Comment on Beginner looking for advice on open-source NAS hardware and OS for self-hosting
JTode@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I endorse TrueNAS, mainly because ZFS. You want ZFS, I will go so far as to get on a video call with you and go over why, if I need to convince you. I used FreeNAS, the old name for the gratis, BSD-based TrueNAS, and it was brill. There are some very good videos on Youtube made by Allan Jude at Klara Systems if you want to dive in yourself.
I run my two servers on old PCs, and I echo that recommendation. You want room to expand your disk pool when needed, and you want as many cores and as much RAM as you can afford. If you don’t have ECC ram, it’s not a big deal for your files, as long as you’re running ZFS, but I would stick to containers rather than full VMs for your services. I have been using Docker, saved as Compose files, for most of my self-hosted stuff for years, and it’s nice cause I can basically nuke the server anytime Iike, import the zpool, and go start the services right back up.
I run straight Debian & FreeBSD nowadays so I cannot say what exact features are on TrueNAS these days, but ten years ago they had an easy GUI for setting up Jails (the BSD version of containers, sorta, it predates them I believe…), so I would assume that current TrueNAS does the same for Docker on some level.
Old PC running TrueNAS, that is the way.
zarathustrad@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I run on old PCs also. Though, I use Proxmox (proxmox uses ZFS, and now that I have expanded to 3 old mini PCs, they can cluster). Not claiming it is superior, it’s probably slightly more complicated, but it works for me. (Also, given the RAM situation, 3 essentially free mini PCs can hold more old salvaged RAM dimms, for more VMs, and redundancy/availability.)
The Proxmox is on the bare metal, then VMs run the heavy applications solo, or docker for stacks of lighter apps kike *arr.
(VMs prevent kernel panic from hitting the host, but containers are lighter, it’s a case by case thing depending on the application/risk. I have had a container take down the host, but for most of us it’s not like we are running critical applications, it’s not a huge deal if you just run containers.)