And out of WD Red and Seagate IronWolf, which one should I go for? Or is there a better option?
You create a single drive pool on it, and set up a replication or rsync task. However, USB connections are not recommended because they can suddenly drop out.
If your server or house goes on fire or gets flooded, the external drive will most likely also be destroyed, so if you have space and sata ports inside the case, I would do that.
Thanks. What if you need to view the files on the Disk on a PC? Ideally Linux?
You would need a OS with ZFS.
âŚwhich is: Pretty much any flavour of BSD, any Linux distro with an OpenZFS package, macOS or even Windows.
Whatever you can find for an acceptable price these daysâŚ
Do not forget to include WD Gold, HGST Ultrastar, Seagate Exos, as well as Toshiba MG and N300 series in the mix of possibilities. Or WD Purple, SkyHawkâŚ
THIS 
is the key design question.
Mirrors are fine and flexible (can add or remove vdevs at will)⌠until they arenât because basic two-way mirrors means âonlyâ 50% space efficiency, and with really large drives 3-way mirrors would be advisable.
Raidz1 is not that resilient when things go tits up.
Raidz2 provides decent safety, but implies a minimum of 4 drives (at 50% space efficiency, like a stripe of two 2-way mirrors, with lesser IOPS perforaerformance but arguably slighly better resiliency). The sweet spot would be 6- to 8-wide raidz2 vdev(s), which then implies some minimal size.
Raidz (of any level) provides better space efficiency, at the cost of flexibility: No removal, extension by either adding full vdevs or replacing all (vdev) drivesâboth of which imply more drives than with a mirror layout. Widening vdevs is possible, with caveats. And increasing raidz level (i.e. resiliency) is NOT possible.
With 5 TB of data and an avowed design target of â16 TB usableâ youâre in a pickle.
IMHO, âspinning rustâ drives only make sense from 10 TB and up: SSDs are a viable alternative for lower capacities.
A single mirror of 16 TB drives (or 18 TB or 20 TB if âusableâ takes account of the recommended 80% limit for pool use) would do, but I personally wouldnât be comfortable with a 2-way mirror at this size: Resilvering a well filled pool may take about one day or more.
A stripe of two 8+ TB mirrors would do it. 4-wide raidz2 is an alternative option.
6-wide raidz2 either involves HDDs which Iâd consider ridiculously small by current standard, or massively overshooting the size target. Either way, more drives means more noise and more power.
Chose your evil. And have good backup(s).
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Okay, so for the Case:
What would be a recommendable Micro ATX or Chassis Mount Case for a MATX Mobo for a TrueNAS PC?
Wow, thats quite a bit to take in. Its not like Synology (Never used Synology myself). So it would be better to have more than 4 Drives in a pool?
Thatâs ZFS showing its enterprise origin: The administrator has to make a decision about pool design at build. If the choice was wrong, or ârequirements have changedâ, the way out is generally âBackup-Destroy-Restoreâ.
No. Less drives means less noise and less power, which is generally good for home use. It just happens that youâre in a spot where you have many different options, but none stands out.
Your requirements will fit with a limited number of hard drives, one boot SSD, and one or two SSDs for apps (distinct from boot). So basically any case which can fit four 3.5" drives and cool them well would do. No particular need for a dedicated NAS case.
What I would recommend however is to forget Ryzen and go for Intel Core or Xeon E with an iGPU. Intel iGPUs are well-suited for transcoding.
The CPU is good, and can even use ECC RAM with a suitable motherboard, but TrueNAS no longer has drivers for the old GTX.
Alternatively, you may go for Ryzen with an Arc dGPU.
Periodic snapshot task: Snapshots âlockâ data out of reach for cryptolockers.
And then replication to a secondary backup NAS and/or to external drives; ideally, this goes up to a full 3-2-1 backup strategy. (Which can then inform pool design choices: If you have a solid backup strategy, and are willing to use the backup in case of problems, you can relax design for the main pool (large 2-way mirror, or raidz1); if not, you go for a more conservative and more resilient choice for the main NAS.)
Would the HD 4600 iGPU of my i7-4770 be supported still and be alright if the media being transcoded is not 4K? Its only going to be used internally at the moment (1 or 2 Clients).
Which includes OS Config, Apps Config?
