Comment by gjulianm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjulianm | Hacker News Reader

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> - TrueNAS is more targeted towards enterprise applications. If you want good utility as a home user then give Proxmox or the like a look. Then you can make it into more than just a NAS (if you're open to it).

I have questions about this. I'm thinking of building my own NAS server, and I don't know which OS to use. On the one hand it looks like people recommend TrueNAS a lot, which is nice now that they have a Linux version, but I'm not really sure what does it offer over a raw Debian apart from web/configuration and some extra tools? I have quite some experience in running Debian systems and managing RAIDs (not with ZFS but doesn't seem too much of a jump) and I worry that TrueNAS, while nice at the beginning, might end up being limiting if I start to tweak too much (I plan on using that NAS for more things than just storage).

What you miss with raw Debian compared to TrueNAS is compatibility. TrueNAS makes sure that all pieces are compatible with one another so that when you update each piece or OS, the storage doesn’t break. The whole package is tested throughly before release.

Also, TrueNAS makes setup painless: users, permissions, shares, vdevs, ZFS tuning, nice dashboard etc. With Debian, you get a lot of config files and ansible playbooks that become hard to manage.

Ideally you won’t run other stuff on a NAS, outside Docker.

There's been a movement in the industry to bring storage back onto servers. They use the fancy buzz term of "hyper convergence" now though.

I will definitely argue that TrueNAS gives stability and ease of management. Some of that can be found with Proxmox too though. I think it just really depends on which medium you prefer. Perhaps trying both is the best option?

I’d try both, they tend to target different use cases. Proxmox doesn’t come with a lot of the tooling for things like SMB, LDAP, etc that Truenas ships with but you may find you don’t actually want any of these extras. In that case Proxmox would be a better choice IMO since it’s Debian based and a bit more streamlined.

Proxmox is my way. It supports newer ZFS version and support term for major version is fine. I put NAS functionality on LXC container that passthru'd host's filesystem.

If you want it to be strictly a NAS then TrueNAS should suffice. If you want to do anything more then I'd consider Proxmox or Ubuntu.

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