DIY NAS on a BUDGET! with TrueNAS Scale

[@boyy2411]

One of the best new channels, definitely worth a subscription!!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thank you!

[@RyanGrange]

DHCP is fine for client systems, but I highly recommend you use static IPs for any servers (like NAS) you're going to use on your network.

[@Jims-Garage]

I agree, I use a static IP with local DNS entry. I covered how to do that in my previous video on PiHole (trying to do these in order so people can build a Homelab).

[@snowpoked]

Great content, Jim! Looking forward to go deeper into TrueNAS Scale - this is the most approachable intro I’ve seen on the subject so far.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, let me know if you have any further questions. Happy to help.

[@Wiiownyou]

Very helpful video, I just used it to understand how to mount a folder shared via smb in CasaOS to my raspberry pi for an arr stack

[@Jims-Garage]

@@Wiiownyou thanks, glad it was useful

[@darrenoleary5952]

Hey! Not related to the video content, but rather something I just noticed in the background of this video... your Hells500 jersey! Along with the founder of Hells500 (Andy Van Bergen), I was one of the original crew, regularly riding with them over several years on the climbs in Victoria's high country (7 Peaks Challenge), accompanying them on many of their other groups rides and several of the original Everesting challenges as a "domestique". Well done on completing an Everesting! It's more than I could ever manage during my time in the saddle.

[@Jims-Garage]

Ahh wow, that's cool 😎 yes, it was a tough challenge but a great achievement. I'm a little off that level of performance these days 😂

[@mdhurrtn]

Thank you so much. I have been wresting with "Permission Denied" with shares on a synology nas and an ubuntu server vm. Your formatting of the fstab file is the answer I needed. Thanks.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@mdhurrtn you're welcome 😁

[@seeblu]

thanks for linking this to that one person in that one reddit thread 6 months ago

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, you're welcome. I have an updated build in more recent videos.

[@BoraHorzaGobuchul]

Adding drives may be not so simple afterwards. You do need hardware with sufficient number of ports, and, more importantly, zfs makes it impractical to add drives of various sizes, like you can easily do in unraid. All this rigmalore with vdevs, particularly if you're doing anything else then mirrors. Also, there's proverbial questions - do you want to run zfs on non-ecc ram, and what is the proper balance between cpu power usage and performance, which may be needed for deduplication and such

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks for your comment, I agree with all of what you said, however, this is aimed at beginner's looking to build their first NAS, on cheap hardware with some of those caveats called out. I do stress that an off-site is important to give you that 3-2-1 solution. I will be following up on this video at a later date with a more 'professional' setup that touches on many of the more advanced features and considerations you mention (I've been through that process when creating my own NAS).

[@christopherjames9843]

Low key British guy. As opposed to most of us Americans. Makes me relax lol!

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, thanks. Be sure to check out my latest NAS video if you have a healthier budget.

[@JoerBrando]

You should have mentioned that TrueNAS works best with Intel NICs, had a lot of issues previously with other manufacturers.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@JoerBrando also chelsio (recommended) and mellanox

[@JoerBrando]

@@Jims-Garage haven’t tried, will keep those in mind. Love your channel, keep up the great work. 👍🏻

[@Jims-Garage]

@@JoerBrando thanks, appreciate it

[@brazenintellect364]

It would be super if you can also do a video/review of Rockstor, which is another NAS appliance OS using BTRFS instead of ZFS. It has docker addons much like Unraid.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, I'll consider it

[@FilipeNeto616]

So there's no need to have hardware for raid? TrueNAS will mount the drives as RAID? Is it software RAID or did I miss something? Great channel you have. At the end of this series, for sure I'll boost my home-homelab!

[@Jims-Garage]

TrueNAS uses zfs which is software raid. There are many advantages to this solution, read up on zfs Vs hardware, it's interesting stuff. Thanks for feedback 🙂

[@berniesutton7277]

I've watched numerous videos 'explaining' how to install and setup Truesnas and this is, by far, the most useful, thank you. I'm wondering if this will allow me to share files remotely with someone who lives some distance from me?. Would they be able to setup as a user?

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks. That is certainly possible, you'd need to port forward the SMB ports. However, I don't recommend you do that directly due to security, you want a VPN. Checkout my WireGuard video first. Once they're on the VPN they can then connect as though they are local, whilst being secured through the VPN.

[@berniesutton7277]

@@Jims-Garage thanks for that. I'll have a look at your video 👍🙏

[@wiesawpeche7273]

Hi, I like your videos very much. Very informative and on spot on my home lab journey. There is one thing you might consider - dropping the “zooming”. This feature makes it harder to follow as the whole screen is not visible. Thanks and please keep up!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks for your feedback. I'll take it on board for future videos (very difficult to try and have everything lined up perfectly without moving - perhaps transitions would be better).

[@mikelaurie3850]

If one already has a proxmox based homelab is there advantage of doing this vs creating a zfs pool on proxmox and creating a share drive?

[@Jims-Garage]

Technically no, but I prefer the convenience of having a dedicated machine with TrueNAS, less to go wrong.

