Truenas scale guy, especially now that they are implementing docker itll have so much more app support. Its definitely a bit of a steep learning curve, but its amazing once it works

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Im very excited for their docker integration!

[@HappyfoxBiz]

what would be nice is if you can have a text file that can be read on the same USB stick to assist in setup whether it's unattended or "I REALLY don't want to bother with these settings so I will set this up and leave it to prompt me about the security questions when it arises" The ease of use can vary from "harder daddy..." all the way to "let's do a survey so my server can better handle me" and with those there can be easier UI designs or even websites saying "hey, you can backup your text file here" because... it would probably only fill a SQL query... OMG I used to just host a lot in SQL because the webhost said "you get 50MB storage... but unlimited SQL"

[@DigitalSpaceport]

A text config driven, storage focused OS. That is a really good idea actually and would likely smoke on performance. YAML is all the rage now.

[@ap90033]

Bad memory chipset huh? I'm wondering if you ran proper memory tests etc? That massive server you have there I would definitely do ECC. But for a lowly home user it's not going to have dozens of drives and hundreds of gigs of ram they will be fine with solid quality ram

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Its not about quality of ram. Errors happen, randomly, for many causes and reasons later in a chips life even if it starts out great. Are you running RAM tests all the time? Unlikely. What is running RAM tests all the time? ECC ram of course. Size doesnt matter either, not at all. 100's of TB vs just a few. My photos that got corrupted amounted to like 60 gigs. Its the value of that data, which to me was high. My Mini dell tower that corrupted data didnt do it day 1, It happened years after I owned it. Now ZFS is going to be better vs most others as it checksums the data once its on the disk and snapshots can recover anything damaged later, but there is the initial inflight to the host machine and if corruption happens then, well you have checksummed damaged data. Its not a dig at any user, its an industry problem. Non ecc ram shouldn't exist as its a bad product probe to cause issues. That's not my words, that's Linus Torvalds words. I do agree its unlikely avg users are unlikely to go ecc, but that doesn't mean its a good idea.

[@AidenPryde3025]

So, a couple things. 1. You didn't set up a ZFS pool in Unraid... instead you set them up as individual ZFS disks (I can tell because they are part of the Array Devices), which would use RAM as cache. 2. You didn't set up your Unraid shares to use the Intel Nvme as cache. I can tell, because you would be getting 1GB/s+ writes if you did.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yes indeed I did a correction video and hit some much much better speeds. kzbin.info/www/bejne/aWfQoIeNmd2dpKs

[@layol692k7]

really i am fantastic video I def enjoyed it. But for me I am going unraid for a smaller home server for storage because of ease of use

[@DigitalSpaceport]

It's a very fun storage OS, your going to enjoy it!

[@kenyakking]

If both use ZFS, why is truenas more reliable for data?🤔 Also wish you covered reliability...e.g. if you have two truenas or unraid servers clustered and one goes down, will your services and data survive?

[@DigitalSpaceport]

When looking at the main array in Unraid, they have their own parity calculation thing they are doing. I didnt use the pools ZFS which I should have done in hindsight to get a more accurate picture of the situation. On first glance however creating sets of mirrors looks to be the extent of the layout possibilities for Unraids ZFS implimentation. You have a much wider amount of configurations available with Truenas/bare metal that would allow for ridiculous levels of security with your data in more pure ZFS arrangements. While those would be wasteful to a homelabber, businesses or professionals may need to go that route. Cluster Unraid and Truenas is not something I have tried, as I use proxmox for my main services and it has very good built in clustering. There will be a lot more on high availability, backups, and failover in the next few weeks on this channel so stay tuned.

[@kenyakking]

@@DigitalSpaceport their 2 drive parity sounded like zraid2? (Aka loss of two drives is ok) ZFS definitely has more support but seems like it's enough for most prosumer cases...the big speed difference is concerning though. Looking forward to more HA testing.

[@amateurwizard]

Show me a TrueNAS server with 150TB total (13 disks, 2 M.2) that runs at 54W, & with people using it for Plex runs at 70W. I love TrueNAS & UnRAID but an efficient 24/7 home server does a high performance server OS not make.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Energy efficient criteria would be interesting, but I think you are spot on. Rolling your own likely makes more sense. Good topic idea!

