I just ordered an Aoostar R1N100 mini PC to replace my aging Synology NAS. Now I’m thinking about what to install on it. It’s supposed to work as a NAS but I also want to host some services on it like papeless-ngx and Jellyfin, which I both run in Docker containers on a different machine right now. Plus anything that takes my fancy in the future. Current candidates are OpenMediaVault and TrueNAS. My priorities are ease of installation and administration, as well as reliability. Which one would you recommend or are there any alternatives I’m not aware of? I’ve also considered Unraid, but I’d prefer something FOSS.
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I use OpenMediaVault with ZFS plugin. I find it good for my needs. I tried TrueNAS and didn’t like it. Never tried unraid because it costs money and I wanted bit rot protection.
My priorities are ease of installation and administration, as well as reliability.
How much of a priority is reliability? How many drives are you running, and how many of them are mirrored or hot spares? or are you running one of the striped RAID levels?
Hard drives are consumables and should be expected to fail. Data redundancy is a fundamental requirement for reliability. Probably everything else in the server is disposable/replaceable, but the data isn’t.
TrueNAS makes management of mirrored drive pools easy, and frankly 1:1 mirroring is the most sane way to handle redundancy (vs. parity striping), and you should always have at least one hot spare in the pool as well. For instance, I have five 8TB drives in a TrueNAS server - two mirrored pairs, and the fifth is a hot spare. I have 40TB of drive space but only 16TB of storage, but when an active drive fails then TrueNAS will automatically bring the hot spare online and copy the data from the mirror of the failed drive onto it and alert me that a replacement drive is needed. This is easy to set up, and TrueNAS also automates SMART testing and will attempt to load balance read & write cycles based on drive age and performance.
It’s only a two bay box and I’ll run it in RAID 1. And of course I’m aware of the limited lifetime of HDDs which is why I’m replacing my current box.
Ah, I didn’t actually look at the Aoostar device you mentioned in your post… yeah you probably don’t want to run TrueNAS on that, something lighter would be more appropriate.
I do want to point out that in this price range you can get a used PowerEdge tower that will be more capable, reliable, repairable and upgradeable long-term. You can add more drives, more RAM, and even a second processor as your needs grow, plus it has a proper backplane with a physical RAID controller and redundant PSUs. If any of the electronics in that R1N100 fail you have to replace the whole device.
Of course it’s a lot bulkier, so it might not fit your use.
Yeah that would be total overkill for storing my … homework.
I’ve been happy with Unraid. The few issues I’ve had were HD controller problems.
Seconded, being able to use different sized drives is nice.
Yeah, I just sort of take the different drive sizes for granted nowadays.
I use freeipa and the only luck I’ve had with integrating that with storage was by rolling my own with rocky Linux.
Before that truenas worked well, OMV is good for Lower power machines that can’t handle full phat zfs and needs ext4 based mediums.
Apparently TrueNAS are building FreeIPA support in their next release. It is currently in beta and I’m waiting for the release to test it.
Good, it always kind of losses meoff that the premier open source NAS package supported AD which EEE’d several open source protocols instead of something like FreeIPA.
I get they’re a commercial company and this is their product, but they could’ve still had the decency to put that on the same level.
I went from OMV, to TrueNAS, to just mounting the drives directly on my Proxmox host, combining them with mergerfs, and then sharing them from a samba container they’re bind-mounted to.
Unless you have some fairly complex storage needs I’d say go with a good hypervisor over a dedicated storage OS with a hypervisor tacked on.
That sounds complicated.
It’s honestly less complicated in the end. I’d say probably 95% of people don’t really have a need for a dedicated storage OS because everything they want to do is easily accomplished on any Linux install.
If you’re only wanting to use Docker and don’t need to run VMs I’d just use Debian, and even then you could still run VMs if you really want to.
