Starting TrueNAS Core/TrueNAS Scale for New Users

[Kegler]

Can check out the first page of the thread.

Standard recommendation:

• Get a low powered CPU
• Get a motherboard with as many SATA ports ad possible
• Get a motherboard with multiple intel NICs
• Get as much memory as you can afford
• Get 2x SSD (mirror) as boot drive.
• Use SSD as ZLOG if running VMs
• Get an efficient PSU if running 24/7
• Get a UPS with USB communication port to safely shut down your NAS during power lost
• Get a casing with multiple hot swap bay. Always get more bays than you need.

Sorry forgot to mention
My priority is vm so I don’t think Low power cpu works well
Should I go for 5700g? Or intel 12th gen
Any suggestion on mb?

 

[TanKianW]

Sorry forgot to mention
My priority is vm so I don’t think Low power cpu works well
Should I go for 5700g? Or intel 12th gen
Any suggestion on mb?

The 8th gen 8700T (6C, 12T) at 25W on my NAS is pretty capable of running VMs. Unless your VMs are really intensive.

Personally, if my priority are VMs, I prefer running dedicated hypervisor rig. Then point the (NFS/iSCSI) storage to the hypervisor.

I have not build any NAS system recently using AM4 or 12th gen Intel. But If I have to choose, I will go with 12th gen.

Since I have not build any storage (NAS) system based on this two types of sockets, kind of hard to recommend you a certain mobo. I recommend you to look at offerings from SuperMicro or Asrock Rack, or any OTS motherboard with lots of SATA ports.​

 

[Kegler]

The 8th gen 8700T (6C, 12T) at 25W on my NAS is pretty capable of running VMs. Unless your VMs are really intensive.

Personally, if my priority are VMs, I prefer running dedicated hypervisor rig. Then point the (NFS/iSCSI) storage to the hypervisor.

I have not build any NAS system recently using AM4 or 12th gen Intel. But If I have to choose, I will go with 12th gen.

Since I have not build any storage (NAS) system based on this two types of sockets, kind of hard to recommend you a certain mobo. I recommend you to look at offerings from SuperMicro or Asrock Rack, or any OTS motherboard with lots of SATA ports.​

I’m actually looking at ASRock x570d4i-2t and fits all my want/needs but seems like not easily available.

 

[TanKianW]

I’m actually looking at ASRock x570d4i-2t and fits all my want/needs but seems like not easily available.

This the motherboard I will get when I retire my 3700X. And definitely go with ECC.

 

[Kegler]

This the motherboard I will get when I retire my 3700X. And definitely go with ECC.

seems unavailable anywhere…. Only saw the matx on Newegg but matx too big

 

[TanKianW]

seems unavailable anywhere…. Only saw the matx on Newegg but matx too big

You can look on Taobao, which is not cheap.

If you do not need ECC, I will just go with any OTS mobo.

If you do need ECC, there are actually OTS mobo out there that support ECC by some vendors, especially Asus. You need to do some research. Not sure if it will work with 5000 series APU, it was said that 4000 PRO APU series can do it (Eg. 4750 PRO), so long mobo vendor supports it.

 

[TanKianW]

*UPDATED On Post #5*

**TrueNAS: Backup Immutability and Hardening**

Video Tutorial: Good backup practices on TrueNAS

There are several ways of backing up your data automatically on TrueNAS, which helps you to remove the “chores” of backing up your precious data. You can even set TrueNAS to inform you of unsuccessful backup task due to any mis-configuration or remote access settings screw ups. You can choose between replications task, cloud sync task, rsync, periodic snapshots or a combination of them. Below are examples of how you could backup your cloud sync (eg. Nextcloud on mobile) dataset and protect it against malware using TrueNAS Core/Scale.​

Good practices: Following the 3-2-1 rule of backing up data:

Backup Methods:
Periodic Snapshots (tasks) on the dataset to protect against Malware:

Snapshots Replication (tasks) to another (local) NAS system:

Auto copy data using rsync (tasks) to another (local) NAS:

Offsite backup (tasks) to Backblaze B2:

 

[TanKianW]

**GOOD WATCH: Why hardware RAID and conventional RAID (5/6) is a bad idea!**

Why hardware RAID and the G-RAID (GPU for RAID) is a bad idea (LTT had a review recently). It speeds up RAID, yes, it also stop telling you when there are errors, which is a big no no. Wendell also explained why convention RAID 5/6 (even on Linux) is not good. If you are really serious with data integrity, software RAID is the future and ZFS should be your "go-to" file system for enterprise storage solutions.

The way Wendell puts it...

"ZFS has Paranoid levels of Paranoia....it is getting back from the block device (storage), what it gave to the block device. It doesn't trust the block device as far as it could throw it. That is a great philosophy".

