I would like to build a mini home NAS with my mini computer.
I totally understand that for a “proper” NAS you need multiple disks and redundancy. And for best performance and flexibility I also see the need for an extra boot drive to install TrueNAS.
But for my mini home, NAS performance is really not an issue and redundancy is done by near time replication to a cloud storage, which is good enough for me.
Is there an easy way to create two partitions and install TrueNAS on one of them and use the second partition for Data?
Or is there a bigger problem with such a setup, that I don’t see?
I know this is somewhat of a niche use case for TrueNAS as a product, but such a setup could still be helpful for other home users, I think.
TrueNAS software was not designed for the low end. And a single drive, partitioned up would more or less be the lowest end.
We don’t have a readily available instruction guide on how to accomplish this goal. Perhaps it would be nice, but their are occasional problems with a single disk setup.So I guess those that know how to do it, probably don’t want to take responsibility for another’s data.
You might glance at HexOS, which has a different front end to TrueNAS. It might support single disk installations. However, if I recall correctly, HexOS is a paid product.
It is generally not supported and you are on your own (and forums ) with such a setup.
Well, I’ve been using OS disk(s) for other purposes too for years, with CORE in past and now SCALE. I never encountered unforeseen issues or problems with updates. That is my experience.
Actually it is not to complicated to setup BUT, as mentioned, it involves using the command line. Just to outline it:
Install TrueNAS on a USB drive which is smaller than your SSD/HDD.
System > Boot > Button: Boot Pool Status : attach target SSD/HDD and check that it shall not use entire space. Then reboot… zpool offline USB drive… zpool detach USB drive… reboot and plug out USB drive.
Command Line: create additional partition, restart, create new zpool consisting of that partition. export zpool.
I think the main point is getting overlooked in some of the responses. Yes, TrueNAS needs a boot device and at least one other drive for data. The boot device doesn’t need to be large, though. Even a USB flash drive can be used, though it’s distinctly suboptimal. A USB SSD is a decent choice. A small NVMe SSD is a very good choice.
What you definitely don’t have to have is more than one large-capacity spinning drive. It’s recommended–we assume people who are using TrueNAS care about their data, and thus would store it with redundancy–but it definitely isn’t required.
When I first started out with FreeNAS in 2015 (name before it became TrueNAS), the boot drive was a USB stick and the data drive was a single large hard drive, and this was on a rescued Core 2 Quad system. I fully expected to lose the data (no ECC memory), but it allowed me to “cheaply” set up FreeNAS and gain experience before spending money on a full-blown setup.
When I built my full-brown system, the server motherboard had eight SATA ports and a NVMe slot which I used as a boot drive.
It would not even be much less contorted with OMV, which is also designed to have a dedicated boot drive. So not much hope of hapiness by chosing another NAS appliance.
If you really want to share files from a single drive and do not care about data safety and integrity, just install your desktop OS of choice, macOS or Windows, and set up a shared folder on the drive.
I just want to add one point regarding the USB flash drive. It’s not that you can’t use it, it’s simply not recommended.
From personal experience, I can see why. I too ran FreeNAS circa 2013 back when USB flash drive was actually a recommended practice. Every once in a while though, I would get “mysterious” freezes or just unexplained bizarre stability issues or I would reboot after an update and then the machine refuses to boot.
All of those prior aforementioned issues were ultimately due to a bad flash drive that needed to be replaced, but I lost way too many hours trying to figure out what was wrong thinking stability issues are usually overheating or bad RAM, etc and each time, it would take me a while to finally figure out it was a bad thumb drive.
I’m pleased to say that ever since I switched to a cheap 60 GB SSD, I have never encountered these bizarre issues again.
So, if you like to play on the edge and like to be frustrated and love chasing a wild goose once in a while, by all means more power to you. I personally have little patience nor time for such headaches.
From my experience the basic you need are two USB drives of min 16GB each and one HDD of sorts. Personally WD Reds are the HDD I use but any will do.
I found over the years that the USB’s don’t fail but the connections get tired this is why you need two. When the connections get tired as you will see on the Console eg: missing boot device you shutdown pull out and put back in the USBs several times. Boot and it should all be good as it will resilver (I think, Been a long time). As a precaution I do it once a year and have not had USB’s fail. If I also remember when playing with TNS it will complain about USBs, blah blah not recommended or such.
Suggestion:
Write Truenas onto USB 1 then place both USB’s on target PC. Boot into USB containing TN. Remember to set PC to boot from USB only.
Once installed go into boot devices and create a mirror boot device with the USB that you used to install TN. Future updates can be done online.
Set up your HDD and set the System dataset onto the HDD if using USB as boot devices. TN will run and boot faster with the System Dataset on a HDD.
That’s all you need which is what I use when playing with Scale.
I don’t use raid, can’t get my head around the wasted space and $$$ since it’s not a backup anyway, striped disks is too dangerous and the others no use to me a home user. So I have separate HDDs inside my box and I use Rsync to back up every other day. Example: Media disk has the backup of Users and the Users disk has the backup of Media disk. Yes I also do off-site backup in case house burns down…
I’m going to take a slightly different angle to other respondents:
TrueNAS’s core reason for being, imho, is to provide an appliance-based secure and redundant storage solution. If you’re looking to run a system on a single HDD with no data backups or redundancy why did you select TrueNAS? There may be better options out there for you, particularly if you’re looking to use your system as a platform for running VMs and/or containers on (which, imho, are something of a (currently) unstable* afterthought in TrueNAS Scale).
It’s a storage platform that also happens to provide app hosting, not the other way around.
I don’t want to put you off: I think TrueNAS, the developers, and the community are fantastic. I think just think people need to think carefully before adopting it for use.
‘unstable’ as in evolving/changing, not necessarily prone to crashing
Let me counter with this… what is wrong with starting small just to get your feet wet? How many of us started with a out-of-date system that was re-purposed as a TrueNAS system?
I’m helping a buddy out with his first TrueNAS system by sending him my old TrueNAS system. It’s nine years old, but it’s still quite capable with a Xeon processor, server motherboard, 64GB of ECC memory, and power supply. Just add NVMe boot drive and hard drives.
Genuine question: why not just use a mirror? It seems like you are essentially creating a mirror with extra steps. That way you don’t have to worry about the rsync task failing or losing any data modified or created after the most recent sync.
This is about the rsync between drives in one Truenas box.
The mirror would provide the redundancy of this rsync solution (if I understand the solution correctly) not the backup that is taken care of by the offsite backup.
So yes I agree that redundancy is not backup, but that’s not what I was suggesting.
Totally agree, moreover i think that “processing” data this way not cover any possible data corruption and instead will degrade nor source and target silently in case something bad happen.
In TN i don’t really see any advantage, although in other scenarios where build an array is not possible, probably is the best solution
Nothing, altough starting with a single data drive (and a dedicated boot device) really feels smallish.
But TrueNAS with one and only one drive for everything, OS and data, is not getting your feet merely “wet”: It’s getting your feet deep in quicksand. Don’t do that!
Oh, I agree. Two drives (one boot, one data) are absolutely the minimum. And, some scrounging around should allow you to find some old drives. Many motherboards have multiple SATA ports, and most motherboards in the past ten years probably have at least one NVMe slot which can be used for the boot drive.
) with such a setup.