Best Truenas hardware for a beginner (not me)

TrueNAS General
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I’ve used Truenas, and before that Freenas, for many years for my own data, and I currently have two SCALE servers, both of which I built myself with server boards, ECC memory, and BMC/IPMI.

However, in a couple of months, I’m going to be visiting my brother, and he has asked me to help him set up his first NAS to keep his data safe. He’s not as tech savvy as I am, and I’m trying to figure out what hardware to recommend to him as a total novice not only to Truenas but to NAS in general.

(Actually, a separate question is whether Truenas is even the best NAS in his case. It’s all I’ve ever used, but I’m wondering would a closed source, proprietary NAS be best for a NAS novice?)

But assuming that I recommend Truenas to him, I’d like to find some hardware that is as easy as possible to set up and maintain. I don’t know how much data he has, but my guess is it’s not very much, probably a couple hundred GB at most.

Does anyone have suggestions?

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It depends on his needs and your desire to do remote support. I generally set up family members with a Synology (though more problematic with the new drive restriction). I do have 1 Truenas remote family install that I support, but I jsut pop it on my tailscale networking so I can access just like the rest of my systems. (But I am doing all the support except for onsite))

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You have asked I think the correct questions for a good answer to follow.

You need to find out “exactly” what the NAS will be used for. If it is just SMB sharing, then practically any NAS would be fine. If you plan to build one yourself, use server grade hardware, it will give you the least amount of headaches. And if you build this, build it a month before you give it to your brother so you can run it for a month and ensure it works without issue.

Another question is: Are you going to be Technical Support for your brother? If yes, are you going to setup remote access to his machine to fix the problems or just setup changes that will be needed? And this leads to IPMI, something you would want access to if doing remote operations. IPMI is a life saver.

TrueNAS is a great NAS, if using it just as a NAS, and maybe some very light jails or applications, then a low power Supermicro board will be fine.

If you want a very simple path, buy a commercial NAS. The reason I don’t like Synology, for the money, Synology is slow. TrueNAS is fast, even on a slow piece of hardware. Using a commercial product will also ease up your responsibility to be I.T. support for your brother.

If your storage is going to be under a few TB’s, you might look into SSD’s for storage. It is silent, draws less power, and in these capacities you could create a mirror with two 2TB drives, or even two 4TB drives (depends on how much money you have). Lots of different ways to do this. Yes, you could use spinning drives, those work fine as well and are definitely less expensive.

As for RAM, of course ECC since we are shooting for Server hardware here, and I’d go for 32GB. Why? Only because your brother may see that TrueNAS can do a lot more and will want to give it a try. Why not have the RAM up front. If it will only be a NAS, 16GB RAM then would be good for several years to come.

When you install TrueNAS, use the same version you are running. It just makes life easier, and I do speak from experience. And if it’s working once you are done, do not upgrade it unless you have a valid reason to do so. Software updates can break things. TrueNAS upgrades are very good these days, but there was a time when it wasn’t. Just play it safe.

Everything I just said means a lot of money invested. This is why so many people use non-server hardware for a home NAS. With that I’d like to say this one thing… Of all these items which need to be purchased, there are the consumable parts, Fans, Hard Drives/SSD/NVMe. Wow, short list. You can expect to replace the drives likely before any fans fail, but fans will fail, including the on in the power supply, unless it is fanless. With that said, buy the good hardware that will last you 10+ years.

I don’t think I answered all your questions but hopefully I gave you enough to run with.

Do not forget the UPS !!! Critical component, and the battery is a consumable, life 3 to 5 years (typically) just sitting there not doing much.

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Good points Theo. Remote support and how much there will be is a strong first consideration to work out. It’s not like TN breaks alot or has poor documentation, it’s just that some commercial offerings may have tech support on the phone.

Since the brother is worried about data integrity as his main concern, I’d do a small truenas build with mirrored pools. Have everything labeled by drive serial number in case something breaks in the future. Don’t fidget with permissions just keep it off the internet for the most part. I’d make sure I could vpn to that box remotely before I left so definitely switch on and configure ssh. Preshared key for minimum headaches.

If he’s somewhat advanced, maybe introduce the concept of tiered storage, where you have some fast but small pools not mirrored but z5 in nvme, at least 3 working together, for one pool/share, then another big data pool that is expected to be slow but just mirrored (traditional big sata) drives for more integrity. That way he knows use the X drive for this and backups go to the Z drive. Scrub monthly, get email reports, keep an eye on drive health. Good to go. Then cost is a factor also.

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Thanks. You both raise some good points. I don’t think I’ll be able to do remote technical support for him because he doesn’t have a static IP, so he’d need to get dynamic DNS for that, which would be an extra layer of complexity. (Personally, I have dynamic DNS at home, but it’s a complex setup, and there is no way that’s going to work in his case). He also lives a long way from me, so I can’t visit him regularly to help maintain the NAS.

So, I guess I will need to think about this. Maybe I will recommend a pre-built NAS, like Synology, and then install Trueneas SCALE on it, because I don’t know anything about Synology and would rather recommend SCALE, which I’m familiar with.

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Lots of solutions for that these days; Tailscale is probably the easiest to work with. No need for dynamic DNS, port forwarding, or any of the other machinations that would have been needed, say, five years ago.