[@amateurwizard]

@@DigitalSpaceport I made a post about it on Level1Techs forum that you might find interesting. I tried posting a link but KZbin did not like that 👁👁

[@cobra64th21]

That's nice but that low power consumption is due to shitty hardware. A home built truenas, unraid server will wipe the floor with symbology or qnap.

[@HeathenInfidel]

I used TrueNAS Scale for about a year before defecting to Unraid. You're right - Unraid wins, but It should also be equal in performance if you fix your pool config. I don't know why you used it whole drive for parity and set the pool to ZFS, which already stripes the parity across the pool! In Unraid 6, use a flash drive as a token array drive (you don't even need that for Unraid 7), then use raid-z1 for single disk or z2 for 2 disk parity and you should be back to full speed.

[@krypton8784]

Team Blue

[@Kasjo87]

Create a ZFS Pool in unraid like it should be done.. compare again ;) I guess unraid will gain a point here two. ZFS in a Array setup makes not much sense. ZFS Pool instead brings you the same Speed as TrueNAS + the benefits. Array and Pool setup are two totally different ways of using unraid and you can do both!

[@moebius2k103]

You didn't change the cache drive to ZFS, it formatted as BTRFS. That's why you didn't get the benefit of RAM cache. It was just writing to the SSD at its native speed. The array was formatted as ZFS but that is the secondary location which only matters when the mover task is invoked.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

yeah I did address that in the second video, but there were additional points that need to be cleared up folks have pointed me to so there will be a dedicated UnRAID video on all this soonish.

[@DickyBenfield]

@DigitalSpaceport I would love to see a revisit of the zfs comparison once Unraid 7 is released.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Okay. That sounds cool

[@phonatic]

Nice video! It's team 🔵for me. Just migrated to TrueNAS CORE from my 10 y/o Synology this month after three weeks of testing. Except for the hard drives and the frame, everything was build from old hardware. Since I only a need a reliable, local storage with native encryption and NFS share, not much beyond that, I could have easily chosen unRAID as well. Although I am currently playing with team red on an older Xeon E3, unRAID's requirement for pre-clearing previously used drives is somewhat getting on my nerves. Expansion flexibility has it's appeal, though.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Its a chicken and egg with preclear. You can skip it, but you better trust those drives! Mix and match HDDs is indeed awesome stuff.

[@MikeDent]

I couldn’t tell if all the extra ram in the server made a big difference for true nas?

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah I have never been fully sold that ARC on dual socket systems is all that. Theoretically it should be, but writes performance never get to what I think it should be. I need to test a single socket more modern processor like an epyc.

[@patrickprafke4894]

If you know how to trick it. A Samsung 950 pro has built in bios firmware it gives your motherboard bios for "generic nvme drivers" to boot from. It's why I stil own 6 of them.

[@vstockwell]

Team Orange with Custom Ubuntu build out - all Cli no gui baby. ZFS, Docker, Plex, and all the trimmings.

[@MrThereal1]

Team Unraid running inside of Proxmox!! Best of both worlds! #teamunraid

[@DigitalSpaceport]

UnRAID runs great inside Proxmox! There will be a surprise VM when I do my Proxmox tour video 😃

[@MrThereal1]

@@DigitalSpaceport The only issue I have with Unraid inside of proxmox is that my SSD pool that is ZFS gets stolen by proxmox even with the HBA passed through to Unraid. Looking forward to that video!

[@cluelessfish]

Wouldnt it be much smoother proformance running of an SSD/NVME instead of an flash drive wouldnt it be better cloning the flash drive to an actual hdd and run like that really should be an option to install to an ssd

[@Sullrosh]

in unraid adding more drives to the cache will speed it up

[@puta1082]

TrueNAS from FreeNAS days. I have a customer I droppped a FreeNAS box in about 5 years ago, they are mental and have not had me do any maintence at all. But I know from a worker there, it is still kicking.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah BSD is king class stability

[@odedia]

I wonder if trying to install the virtual machines and/or docker apps with the 1M block size was the source of the issues? Ideally you'd want to have the apps and virtual machines on a separate vdev, preferably using SSDs.

