Hello, I just got an uGreen 6800 PRO and I’ve spent last 3 days reading. I’m divided between staying on UGOS or moving over to TrueNAS. I’m a complete beginner in the whole NAS sphere and while I always thought myself as a technical person, my linux experience is tiny. I would stay on OGOS, but one of the concerning points I had was privacy and security of data. It’s a chinese software and we all live in some sort of paranoia of having our data leaked somewhere outside. While I don’t live in the US and recently there were some unpleasant political remarks with regards to my country (which I don’t want to deal with), I think I’d still feel a bit more comfortable knowing that UGOS does not ping to Chinese servers all the time. There is no way for me to track outgoing and incoming traffic as I’m part of a group network and don’t have access to router.
Which is why I started considering TrueNAS. I do have, however, some concerns:
as I said, my linux experience is minimal and all the tutorials and guide made me a bit scared (although I don’t mind spending the time to learn some stuff).
if I understand correctly, TrueNAS has no option of updating the firmware of UGreen NASes, so for firmware upgrade I would need to jump between UGOS and TrueNAS risking loss of data (I will have a backup option for most important data, but I have way of having full backup through having a number of external HDDs or a new NAS just for backup purposes). How faulty this jumping here and there could be? How often would it have to happen?
The NAS will stand in my living room and I am very much taking into account the temperature and noise it will make. I’ve read that control of NAS is harder from TrueNAS perspective and managing fan speed and temperature has to be done via BIOS? Which still results in higher noise and temp than regular UGOS?
I’d be grateful for any advise or assistance on the matter.
Well i am using a DXP6800 myself but have to agree i never used UGOS - mainly because i wanted to test out something new after having used a closed source nas system for quite a while (in my case QNAP). So i backed up the boot drive with clonezilla in case i want to go back and installed truenas instead. But to be honest - as soon as your zfs pools hold quite some TB of data it’s unlikely to switch back anyways i guess. So yes Truenas requires some “getting used to” and is probably less intuitive than UGOS, but in return you get a rock solid NAS (if you stick to production versions at least) and some rudimentary support for VMs and containers. When it comes to new versions i actually doubt UGOS also updates firmwares for BIOS or network cards - for UGREEN UGOS seems to be the firmware - but someone correct me if i am wrong. Cooling on the DXP6800 is out of the box bad - you will get pretty high temperatures as soon as the system gets some load. You will most likely have the fans running at 50% or more all the time to keep the System running at a reasonable temperature < 44 C. Finetuning can be done via e.g. coolercontrol. You may want to have a look at this thread.
There is definitely a learning curve and you will not find GUI solutions for everything. However, basic setup of a few SMB shares is relatively simple and there are some good Youtube videos around.
Regarding firmware updates, unless there is a useful BIOS update, there shouldn’t be any reason to update or switch between the different operating systems. In this hypothetical scenario, if you’re worried about data loss, I suppose you could remove the disks and insert a spare to execute the update?
On noise, the stock fan is decent and you can set PWM via BIOS. If anything, the disks make more noise during active use than the fan.
I would recommend that you familiarize yourself first with the target NAS system - you can play with it in a VM for a period of time before making the transition.
the advantage of going to TrueNAS is a vast user base that can provide help if you run into issues. But the gist of pretty much all those systems is roughly the same.
I started with TrueNAS core way back, went to a few alternative NAS systems, settled on fnOS as my main NAS now. but I’m also playing with a few hand-rolled samba implementations so fun learning (in VMs first).