I know there are people who use backup scripts. Or is there a better way for me a newb?
Yeah, I wasnât really intending to have more than 4 Drives anyways.
I also have some of these could the front vents be good at all for âcoolingâ? Or should I go for something else?
Unfortunately, Iâm not knowledgeable enough about the history of QuickSync to know what an i7-4770 iGPU is capable of, so I canât answer the first question. (1-2 clients and no 4k might raise the question whether thereâs a need for transcoding to begin with, or whether the CPU could just do it.)
OS config: You save a configuration file somewhere ouside the NAS. Or set up @joeschmuck 's Multi-Report to regularly mail it to you.
Apps config is where the devil lies. With quite a large HDD pool, I suppose you may just replicate the app database to the slow storage.
I was thinking more about a mid-tower with fans just in front of the internal drive bays.
Fractal Design Node 304 is an excellent small NAS for up to 6 drives. If youâre in the USA, there a Lian-Li PC-Q25 on eBay right now. But these cases require a mini-ITX motherboard.
Multi-Report is script which will test your drives out periodically and daily send you an email. By default every Monday will be an email with your TrueNAS Config file attached. Multi-Report also generate a nice informative email about the health of your drives. You must run this script daily to reap the benefits of the SMART testing.
If you ONLY want to get a backup of your TrueNAS Config file, there is a second link in my signature for just that purpose, it does not run SMART tests, it only send you an email with your config file attached. When you run this, it will generate the email. You can put this in a CRON Job to run as frequently as you want. During initial setup of TrueNAS, maybe you want this once a day, once every 2 hours, whatever⌠After your system is configured, once a week should be plenty unless you are making changes often.
Why use an email? Well, your email is generally stored outside your home, normally on an email server. This makes having a backup copy easy to locate and have available should bad things happen to your NAS and you need to reinstall TureNAS.
Your junk PC would make a good backup target (remember 3-2-1).
I would use,
1ssd/nvme for your boot drive,
1ssd/nvme for your apps - configure this to be backed up by your main pool.
2-4 disks for main pool (i prefer 4 in Z1 or Z2) - If you have enough drives use your old machine as a backup target.
This to keep in mind for the future while you are shoppingâŚ.
NO SMR
Consider the network interface speed on the board (1g, 2.5g, 10g) will you possibly need to add a NIC later to increase the network speed (btw 1g is fine for plex and the like but can be slow for replications and large transfers).
how many drive connections do you need and might you need, will this require an addon card (e.g., HBA).
may sure you are aware of the restrictions on sizing your ZFS pool (a 4 disk z1 pool will be roughly the size of the smallest disk times 3 - e.g., ZFS treats all disks as having the size of the smallest disks in the pool).
I donât personally like containers within truenas (i use proxmox to virtualize truenas) i run a fedora VM on proxmox for all my containers alongside the truenas VM (except tailscale which i use for my admin connections and for replications). separation helps to limit your exposure. If you are really concerned with security you may want to consider either separate machines to run your apps or a virtualization based approach. Do not go exposing things to the internet directly, only allow access via vpn/wireguard type connections (e.g., tailscale/netbird/etc.). Restrict everything to have access only to the thing they are supposed to have access to (I honestly do not see this covered very well on most tutorials - its usually just ignored and everything is done as group/user 1000/1000 which is not good.
I believe that you can create vlans with truenas (and proxmox for that matter).
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I wouldnât recommend emailing your config file as it should normally contain your secrets. But its not really necessary either. The config only changes when you change the config, so just capture the latest config when you change settings and then put is somewhere safe.
It can be compromised, that is a fact as I know it. I use to have the file encrypted but no one was using it and my poll resulted in it not being really that desired. The new major version will encrypt the .tar file and be easier to setup. But that is still a way down the road.
For those who have a relatively safe system, not exposed to the WAN, then the email works great as-is. If an admin account is exposed to the internet, then you could be infiltrated.
I presume (possibly incorrectly) that most of us use email services (e.g., gmail) to receive our emails. If truenas emails us the config file then it would be saved in your inbox so if someone gets into your email and then gets your truenas config. what might they be able to do with that?
I have seen many folks that ended up with compromised email accounts in my day, and I donât even work in IT.
Hmm⌠Is there a way to send HA alerts based on System Tests?