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Yeah I didn’t mention Tailscale because I have no experience with it, but I see it mentioned alot.

So that’s the remote support angle; it’s a must because something will happen or he’ll want to change it eventually. One thing I can say from experience though, is that there’s no excuse for it to fall behind when the update screen asks if he wants to apply it. Truenas has never left me in an unbootable state after 15 years (freenas, core and scale) so I always trust the updater.

Again, label the drives with a sticker of their serial numbers, maybe take a picture for future reference. Even if you buy a solution it’s a good idea. If I were to make a box for a relative, today, I’d get a used Lenovo or Dell or HP tower with lots of sata ports internally, used server hardware leaning towards a pair of Xeon cpu’s and as much ram as the case will hold. ECC preferably. This comes back to budget and maybe even power usage so it’s a blind recommendation on stuff I know will probably not only work forever but not fall apart or cause too many support calls. Server stuff in general is just better, businesses won’t put up with stuff that fails. Dell used to always have an R or T variant of their servers, with the R being rackmount and the T being a tower. They made some hotrod “workstations” for desktops too, with dual cpu’s and other fancy bits inside. Plus, having an iDRAC available is pretty slick when you’re remote. I can dream up boxes for all kinds of budgets so having parameters (cost, size, noise) helps to plan this out.

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That wasn’t why I mentioned Synology in my previous posting. It was more for Technical Support and you just set it up once and any idiot can use it after that. If you install TrueNAS on a new Synology system, you will not have Synology support to help your brother out. He will be 100% reliant on you until he is up to speed on this new system. But you can use a Synology piece of hardware if you want to and I’m not a Synology expert but I thought I read they do not use ECC RAM, but that was a long time ago, I have no idea what things look like these days. More research would be required.

And as @dan said, there are ways to handle the dynamic IP. I have never had a static IP and there is always a way to get the job done, easily too. I have not used tailscale but it is popular.

I can’t believe I forgot to mention, this is very important… Perform routine SMART Short and Long tests on the drives. I always recommend a daily Short test and a weekly Long test. You need to be proactive to maintain a healthy system.

Hardware considerations… Do not promote a Hot Swap drive bay. Always teach your brother to power the system off before changing any components. You can of course use hot swap drive bays but treat them as if they do not support it.

Let’s talk drive replacement… This is just a personal thing but put down “on paper” a step by step procedure to replace a drive for your brother to follow. Put a copy of this procedure inside the computer case, maybe taped to the inner panel. You have no idea how helpful that will be later down the road. Replacing a drive is almost always simple and only a few steps, but going to the TrueNAS website to read the docs on how to replace a drive can be nerve racking for many people. They are worried about data loss and just having that piece of paper handy will solve a lot of anxiety. And I’d write it for his specific machine setup. Do not include other crap that would not apply to him. Lastly, run the procedure to make sure it works. You can simulate it but pretend you were born yesterday and know nothing. You will hear me talk about assumptions periodically here on the forums, that is because assumptions can really get people into trouble.

Good luck on whatever you choose and I hope the information everyone has provided is helpful.

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Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. Having looked into this further, I am considering going with a mini-PC NAS with an NVME SSD pool, like the one by GMKtek that has 4 NVME slots. It’s affordable, low power, and low noise. which is good because my brother is environmentally conscious and lives is a warm climate with the AC often running.

Then I’ll install SCALE and do a 3 x 2TB mirror. There have been concerns expressed in the past about consumer-grade SSD’s and Truenas pools, but one of my pools is NVME SSD, and it’s been running fine for years. Plus, my brother is mostly going to be doing reads. I doubt he’ll write to it very often.

I also plan to use different brands of SSD for each of the devices in the mirror, like one Samsung, one Western Digital, and one Teamgroup, so that if one fails, he’ll be able to easily see which one it is from within the SCALE UI.

Finally, I plan to install the SSDs and Truenas when I’m there, so that my brother can see what I’m doing in case he ever needs to reinstall or replace an SSD.

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Tailscale does this, and it also manages security–it’s a VPN solution. Really, the dynamic IP issue is a side benefit.

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Thanks. I’ll look into Tailscale. For my own setup at home, I have dynamic DNS with a custom domain installed on OPNsense, which I run as a VM on SCALE. It works perfectly, and it’s nice because I also run a Nextcloud server, but that’s far more complexity than I would ever recommend to my brother. So, Tailscale sounds like the way to go.

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I need to look into it as well and have it running within 1 week, before I head out on a week long trip to one of my sons homes for a week. It will be a nice trip but there will be a lot of dead time so having remote access would be nice if i can have it up and running.

EDIT: Wow! That was easy. And free for personal use. I created an account (linked another account for authorization), then I installed Tailscale on my desktop computer, then I installed the Tailscale App in TrueNAS SCALE 25.04 without issue. Guess what, I was able to access my TrueNAS using the VPN IP Address. 20 years ago I would have paid for an effortless service like this. Trust me, it use to be a real pain to setup. No firewall changes needed to be made.

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Indeed. Which is why I :roll_eyes: when people complain about the OpenVPN service going away. Just use Tailscale; it’s infinitely easier.

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