I tend to go overkill when it comes to home networking and server infrastructure. I’m considering replacing my QNap, with what I assert is the world’s worst software, with a homebrew and unRAID.
I’m just wondering if anyone has any experience doing this or not. For a few years I ran a raid 5 array on an old gaming PC, and then I swapped to qnap for “what if there is a fire, how do I grab and run with a computer that can act as an anchor for a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier”. That’s worked for the last 5 years, sort of, but I swear they make everything 10x harder than it has any right to be.
I was considering 4 x 10tb hdds and 3x2TB Evo 990 Pros, in a cache pool and/or 2x2TB in an SSD pool for docker containers and 1 2TB for the cache pool. I’m just not entirely sure where unRAID itself ends up going; the cache pool?
Aside from that question, any other “gotchas” that you’ve experienced? Any comparisons with qnap would be greatly appreciated, too.
TrueNAS is the rebranding of FreeNAS, right?
I’m not the biggest BSD fan - I’ve struggled with figuring out <basically everything> with my pfsense and then opsense perimeter devices, so I kinda just gave up. TrueNAS Scale could work, but I’m trying to avoid VM in favor of docker-container-all-the-things. How is TrueNAS for running containers? Is it just like a basic linux server install, or does it have some bells and whistles like unRAID does?
@dax Scale is very nice. Way better docker/cotainer support. the CORE version does not really support that at all. Scale has proper container support.
Scale has a good UI for containers, I think it’s very easy management.
I have a couple little boxes around I could install scale on to give it a test drive - with unRAID having a (very modest) price point I’m not against it, but if TrueNAS Scale does what I want, I won’t really need to go unraid route. To be honest I’m less entranced with the UI than I am having a sane set of command line tools and a reasonable cli-first configuration route, if that’s possible.
@dax TN may not be for you then. The cli and all the tools are available but it is GUI based.
I have not tried unRAID but have read good things about it.
@dax BTW, pfSense is my gateway/firewall. I love it. It runs on commodity hardware. Hasn’t crashed in a long time. THe last problem was a dead pwoer supply which had been on 24/7 for about 5 years
Yeah, I got a cheap ali-express mini-itx of some sort about a decade ago and ran pfsense on it for like 7 years straight, with my only issue being pfBlockerNG causing a catastrophic failure after I installed it. this was my first trial-by-fire of administering a bsd machine on the command line and it was so stressful because I was trying to undo it without any internet at all. I still never got it working in the end and just gave up and ran pihole on a container instead.
I ended up switching to opnsense when I got > 1gbps internet and wanted to make sure my router could handle it - got one of the opsense appliances with sfp+ and ran 10gb fiber to my switch and 2.5gbps ethernet to my modem. It’s been super nice actually!