TrueNAS - a NAS for your Homelab

Posted on August 1, 2024 • 3 min read • 544 words

Anyone who has private pictures and videos, correspondence, music or self-written software needs a NAS in their home lab. TrueNAS offers everything from simple entry to complex expansion.

TrueNAS - a NAS for your Homelab
Photo by Growtika  on Unsplash 

Serie TrueNAS

Why do I need a Network Storage?

The amount of data that accumulates over time, even at home, is constantly increasing. Initially, internal PC data carriers were sufficient, but soon external USB hard drives were added to cope with the sheer mass of data. Then you treat yourself to a new PC and the first SATA disc goes on the shelf with unknown contents, right next to the burnt DVDs from the past. Only to realise years later that the media on the shelf is no longer readable. In one way or another, we all feel the same way.

In my opinion, a good solution is to keep all data continuously available and controllable in a network storage system. This takes care of the integrity of the data from now on and covers possible hardware defects with redundancies.

Why TrueNAS?

There is nothing to stop you buying an off-the-shelf NAS. These are highly developed and have been tested millions of times. As a home networker, however, I would prefer to set up a NAS myself. With care and the use of open source NAS software that has been tested millions of times, you can get quite close to the ready-made solutions and learn something in the process.

If you have followed the home networking scene over the years, two NAS software products in particular have repeatedly attracted positive attention, one Unraid and the other TrueNAS . Unraid has now introduced a licence model, including a 30-day free version for testing, while TrueNAS states that it will continue to maintain a free community version. The bottom line is that I decided to try TrueNAS in my network and have been using it there for years with great pleasure. And to get this out of the way right now, this series is not sponsored or influenced by iXsystems in any way.

  • ZFS as a file system provides each data block with a checksum, which can be used to prove the integrity of the data
  • Several hard disks can be combined in data pools, whereby the set software RAID level determines the security against one or more defective hard disks.
  • Possibility to use fast SSDs for caching frequently used files
  • Browser-based operation after installation

Posts in this Series

The first posts in this series about TrueNAS will get things rolling, with a few more special things to come later.

Since trial and error with network storage can get expensive very quickly, this series on TrueNAS starts with how TrueNAS can be set up and tested virtually with existing inventory.

All Beginnings are Easy
And this is how it continues

References

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