He stressed again at the end, "RAID is not a Backup!" Somehow this just could not stick to most RAID users.

​

 

[TanKianW]

**A Different Path: Install TrueNAS on QNAP hardware**

Can’t say I don’t see this coming with all the recent and past security vulnerabilities of QNAP systems. Who knows, as Synology continues with their exclusive and meaningless hardware lock in, this will soon be the inevitable for all OTS NAS systems. With TrueNAS Scale (on Linux) nearing its production release, the NAS vendors just fails to see what is coming their way. If QNAP takes the leap of faith to OSS, this will create competition and more choices for consumers. It will become like buying OTS routers and flashing it to a more advanced and better supported/documented version of OpenWRT.
​

 

[hairymonster]

**A Different Path: Install TrueNAS on QNAP hardware**

Can’t say I don’t see this coming with all the recent and past security vulnerabilities of QNAP systems. Who knows, as Synology continues with their exclusive and meaningless hardware lock in, this will soon be the inevitable for all OTS NAS systems. With TrueNAS Scale (on Linux) nearing its production release, the NAS vendors just fails to see what is coming their way. If QNAP takes the leap of faith to OSS, this will create competition and more choices for consumers. It will become like buying OTS routers and flashing it to a more advanced and better supported/documented version of OpenWRT.
​

The qnap firmware can be considered oss. A few years back, OS security has been successfully reversed engineered. Any x86 main boards can be installed with qnap firmware. Updating of firmware is as easy as clicking update firmware in the webgui. All qnap services such as ddns, myqnapcloud will be accessible to the user.

Pick your own hardware and DIY a QNAP

 

[TanKianW]

** GOOD WATCH: TrueNAS Permission, Access Control and Shares (SMB Shadow Copies)**

A good watch to the new users as well as the old-timers who are still puzzled by the ACL Permission and Access control on TrueNAS. This video also covered my favorite SMB Shadow Copies which could easily help you roll back on any deleted files on your SMB share via the "snapshots" function of ZFS on TrueNAS. For those who constantly gotten yourself lock out from your dataset, do watch this.​

 

[TanKianW]

**UPDATE: TrueNAS Core 13 Released: New Features and Changes**

"TrueNAS Scale is cool, but TrueNAS Core 13 isn't gone". Personally, I am still using core over scale in my production environment. Core is still geared towards stability, reliability and performance which works great if you point several storage (iSCSI) to run and backup multiple hypervisor/VMs in intensive production environments. I have been testing TrueNAS Core 13 beta and not running into any problem till the official release. For homelab users, you can give it a shot. But for critical production environment, you should wait for later RC releases. Scale is still experiencing some "teething" problem which sees impact to its performance, which is why I have not been actively promoting it....yet..

​

 

[TanKianW]

**Benchmarks: TrueNAS Core 12 & 13 VS TrueNAS Scale**​

 

[TanKianW]

**CASUAL WATCH: LTT's Petabyte and Ultra FAST SSD Storage Server On TrueNAS Core & ZFS**

LTT's Petabyte and Ultra fast (nVMe) SSD storage server project using TrueNAS Core (highlighted that Scale is "not yet production"), ZFS and probably some replication/Rsync tasks to do auto duplication/backup of storage data between the 2 servers. Finally they are trying to do this right which is likely due to Jake's decisions, by sticking to the "10 drives" vdevs soft limit, RaidZ2 and a hot-spare.

BTW, the server is for another Youtuber using it to store their Minecraft game streams.​

 

[lobukong]

Great post! Thank you for sharing.
I have a question, is it a good idea to install both pfSense and trueNAS on the same PC? So by purchasing a 4*1Gbps NIC, the router+NAS machine may have a download speed of >1Gbps without the need of a 10G switch.

 

[TanKianW]

Great post! Thank you for sharing.
I have a question, is it a good idea to install both pfSense and trueNAS on the same PC? So by purchasing a 4*1Gbps NIC, the router+NAS machine may have a download speed of >1Gbps without the need of a 10G switch.

For fun, why not?

For actual use, a bad idea.

 

[TanKianW]

*UPDATED on Post #2

Update old FreeNAS installation video to latest installation steps for TrueNAS Core:


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Budget build:

 

[TanKianW]

**UPDATES: TrueNAS Scale 22 02 2 Release Notes and Benchmarks VS TrueNAS Core**

The more adventurous home-lab people can give this updated version a try/test. There are several major updates and improvement. It is better, but take note that it is still not ready for production (even for Docker), and still comes with some performance penalty on some applications. If you are using a dedicated hypervisor machine with TrueNAS storage (NFS, iSCSI) mapped, Core is still the clear choice.

Release Notes here: https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scalereleasenotes/#22022​

Benchmark here: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2206237-NE-TRUENASJU43