Complete newbie to NAS at this level

TrueNAS General
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So I’m a complete newbie to a NAS device at this level. I am looking at Truenas Scale, and if I don’t like it, then OpenMediaVault.

I started out with a Netgear ReadyNAS years ago and it worked great. Then I needed more space for more drives, Netgear got out of the NAS space so I made the mistake of buying a pair of WD PR4100. They woked pretty good for my use but then they upgraded to OS 5 and it’s been a disaster ever since. I can create shares, somewhat, user accounts don’t always work, the interface is lacking if it works at all. I can’t install any apps on them any longer, some doofus at WD decided they don’t want apps on the devices any longer. If it was installed prior to OS 5 it is still there but otherwise apps are gone. The cloud feature has never worked and WD doesn’t ever answer my emails.

The reason I’m going to try a NAS like this is that I have an older server, a Dell PowerEdge R720 Server with 2 E5-2630v2 2.6ghz cpus with 64 gig of ram. I also have 4 4tb WD red drives and 4 6tb WD red drives. The drives will be hardware mirrored and striped.

I’m going to use the WD red drives I already have in the R720 but right now I’m backing everything up to a couple of servers I have on my network. I also need to get a 1000gb network card for the R720 and that’s on order from Amazon.

It seems that this will work with Truenas Scale. Is this correct?

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That’s an extremely bad idea with TrueNAS (any version), or any other software that uses ZFS. Use ZFS instead to manage your RAID.

Other than the above, I’d say so.

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You might also want to check if these drives are CMR or SMR by reference to the model numbers and the information at List of known SMR drives | TrueNAS Community as SMR drives are not generally suitable for use with TrueNAS.

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