TrueNAS inquiry!

[Biesel228]

Hey all!
I hear that TrueNAS is a good and basic solution for a NAS in terms of repurposing an old computer.

 

I have an intel NUC, so my questions are as follows...

1. Does TrueNAS allow me to access drives attached via USB connection?
2. Would it be better if I took out the motherboard and built a tower with a higher power supply, and attach Hard drives and power through SATA?

I only ask because I have a ton of drives (externally powered) that I'd like to be able to access anywhere, and from my finder on my Mac (like connecting to a sharedrive).

I also have 4 2.5inch SSDs as well that I'd like to use/repurpose. Any ideas welcome.
I was thinking about using those 4 SSDs with a raspberry pi as just a separate personal NAS. Thoughts? I remember seeing a video on it but the guy had to break off some pins on the heatsink...

Thank you, and let me know!

[AbydosOne]

17 minutes ago, Biesel228 said:

Does TrueNAS allow me to access drives attached via USB connection?

From the UI, no, it will prevent it. I actually spent some time over the weekend testing this exact question: you can use the CLI to partition the drives and make the ZFS pool, but supposedly USB isn't very stable in the long term for drive connections. On the short term, I didn't have any issues (due to USB, at least), so I can't comment on that.

 

To be clear, TrueNAS is not for accessing existing drives of stuff; TrueNAS uses ZFS to create drive pools for redundancy and performance gains (wiping the data on the drives in the process).

 

19 minutes ago, Biesel228 said:

Would it be better if I took out the motherboard and built a tower with a higher power supply, and attach Hard drives and power through SATA?

The NUC motherboard? It probably doesn't have a way to expand to a useful amount of SATA ports.

 

The best way to build a NAS is to start from desktop components, even if they aren't the newest/fastest, as it really doesn't take much to serve files. My testbed NAS is a Chinese B85 ITX board, a <$20 E3 Xeon, and 16GB of DDR3.

[LIGISTX]

Like the above post said… don’t use ZFS over USB. Either find a different OS to use, or find different hardware for direct SATA connections to your drives. 

[Psittac]

In my brief research, HexOS can use USB to connect however it isn't officially supported.  HexOS is based on TrueNAS.  The reason it isn't supported is because not all usb connection devices pass through the proper information for HexOS to function.  For that reason and because HexOS doesn't offer a trial perse, rather they offer a 30 day money back guarantee I decided to go with unraid which I had already tried and knew it worked.  I could have done the research to see if my DAS handled the drives properly but I'm getting old and lazy.

 

TrueNAS can be a little difficult to reconfigure if you realize you want to change it, unraid appeared to be easier.  Unraid isn't cheap, about the same price as HexOS, so it's difficult to recommend either to someone who isn't dead set on running a server.  For the cost of the software, depending on how many drives you have, it might be cheaper and easier to shuck the drives and put them in a prebuilt NAS.  Considering you aren't looking to do anything compute related this might be an affordable solution (I know there are powerful NAS solutions, but a basic one should be affordable)

 

But like @AbydosOne said, this isn't for linking up drives with data on them.  You would need to do some data management and get your drives empty to start with.

[AtomicGlargh]

I've been using a TERRAMASTER D6-320 with ZFS for awhile and had no problems. I bought it specifically because it provides the drive data ZFS needs.

[DraconisMaximus]

On 2/17/2026 at 5:31 PM, Biesel228 said:

1. Does TrueNAS allow me to access drives attached via USB connection?

Yes, you can, but it will scream at you constantly; and yes, the risk of data corruption is substantially higher because of the way TrueNAS (and most similar high-availablity server OSs) interact with file systems. If you're just using a USB drive for your offline backup pool you should be fine. Just hook it up occasionally and run your replication. A USB drive should really not be a part of your regular pools though.

 

On 2/17/2026 at 5:31 PM, Biesel228 said:

2. Would it be better if I took out the motherboard and built a tower with a higher power supply, and attach Hard drives and power through SATA?

What are the actual specs of the NUC? Even with RAMageddon older desktops that aren't really usable for gaming but are more than sufficient for a simple NAS can be often be found sub $200(USD) on marketplace sites or thrift shops. You don't need a very fast CPU but more cores and more (even older slower) RAM will expand your options for virtualization. Look for lots of SATA ports, a decently sized case, and maybe some extra PCIe lanes either for add on storage or a small transcoding GPU.

 

The NUC is probably better repurposed as an HTPC. Which incidentally would pair great with a NAS.