For a few years now I have had a PC with an i3 4170, 4gb of ram and 120gb ssd which I only use for Home Assistant and a separate Terramaster F2 210 NAS with a single 4TB HDD for storage and plex. I would like to eliminate the NAS and use the Home Assistant PC’s hardware for both functions, by installing TrueNAS Scale on it and running Home Assistant in a VM like I’ve read others do here.
My question is why is the recommended ram 8GB? Is it for multiple hard drives use case scenarios? Even if it was ok would it then mean I’ll have to permanently allocate some RAM to Home Assistant’s VM?
8gb are the minimal amount of RAM for a really basic use case.
And without at least 16gb of RAM, running VM Is not safe for system stability.
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I wonder why, my current NAS is a 4xCortex A53 ARM with 1GB of RAM and with my 1gbps network I never have any slow down, is it because TrueNAS is oriented towards bigger systems? I think I’ll have to consider OpenMediaVault to avoid upgrading since that has only 1gb RAM requirement
Because TrueNAS is a much more involved piece of software. If you’re unable or unwilling to meet its hardware requirements, it’s best for you to use a different OS.
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ZFS is not a lightweight file system, and TN is used (and as such built) for Enterprise duty.
4GB of RAM in 2024 is nothing btw.
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If you can’t deal with the RAM upgrade (and probably with the NIC upgrade to), point to another OS Is the better way IMHO.
Didn’t try personally OMV, but Is really popular
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Also, do note that ARM does not work with TN.
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This CPU, but with 32GB of RAM, would be a good fit for Truenas. Probably even with Plex running.
But for VMs, you want more cores/threads.
ZFS uses most available RAM as a read cash. This drastically improves performance.
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Heck, 32 GB aren’t a lot. But people are still stuck in the mindset of recycling their old 386 as a NAS.
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If it’s not a necessity I like to avoid spending money where I can, and I have to admit that I did a lot to run software that wasn’t supposed to run on i386 some years ago and everything worked just fine after the initial headache for setup. I wanted to get away easy this time too, thanks to everyone for the explaination provided
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This really is very poor thinking indeed.
The point of a NAS is to make large storage both easy to use and administer and very safe for your data.
You don’t get safety by using a mixed bag of different sized knackered HDDs which are passed their useful life. You need to use several disks of the same size and type - and those cost quite a lot of money. So why even attempt to reuse old computers for it, especially since 20TB will cost you c. 500€ and a new N100 based MB and case might cost you 350€, for which you get all the data safety features and also fabulous performance.
It is, but there’s at least some historical basis for it. Long ago, before iX’ involvement (so, 15+ years ago), the product then called FreeNAS was a completely different beast, had very minimal resource requirements, and thus could run on just about anything. And as a result, there were (and still are) a lot of videos to the effect of, “turn your potato into a NAS.”
The problem is that this is now in the distant past, but people still have this mindset. And it’s one that really neeeds to go away.
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If other people’s thinking is like mine I reuse old computers because I know I’ll never need tens of TB of storage or performance beyond about 100mb/s transfer. Me, my brother and dad used a 1TB NAS for 4 years before the disk died and we switched to 4TB just for convenience.
By the way the reason I turned to TrueNAS before considering other options is that I installed and used FreeNAS on an even older PC many years ago and it worked fine, just took too much space at the time and decided to buy the Terramaster small NAS. I did not look further into what FreeNAS had turned into, commercially and functionality wise.
Reuse old hardware Is not bad at all, point of view.
Important Is that this old hardware must be suitable at most.
Avoiding SMR disks, Realtek LAN, cheap SATA multiplier… Is a really good start point for the goal (have a well working home nas).
In most case, the strong limit for a consumer board Is the lack of ECC… But this Is not a requirements (highly reccomended fir sure).
Everyone had to face with own situation, and that can mean that not everyone can spend 1000€ (but budget Is just an example).
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Repurposing old hardware is totally fine and in some cases should be encouraged, however it boils down to understanding the pros and cons of doing so.
Guiding the new users to making an informed decision is the most important role of this community’s members, especially since there is suboptimal information out there.
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If you read the scale hardware requirements carefully you’ll see that TrueNAS can run as an SMB and replication system with less than 8GB of ram, but perf is significantly better with 8.
The TrueNAS installer recommends 8 GB of RAM. TrueNAS installs, runs, and operates jails (in TrueNAS CORE). It also hosts SMB shares and replicates TBs of data with less. iXsystems recommends the above for better performance and fewer issues.
I’ve run TrueNAS on a 4GB system. It leaves about 700MB for ARC.
An 8GB system, conversely allows about 4GB. Which is a significant increase in ARC and thus perf.
Also allowing increased flexibility.
As you add more services and tasks to your NAS, each requires a bit more RAM.
You would not want to run a VM on a TrueNAS system with only 4GB of RAM, as yes, you need to dedicate some memory to the VM, generally starting with the minimum requirements for that OS and increasing as necessary)
You can probably get away with running a HAOS VM with 8GB of ram, but even more would be better.
I believe the HAOS does not have excessive requirements.
TLDR; upgrade to 8 or 16GB, then go right ahead.
Do note that we have seen issues with systems running less than 8GB of RAM.
Some of us do not feel confident in suggesting running 8GB as per the official minimum RAM requirement for SCALE, but that’s another story.
Absolutely, but also the minimum was raised because of “issues” when SCALE did not even exist… ie we have not actually seen the weird corrupting “issues” with SCALE, other than the fact that 4GB is not enough ram to do too many things or host a big zfs pool.
The recommended minimum is 8GB which will allow a a modest system to do modest things quite well.
I recall my first IBM PC, a whopping 256K of RAM. A handful of 16 or 20 pin RAM in DIP format, pushed all into the motherboard and BAM! 512K of RAM. And with our CGA B/W monitor we could do quite a bit, for it’s day.
To the OP, as others have said, TrueNAS has some rather serious hardware requirements to ensure stability. We would rather warn you than let you go through a lot of pain and suffering. It is no fun.