[@yourpcmd]

What if you want to access the share outside your network? Like if you are on your laptop and on vacation and need to work on a document, How would you do that?

[@Jims-Garage]

See my WireGuard and headscale videos.

[@ultravioletiris6241]

How are you virtualizing TrueNAS here without an HBA?

[@Jims-Garage]

You need a HBA to virtualise, or a sata controller that can be passed through.

[@wilsmith7173]

good work!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, Will.

[@thorstencole]

Very good Video. I like your channel very much and it´s easy to understand, but can you try to improve your sound? Your voice appears to be very silent and I have to crank up my speakers very much compared to other videos or KZbinrs. Thank you in advance

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks for the feedback, I will look into it.

[@demanuDJ]

I don't understand why are you putting truenas on proxmox? proxmox has native zfs support with even WebUI suport, you can build entire NAS webui in lxc container on top of it for example on Cockpit and entire storage is avaliable and managed by hypervisor and VMs directly, not via emulated NICs and NFS/iSCSI. For me Truenas is great but for bare metal, not for hypervisors which supporting ZFS by default.

[@Jims-Garage]

I think I mention in the video that I actually run TrueNAS as standalone on bare metal, and in other videos I've mentioned that you can do ZFS shares on Proxmox natively. I installed it in a VM as I didn't have a spare machine to deploy on, and to confirm that deploying in a VM is indeed a supported option that many people use. Some people prefer to just have all of the other benefits of TrueNAS in a simple VM (e.g., ACL, SMB, NFS etc - out of the box) rather than doing through Proxmox.

[@demanuDJ]

@@Jims-Garage Maybe I've missed it, sorry. Yeah its easer to run it like that but also its not good idea to passthrough drive controlers because in case of bug or failure there will be huge problem because entire ZFS management is in virtualized enviroment. For me better way is to let Proxmox manage ZFS and drive controlers and use WebUI like Cockpit or use VM like OpenMediaVault and give it access to ZFS Pool

[@Jims-Garage]

@@demanuDJ It's the exact reason why I have a dedicated server, less to go wrong IMO.

[@mamdouh-Tawadros]

Thank you.

[@Jims-Garage]

You're welcome!

[@InsaiyanTech]

quick question i have 3 14tb hdds and a whole bunch of 1tb ssds laying around what would be the best configure to try also. i had them in my windows pc and now i want to to add them to trueness would this delete my data on them i do have them backed up in backblaze but im just curious since im gong to set this up this week. just got all the hardware needed from your videos 4 port gig nic 1 10g nic and a switch. the truenas part im a little lost on though i do want to virtualize it the same as i want to do docker and my firewal.

[@Jims-Garage]

It's difficult with 3 drives and depends on how much risk you want to take. I generally recommend raidz2 which means 2 drives can fail, but you lose two drives worth of storage. So with 3x 14TB you'd only have 14TB usable... You could go raidz1 which would give you 28TB but if a drive fails and another fails during a resilver you'll have data loss. This can be somewhat offset if you have a good off site strategy. The SSDs might be better in a mirror if you want to store VMs on them and have better performance. Depends how many you have and what you want to do with them.

[@InsaiyanTech]

@@Jims-Garage ok I see what would be a optimal setup you would say with hdd’s I have about 5 1tb ssds. One more question as well lol sorry for badgering is there a way I can use backblaze to just back them up to the cloud just for a fail safe it’s what I was doing with them on my windows pc and it just runs 24/7 it was basically my offsite backup in a way I was wondering if I can do that with this if I go with raidz1.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@InsaiyanTech yes, check out my rClone video and just alter the provider to backblaze. I would go raidz2 with the HDD and probably 2 mirror for the 4 SSD.

[@InsaiyanTech]

@@Jims-Garage thanks for answering ima follow the advice I’ll go raidz2 and time to look into some rClone videos. I appreciate the help for real.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@InsaiyanTech no problem. You can always add more drives to the pool at a later date.

[@thespencerowen]

Thanks for this information. Can I recommend you normalize the audio? There are points where even at 100% volume I had a hard time hearing you.

[@Jims-Garage]

Appreciate the feedback. Hopefully this is resolved now (these were my very early videos).

[@jameskellam2980]

If raid is not backup, what good is it? Why not use the drives from raid for backup. You lost me here. Will type this into a search engine soon, just doesnt make sense with resilvering and all.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@jameskellam2980 raid is redundancy, it means a drive can fail and you still have the service (e.g. dual disk raid, 1 disk dies the other is still good). Backup is a separate set of drives or machine. Imagine a power surge or theft, the backup should still be available. The service will go down when raid fails, but the data can be restored from a backup.

[@jameskellam2980]

Now I get it. Backup is NOT on the machine you are backing up. I can see how that would be better. I think for me, there will be no need for raid except as a learning experiment.

[@adamtwo]

Hi

[@Jims-Garage]

/wave

[@mrq332]

wrong info on a mirror setup, you don't get performance of 2 disks in a mirror 16:45

[@Jims-Garage]

True, I should have said that you can see a performance increase to reads in some cases. Writes aren't affected.