It was more of a humorous comment about the pains for the consumer being at the whims of a company and how I could possibly (0.00001% chance) turn the situation (playing on the stereotype of the fickleness of the typical Linux developer) into a benefit for me (the consumer).
But that aside, if you want an actual opinion from me: this (HexOS) is a typical cash-grab. HexOS devices will be disposable and not used long term. If they want expansion, they can plug in another NAS (device [the price] and setup [the time] is cheap). -i.e. Sucess is not measured in time, it is measured in amount.
Oh how I do so wish that NAS’ were so cheap that they were indeed disposable.
In reality a NAS is a significant investment. My NAS is probably worth more than both my laptop and my wife’s laptop put together.
Perhaps LTT are expecting to make money by being the default point of contact for users (aka suckers) who have installed HexOS and now their data is inaccessible due to some technical issue.
I know. I’m running a 10+ year old Mini because I can’t afford to purchase anything else. However, a cheaper alternative would be to buy a mini computer and a JBOD enclosure if I didn’t need reliability (buy a new mini computer and I’d have a “new NAS”).
Remember, raidz expansion exists now. Most “home” users aren’t going to be adding entire VDEV’s to expand storage (You can safely assume they’re not going to know what a VDEV is), they’re going to be adding individual disks 99% of the time.
Where I think it’ll be interesting is when they reach the maximum number of drives they can have and want to expand their storage - it’s slightly less trivial to swap disks out for larger ones to expand your pool that way. But that’s a solvable problem in itself.
Maybe there is market for unraid/synology “simplicity” and truenas “technology”? That might even make sense for iX, assuming that if HexOS is not free, like unraid, they profit financially in a way, without having to enter this market themselves and focus on their enterprise business and keeping the base of technically interested/advanced user with core and scale?
What technological advancements does SCALE offer? They switched gears from CORE with very little gain. They wanted to break into the Kubernetes/container market but that didn’t pan out. Not sure I see where they’d profit if an “easier turn-key solution” is available. I think the “numbers showing SCALE is more popular than CORE” is only because there is greater interest in the disposable (home) market and people know the word “Linux” more so than “BSD”.
Thing is, there were advancements promised such as resuming interrupted snapshot replications to remote servers for SCALE vs. CORE. It’s too bad that as of 24.04.1.1 the resume feature re: replication is non-functional, at least in my use case.
Most of the time when the process is interrupted, it simply restarts at the last successful snapshot, ditching all progress. Sometimes, the remote dataset is still around but “busy” and it blocks any further replication efforts.
I’m ok with switching platforms if the promised upgrades are valuable to me and work as intended. I am disappointed that the announced advancements in SCALE re: replication are not functional.
That’s a pretty weak advancement! I just read something on backups the other day…Here it is. I don’t have access to my NAS so someone else would have to find out what software is or isn’t on the CORE/SCALE systems. OpenZFS Best Practices: Snapshots and Backups (klarasystems.com)
Other than the die-hards here, nobody’s arguing about CORE vs. SCALE; TrueNAS is SCALE, and CORE is terminal, and that’s because iX has made it so[1]. So the question isn’t “what advancements does SCALE bring over CORE,” but rather “what advancements does TrueNAS offer vs. everyone else?” And the most obvious answer to that question is, “ZFS.[2]” A second obvious answer is, “a well-documented API that lets third-party software (like, say, an idiot-proof GUI[3]) use the TrueNAS back-end.”
…and the reasons for that are really immaterial to the present discussion, which is about HexOS ↩︎
AFAIK, the only other NAS software that does ZFS natively are napp-it and XigmaNAS. XigmaNAS is The Product Formerly Known As FreeNAS and remains based on FreeBSD; napp-it is designed to run on a Solarish OS but apparently can run on Debian as well. I haven’t touched XigmaNAS, but napp-it is miles behind any flavor of TrueNAS in terms of its UI. ↩︎
Sure, there isn’t really any such thing, but that seems to be the goal of HexOS ↩︎
In a meeting (sorry for the brevity). What advancements does TrueNAS offer the end user (ZFS is the obvious and no one questions that)? My point was more about how iX wanted to break into the market with the switch to containers but that flopped (I’m sure if the end user is offered the choice between “containers” and “ZFS” they’d choose “containers” 9/10 times).
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here, and I question whether you are either. TrueNAS, and FreeNAS before it, has always had containers. TrueNAS SCALE has always allowed users to run arbitrary OCI (i.e., “Docker”) containers, and this isn’t changing. They aren’t going to use k3s any more–but if that’s what you mean by “containers,” you’re using that word very strangely.
Okay, it’s fairly obvious I cannot Type, Talk, and Listen about two different topics at once (I’ll try to do better this time). We can talk about containers later (maybe we’d even have time for bleeding edge too).
My point about advancements was more that I think this could be a detriment to TrueNAS and the Consumer. I think this will play out badly for the consumers.
The point about containers was more along the lines of “I don’t see a good reason WHY iX changed gears at this point”. I think the initial switch from CORE to SCALE was for corp. use (hence the k3/8s). I’m not sure more non-technical home-based users will be attracted from the ‘linx’ and ‘container’ name recognition (with the flood of low-cost NAS options) to use SCALE vs something like Hex offering ease-of-use as well.
However, the hammer drop I expect from iX on the subject could change that.
TrueNAS is an appliance. As a personal user I do not care whether it is based on FreeBSD or Linux so long as it supports my hardware and is supported by iX.
Enterprises are more concerned that the O/S it is based on is provably both reliable and security hardened, and I suspect that is the reason for iX switching - though I would also imagine that Linux is going to be better at supporting modern hardware.
As for switching in order to use k3s/k8s, it may be the case that iX wanted to do Kubernetes clustering, and that was also part of the switch to Linux, however as an ex Enterprise IT Senior Manager, I do NOT believe that this would ever be an Enterprise requirement for TrueNAS - if Enterprises want advanced Kubernetes infrastructure, they will do it natively and NOT under a NAS appliance!!!
I really don’t understand why CORE vs. SCALE or k3s vs. Compose are coming up here (again)–neither of these subjects seems to have anything to do with whatever HexOS is.
I understand. Im also a home user and I prefer the hardened and tried-and-true because I’m more cautious (not zombie cautious) about my data. I have our (me, wife, two small kids) social security information, documents, photos, etc on the sever. I also have movies and music but who cares about that as much really nowadays?
I also take the same approach to the hardware (I bought the mini, and had iX set it up too. …I thought this was more of my “donation to support iX but I imagine it wasn’t much of one).
Good point about the enterprise going native; I would have thought the same thing but I’m not in that industry so I wouldn’t have offered that opinion. Glad to think I wasn’t too far off base from a professional though.
