TrueNAS or unraid?

[arthurc_]

So, im planning on building a nas for my home, after asking on the forum, i came up with this nas build, any improvements should i make and what OS should i run? thanks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id stay away from those hdd, there smr and shoudln't be used in raid configs.

 

Id get fewer bigger drives here. 

 

Id go truenas as its faster, and you all have the same size of hdd, but depends on if you want to expand easily.

[RollinLower]

running truenas myself, though you should really read into ZFS before comitting. 

I have no experience with unraid. 

[Quantum Noisemaker]

Hey Cin, with that many disks Truenas would definitely make sense here, but you current build doesn't really fit for it. 

 

First off, as Electronics Wizardy mentioned, don't use those HDDs for Truenas or UnRaid. You want CMR HDDs, so go with the Ironwolf drives you had selected previously or with Seagate Exos, depending on what's cheaper in your region.

 

For Truenas, you really want ECC memory, since the memory is used for ARC caching. The G6900 chip you have selected here does not support ECC memory, so you would have to choose a different platform if you wanted ECC.

 

Based on this, I'd stick with Unraid. However, if you do want to go Truenas, I found the Community Hardware Recommendations Guide to be a great resource.

[m9x3mos]

1 hour ago, TechguyCin said:

So, im planning on building a nas for my home, after asking on the forum, i came up with this nas build, any improvements should i make and what OS should i run? thanks.

As others have mentioned, don't use these drives. SMR will cause performance issues. ECC is a nice to have and not really a requirement. I have been running truenas core on a 6700k for years now with no problems.

If you plan on adding drives incrementally to add storage and are using it just for file storage (no vms or heavy throughput) unRAID it's good for that.

If not, I would stick with truenas.

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

(no vms or heavy throughput)

I actually consider Unraid better for VMs since they'll typically live on a cache SSD there, as for heavy throughput the cache is both read and write unlike ARC on ZFS.

 

Just been through this and tested both and I'm finding Unraid makes a lot more sense. Besides not having the limitations of ZFS setups if you're going to want to run services besides file sharing the app support is way better, and so is documentation / help resources.

 

The choice of drive setup to get kinda differs between the 2 so you should do it the other way and figure out the OS first, then choose the drives accordingly. IMO Truenas would be better for a fixed config and little stuff besides file storage, Unraid otherwise.

 

You do want to avoid SMR indeed, but on Unraid they shouldn't be that bad for the actual storage in normal use as long as the cache drive(s) are CMR with a proper setup since writes will go to the cache and will be transferred to the slow drive later. Could be more of a pain in case of rebuild.

[Jarsky]

Just to throw my 2c in the ring. 

 

Correct, those disks should not be used in a RAID config..with traditional and striped arrays they can be problematic. 

However, if you are going to go UnRAID, it depends on the purpose for which youre using the storage for. 

 

If its going to be "write once, read many" such as a media server then those disks are ok to use..however they will suffer write performance which is the biggest issue with SMR's. But we're talking on the magnitude of 30MB/s+ sustained 

If you ever do need to rebuild parity....it will take longer due to the reduced write speed to the new disk (if the new one is also an SMR / the same drive model)

 

Using a cache drive, then you'll probably never even notice the write performance hit since the data will be written to the array on its scheduled move task overnight (2am by default iirc)

 

 

[m9x3mos]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

I actually consider Unraid better for VMs since they'll typically live on a cache SSD there, as for heavy throughput the cache is both read and write unlike ARC on ZFS.

 

Just been through this and tested both and I'm finding Unraid makes a lot more sense. Besides not having the limitations of ZFS setups if you're going to want to run services besides file sharing the app support is way better, and so is documentation / help resources.

 

The choice of drive setup to get kinda differs between the 2 so you should do it the other way and figure out the OS first, then choose the drives accordingly. IMO Truenas would be better for a fixed config and little stuff besides file storage, Unraid otherwise.

 

You do want to avoid SMR indeed, but on Unraid they shouldn't be that bad for the actual storage in normal use as long as the cache drive(s) are CMR with a proper setup since writes will go to the cache and will be transferred to the slow drive later. Could be more of a pain in case of rebuild.

If it is data that can be kept in cache that is okay. But if you are using data sets larger than your cache, read performance is that is a single disk. When using truenas for vms I have a l2arc and slog. The slog helps but writes with 6 good disks are pretty good.