Good evening,
this post just to understand if truenas could be for me.
At the moment I use Windows 10 Pro as a “NAS”, however, since I have to make a hardware change I was wondering if there was something better for my needs.
In practice I use it associated with the Fire TV where I installed Kodi and from there to watch films.
Are you saying that it is better to continue with windows or could truenas improve my situation since it is a more specific software?
Thank you
I’ll just point you to some basic links on ZFS. That is the main advantage of TrueNAS over just sharing files off Windows. You didn’t mention if your current system has everything stored on a single hard drive.
BASICS
iX Systems pool layout whitepaper
At the moment I have more than a single hard disk, what I am interested in is keeping track of the status of the single hard disk (temperature, health etc…) perhaps this solution seems to be right for me since it is certainly lighter than windows. As for the hardware configuration, can I always ask here?
In my humble opinion, switching from Windows 10 to TrueNAS is a huge jump. I think you’ll be more satisfied if you first jump to Synology or Qnap for a a couple of years and then switch to TrueNAS. If you buy the right hardware (Intel processor, room voor nvme’s, at least 16GB), it’s easy to install TrueNAS over the OS from Synology or Qnap, even though you’ll have to backup your data before and restore it after the migration. TrueNAS is an enterprise system with some functionality for the home user. Synology and Qnap make systems for home users and are scaling up to the enterprise marktet. The mindset behind the OS’s are totally diffferent. If you don;t lke this, even Unraid is much easier to begin with.
but in the cases you indicated is there a free software or do I have to take a complete system?
Unfortunately, Unraid is not free. Synology and Qnap sell hardware with an OS.
TrueNAS is great but it is not as easy as you might think from the deceptively easy UI. You need a basic understanding of Linux, networking, storage (ZFS), rights and network authentication and docker to get it to do what you want. There is nothing difficult about it but you really need to have a basic knowledge of every domain to avoid a major disappointment. I have 30 years of hands on and hands off experience as a an IT professional. I switched to TrueNAS last month and even after all those years of experience, the learning curve was quite steep and sometimes frustrating. If your only experience is Windows as a homeserver you can compare it with learning to drive with a Porsche before the invention of ABS: it’s going to be fun ride but there is decent chance you’ll be hurt enyoing it. 
It’s basically all about your priorities: do you want to learn a lot about IT or do you want to enjoy a movie.
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If you just want to share one drive, without any redundancy, Xpenology or Open Media Vault may be what you’re looking for.
ZFS is possibly overkill and/or overhead.
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I’ll add my two cents for the sake of variety.
TrueNAS is brilliant for big systems with a massive number of disks, it’s brilliant for medium systems with something like 2-8 disks, it’s not so brilliant for low-end systems with a single disk.
That isn’t to say it won’t work, the UI will complain at you a little but it will work, but one of the primary goals of TrueNAS is data safety, and a single disk is not exactly ‘data-safe’.
If you plan on exploring homelabbing, or want to build out a slightly bigger media server with the benefits that TrueNAS provides (easy application management, disk monitoring, etc), then perhaps you could look into getting TrueNAS running with a single disk with the goal of mirroring it or migrating to a RAIDZ pool in the future. It’s a lot of fun to play around with, if you enjoy that sort of thing.
If you’re looking to move just for the sake of moving, I don’t think you’ll see any particular benefit from moving your existing Windows setup to something like OMV, Unraid, TrueNAS, whatever. Anything new is going to have a pretty steep learning curve and if all you are doing is streaming media to a fire stick you’ll have similar performance across the lot.
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A single drive does not protect against drive failure.
A single drive with copies=2 can protect against bit rot.
ZFS on a single drive still warns about bit rot.
It’s all a matter of how concerned/paranoid you are, and how much you’re willing to spend to alleviate these concerns.
At this point I should stay anchored to windows. Possibly installing truenas in a virtual machine to see how it behaves. Is there a section of the forum where I can ask for a low power hardware configuration or can I ask here?
Currently using
AMD Athlon II x4 610E 2.4 ghz
2gb RAM Asus MB M5A78L-M LX
Windows 10 32-bit
Case Fractal Define XL R2
This would be the section for that, but you can start with the docs:
Note that 8 GB of RAM is a bare minimum.