[@alexmiller7879]

The big thing for me is using mixed drive sizes, and future expansion All things Unraid is great at. I know you can expand using ZFS, but it's a pain in the ass. I use Truenas for daily VM backups. And I love how easy it is to back everything up to your cloud services. In addition to that, it's a lot better at keeping a synced offsite clone as well. I use Unraid for my ever-expanding media library because it's easy to chuck in a new drive, and I am not so worried about losing my media. My conclusion. Unraid for play and expandability. Truenas for anything important, like backups.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Yeah I forgot to mention how awesome that is for UnRAID and it really is a killer feature.

[@vankor]

Meanwhile here I am using OpenMediaVault in my simple and tiny Odroid HC4 NAS in my beginner homelab.

For me as home user is really big deal, to grow datasets in time. So I think for unraid is btrfs option. In true nas grow pool is hard it i buy 2 more disks. I think I can do that only if I do mirror drives in pool no raidz. And for home lab it is really hard to think all that struff from begining

[@germanmosca]

For me it's soon going to be both. A "small" NAS with 4 drives will run UnRaid. And the "large" one will run TrueNAS with 4 drives, which eventually will be extendet to 16.

If you get a crash or power failure, will all the data you think you moved be gone on TruaNAS because of the RAM cache? (you might have said it, but I watched the video in a noisy environment)

[@DigitalSpaceport]

No the DATA is transmitted in a txg group and committed directly to disk from RAM constantly. The amount "in flight" between ram and disk is limited by default by a setting called SYNC which in its default state, replies to the calling system/application a successful data transmission only when data is at the disk. Only if you explicitly set that to disabled is data in ram in a non disk backed state. You could then have data in flight damaged, but when you restart the machine it looks for the txg group it had last and will continue writing. That is not terrible if your storing say a static file, however it's potentially catastrophic if you are storing a VM or Database. Hence don't disable sync unless you have a very good reason and know the risks... Which now you do.

[@jeffreyrh]

Does TrueNAS have anything similar to UNRAID's Unattached Devices app. Or in other words, can you 'mount' an SMB remote share within TrueNAS like you can with UNRAIDs Unattached Devices?

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I have not seen that in the GUI, but have not looked for it. You could do it from the CLI but that's not ideal for most folks. I'll check for upcoming video on it.

[@philosoaper]

did you pick an ISO for the VM? did not look like it..... after less than 3 months in "nuxworld.. While this is my first "homelab" of any kind.. I tend to jump into the deep end.. so I'll stick to TrueNas I think...

[@wizdude]

Bro. With your unraid build, you didn’t let the parity disk complete building. It shows that on the disk page and warned you that the parity was failed. You are losing disk I/O performance until this has completed. By the looks of it that will take around 24 hours.

[@GeneralAlgren]

Unraid if you want to do more with virtualization/ dockers. Truenas if you’re more focused on data integrity and file/block performance. I also think truenas is a bit easier to setup. Kinda like an iOS vs Android situation 😅

[@fieryscorpion]

I love iOS, so which one is iOS here? Unraid or TrueNAS?

[@basdfgwe]

I dont know why but I don't know why you would want to run applications/vms on your nas. I'd like to keep the nas seperated from my other servers that run the applications (understanding that some may not be able to afford the price of having multiple machines). I do wish you placed more importance on array setups.

[@Adam130694]

UnRAID went subscription way, screw that...

[@DigitalSpaceport]

It's.....expensive. like more than I thought it would be.

[@TheKetsa]

Why did you skip the actual unraid OS installation ? Went from craeting USB key to html dashboard ...

[@Tecnoc22]

You don't really do an install with unraid. That USB key is the boot drive, and the server will boot off of that every time.

