This is a cool article. I wonder why all the content creators use TrueNAS. I evaluated TrueNAS Scale for a storage server and decided not to use it. I had two major complaints.

First, when you create a ZFS pool, it partitions drives and puts swap on all of them. IIRC it may have even set up some mdadm RAID mirrors. It's a bunch of complexity and can leave you with swap on spinning disks if you don't notice and override the behavior.

For me, whenever I see a bad default like that, where it might have made sense 10+ years ago, I get freaked out about what other poor defaults exist that I'm not noticing or what else may have been neglected for a decade. I use it as an negative indicator and often avoid the whole product at that point.

Second, every time I'd boot (or maybe stop) a VM it would trample my ZFS tunables, specifically zfs_arc_max. I couldn't figure out exactly what was triggering it, but I don't want a system that doesn't play nice with the default CLI tooling.

I actually had a really tough time finding a decent NAS and I'm going to end up building a plain old Linux system running Ubuntu 22.04. If anyone has any suggestions (not QNAP or Synology) for something that can do a good job of ZFS and 2-6 VMs, I'd love to hear them.