What do you all use TrueNAS for? I’d love to hear how it’s being used in other peoples systems!
Personally, I’ve got these apps installed and I love them all:
- cert-manager
- home assistant
- radarr
- 2x uptime kumas
- flame
- tailscale
- qbittorrent
- ombi
- jellyfin
- prowlarr
- sonarr
- traefik
- libreddit
- invidous
- static
- gitea
I use my box solely as a storage server with SFTP, Samba, and NFS. When I first built it about ten years ago, I ran a few jails for Plex and Syncthing (I think, it’s been a long time), but I’ve since moved them to containers on a NUC running Proxmox. PVE uses the TrueNAS box as storage for backups.
I’m going to be setting up Proxmox for the first time soon, and I’m looking for a solution for managing my storage (nothing fancy for now, aiming for about 50TB across 5 disks, with off-site backup). I’m considering my options for whether I should use Proxmox to manage the storage or if it would be better to use TrueNAS for that. I’m curious if you’d have any opinions on the choice.
I like having storage on a dedicated box. I’ve been using TrueNAS/FreeNAS for about ten years and I’m happy with it. In my case, when I was first building the storage box, I wasn’t really looking for a hypervisor like PVE for running other services so FreeNAS made sense. I used jails for a while before acquiring the NUC I have PVE running on now and migrated everything from jails to containers, and I’m now deliberate about not running anything on the TrueNAS box that isn’t directly related to storage.
Nice! I used to Plex a while back but ended up moving over to Jellyfin since I wanted more granular customization. How’s Proxmox? I remember back when I was browsing around I briefly looked at it but ended up going with TrueNAS Scale due to the ease of use and large app’s library due in part to TrueCharts.
I acquired the NUC around 2016, way before Scale came about, but I’ve been keeping an eye on it. Overall I’m pretty happy with Proxmox, and it would take a significant advantage in Scale or another product to make me migrate. At this point my plan is to build a second Proxmox box to create a little cluster.
One of the most annoying things about Proxmox for me is the web UI feels dated, and is completely unusable on mobile, even when requesting the desktop site. As that’s mostly an aesthetic issue I just deal with it.
I know I’m biased to Scale, but if you do end up building a second Proxmox box, I’d say trying out Scale before installing Proxmox, just to get a feel for it. I’ve really enjoyed Scale’s web UI, and it’s ease of use for deploying things, so if you’ve got the time, might as well see what’s available.
I might do that. It would be the perfect time to, and I’ve been meaning to check it out. I’ve also thought about spinning up a VM and installing Scale just for evaluation.
Hmm, while I’d definitely endorse trying out scale on bare metal. I’ve seen posts in the past of people having performance issues running on a VM. Now, while that was over well of a while ago (year or 2 maybe?), and it’s possible they might have fixed those issue by now. It’s still worth noting you might not get the true experience of testing out Scale through a VM.
I understand, and I would never run any production services on it. It would just be to check out the UI in the absence of having another free box to install it on.