[@HomeSysAdmin]

I watched the whole thing and, as someone who uses neither, it was very interesting to see the details of both. 1) TrueNAS seems to have a much better user interface while Unraid just looks old/dated. 2) I like that we have solutions that make the setup and management super easy, but I also feel that can be a downside. By using easy point-and-click GUIs you don't gain insight into how the technology works behind the scenes - such as building arrays with mdadm (or zfs), partitioning, configuring Samba for your network shares, managing permissions with ACLs, etc. Perhaps I don't fit the criteria of your typical TrueNAS user, or maybe it's just me being me, not sure. 3) I don't understand why someone would want to run a virtual machine or dockers inside a NAS. It just seems like those two activities should be separate? It's neat that it has Grafana and Plex apps to easily install, but again, point #2 about managing and learning those. 4) Your comment about "what are you doing if you don't care about the data" made me laugh as we each have Petabytes of Chia plots that if we loose them, don't care just replot LOL Love these types of videos! 🙂

[@DigitalSpaceport]

I think you are a CLI junkie. I know one when I see one 😉

[@HomeSysAdmin]

@@DigitalSpaceport Maybe lol, but anything Linux is all command-line at work. I'd be curious how that compares to other medium to large enterprises. Maybe I/we are unique in that regard. I can see TrueNAS being an perfect solution for the typical small business though.

[@HomeSysAdmin]

@@DigitalSpaceport However, I hate to admit this, but I'm currently reloading my 500+ Bluray catalog to Plex after a mistake that resulted in a loss of my media array LOL. So there are tradeoff's as well.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

@@HomeSysAdmin OMG reripping them? That's a lotta ripping!

[@HomeSysAdmin]

@@DigitalSpaceport Yeah... I have 2 drives now though so it's going much faster than before. Lesson learned - basically the superblock on 2/3 drives got overwritten with a prior GPT table when I changed controllers due to not wiping them properly I guess. Then my recovery attempt destroyed it further 😂 Ooops.

[@jimmyscott5144]

Unraid vs CasaOS

[@michaelgiggsgilligan]

A little disappointed with this video, it is in no way a zfs to zfs comparison based on the latest unraid features. The understanding of how Unraid works is clearly lacking and makes this video essentially misleading. While you can format the array drives with zfs, you can't setup the array as a zfs vdev. If your wanted to do a good comparison, you should have used a few of the drives in a zfs cache pool and a few in the array allowing speed and future expansion (a pro compared to truenas). Outright performance Truenas is definitely better but the new zfs pools in unraid give some great benefits and this was totally missed in this video.

[@DigitalSpaceport]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/hqCzfYqlosZrrLc Yes that is all mostly correct what you said and even more testing is in the works on UnRAID specifically to try to get the most out of its ZFS setup. I did mention I was just using their ZFS implementation for the first time during the video and they might make things clearer with some extra verbiage for the end user to avoid this likely common trap. 100% perf win for TrueNAS (or bare metal) ZFS. I also ran if through FUSE shares so that didnt help performance any either.

[@BloodyIron]

14:37, ZFS' ARC (the caching you speak of) does NOT accelerate writes, it is READ acceleration. That is an inaccurate representation of how that operates. The most common way to accelerate writes with ZFS is to move the ZIL aspect for a zpool to faster storage devices like SSDs, and/or in the cases where it makes sense, disable sync writes for the zpool and/or dataset. The ARC (RAM in this case) again does NOT accelerate writes as you describe at this timestamp.

[@BloodyIron]

Additionally, the "limit" or "MAX" memory usage for this caching is _factually_ not 50%. That may be the default setting for TrueNAS Scale at certain versions, but it is a setting you can change, and ZFS is actually designed for the ability to define the ARC memory usage limit upwards and/or downwards as desired. So no, again, you're actually wrong when you say 50% is the max that you _can_ use for ZFS caching (ARC). Starting to see a lack of research on the topic on your end more and more now...

[@DigitalSpaceport]

No the RAM does receive the write first for async and spools it off to other storage systems. www.45drives.com/community/articles/zfs-caching/

[@DigitalSpaceport]

Unless a user tunes their config it's the max that will be used. Your inaccurate statement earlier on ARC writes might point to a different problem here as well...

[@BloodyIron]

@@DigitalSpaceport That RAM usage does not constitute ARC, which is what part of what I was clarifying on. ARC operates in a separate area of RAM. So my statement is still factual, that ARC does not accelerate writes. The "spooling off" as you refer does not happen, as TXGs to disk do not automatically go into ARC. And again, the "ZFS Cache" displayed in the timestamp referred to is referring to ARC, not TXG. So yeah, my statement is accurate.