Truenas Scale 25 stable opinions

TrueNAS General
, , , ,
1

I know this topic has had the crap beat out of it but opinions seem to flop around and usually pertain to older versions.

I currently use core (latest stable, so 13.xx.xx). my nas is on the current hardware:
supermicro x11ssh-f.
intel xeon e3-1240L v5
lsi 9305-8i
32gigs of ecc ram (nemix brand, came from supermicros recommendation list).
intel x710-da4 10Gb nic.

my main drives are 5x 4TB spinners setup in raidz2 for media (movies, tvshows, music), and for really important stuff (documents, etc…) raidz mirror across 2 samsung SSD’s.

i’m gonna be moving my media to ssd’s (6 x 4TB) and the same raidz2 layout to reduce power needs and quiet it down, make things faster and more reliable than replacing the aging spinners.

so, with that i figured I’d rebuild the entire nas all over again from the ground, up because mistakes were made the first time.

i could stick with core, because performance wise it’s been perfect. i know iX is sunsetting it and focussing on scale so…

it’s main function is as a nas, PERIOD… however, i like the app catalogue of scale and while i don’t have any use for it now i may in the future.

so, my long overdue question is: has the latest stable version of scale (fangtooth) reached comparable performance of core, or at least within 99% of core?

the gui of scale is definitely a lot better than that of core, but can deal with core’s quirky gui.

I just wanna know, assuming my hardware is functioning perfectly, can i expect the same level as “set it and forget it” as i’ve come to know from core?

thanks!

2

Scale has performance enhancements over Core, per iX Systems. I don’t have any links or articles I can point to, off hand though.

I moved from Core 13.0U7? (didn’t do the 13.3 series) to Fangtooth. I just use it as a NAS, no VMs, no apps. The only thing I see is the ARC behaves a bit different from the way it does in Core. I seem to stick to about 50% of RAM as ARC and it clears itself when the computer is idle. I just use the NAS as a SMB share and sync files from my Windows 11 machine to the NAS as a backup source using Robocopy on Windows.
I seem to have more disk access on Fangtooth while syncing changes of at least 16Tb of data. The drive access light is blinking more than I remember under Core. Core used more RAM for ARC consistently and didn’t flush the ARC for free memory when the computer sets idle for a day or two. I don’t know if I have something odd with my system or this is just normal Linux and ZFS behavior.

The other thing is a lot of the dashboards don’t give as much info as Core. ZFS tab had more statistics. ZFS tab in Fangtooth over past month. That is all the data by default on that screen. You might want to make a VM of Fangtooth or install on a spare computer to browse the different GUI screens.

image
image1305Ă—383 22.5 KB

3

I do have fangtooth installed on a small experimental nas… its a very old netgear nas… i disabled the onboard dom, installed a couple of ssds, and the other 4 are spinners… installing the previous version of scale was easy… eventually i upgraded to fangtooth and that too went without a hitch…

if ix was going to keep core going with more than just small patches, i’d stay with it… it runs beaufifully… acls and setting up shares doesn’t seem as easy as it is on scale, but as has been said, it’s fast and solid as a rock.

4

There is zVault that is trying to keep up the FreeBSD based version. I don’t know how it is coming along though.
www.zvault.io

2 Likes
5

OH WOW!!! THAT’S AWESOME!!! it’s just what is needed!

thanks!!!

6

I didn’t know about the 13.3 series… was just reading up on it (they made it tough to get the iso).

I’m trying to understand the difference between Core 13.0U7 and core 13.3…

are they not going to be releasing the security patches for it like they will be for 13.0U7. is 13.3 expected to be less stable than 13.0U7?

7

13.3 was produced for Core users that needed to update Jails at the time. I think it is EOL for that too? Forum post showing user updated a Jail to 13.4 TrueNAS CORE 13.3-RELEASE is Now Available - #214 by Davvo
FreeBSD page shows 13.4 as the lowest value in the current FreeBSD chains. I don’t use the FreeBSD Jails feature so I don’t know if it has fallen off the versions you can update like 13.0 did.

I think Core 13.3U1.2 is already EOL and will not get any more update. Link to docs and last release notice

8

All-in-all though, no issues?

in terms of throughput, how has scale compared to core?

9

SMB doesn’t significantly differ between Core / SCALE. The SMB auxiliary parameters are hidden away from users in the UI, and if you’ve for some reason thrown a bunch of Samba version-specific config in it then you’ll break on upgrade (but that’s not exactly a SCALE vs Core thing) – that’s just a “doing basically unsupported things will randomly break on update / upgrade” thing.

10

I did a fresh install of Scale Fangtooth on a different ssd boot drive. Set up SMB sharing and copied over all the data fresh from my Windows computer. It was stable and copied about 16Tb of files with no problems. Performance and everything else is about the same for my light usage.

I think there are plenty of happy users of Scale on the forum.

11

Has zVault has earned the privilege of being called stable? I’d say hard no. It was forked 7 months ago and it looks development has stalled, at least when I look at the associated github.

SCALE is perfectly fine for file sharing, effectively equal to CORE.
If you want apps functionality, SCALE’s is better than CORE for most things.
VM functionality with its KVM base is better in SCALE, the incus experiment is interesting, but they were right to call it Experimental at this stage. We’ll see how the reimplementation of the previous VM GUI will pan out.

12

I would say it is an option to watch if you want FreeBSD based ZFS. zVault had to do a clean up of IP from iX Systems and pushed out the latest release. I know the web page doesn’t give much info.

13

Regarding zVault, i’m psyched about that and I truly hope it takes off! A lot of times a project runs its course and when it forks the new version of it comes out really great, as we saw when the original M0n0wall forked to pfsense (and opnsense).

Core just works and I don’t think anyone can say otherwise… it’s (core’s) interface is not NEARLY as refined as that of scale, but it could be. and from what i’ve read here, the caching and memory, ARC, etc… still isn’t as refined as it is with core… please by all means correct me if i’m wrong…

also, it was mentioned above that it seems as though writing to the drives occurs a good bit more with scale than core… i have a bunch of ssd’s i’ll be using and don’t wanna be burning them up as they’re expensive… is this the case?

I’m mostly switching to core to take advantage of some of the apps available, otherwise i probably would stay with core as reliability is paramount, (which doesn’t seem to matter any more).

14

The last time I looked at zvault source (which was a while back), they had not updated the samba port from the last time I worked on it. I saw a WIP branch in which some core changes were being reverted without clear explanation.

I haven’t looked in depth obviously, but I’d be leery of using it personally without clear understanding of where they stand regarding ports from core, there’s no guarantee the same level of care will go into the next version of zvault (if it happens). From the standpoint of trust I’d treat it as an entirely new distro project and wait to see how it will develop (or jump in knowing that it’s de-faco experimental). If you have TrueNAS deployed at a workplace the SCALE upgrade path is a safer bet long term.

15

based on a supermicro x11ssh-f motherboard
i3-7100T cpu
32gigs of ram
intel x710-da2
lsi 9300-8i
and 6x 4TB samsung 870 evos in a raidz2 array, what are your thoughts on throughput over the 10Gb ethernet? (writing to the nas)…

as an experiment i created a dataset and copied movies (40gig, an 8 gig, and a 3 gig) from my media station to the nas…
the most it got was around 450MB/s… moving the same files from the nas to the media station (win10 based) yielded a steady 10Gb/s no problem… but i was REALLY surprised that the moving those movies from the win10 box to the TNScale was so slow… i was certain it hit 10Gb/s without issue… cpu didn’t spike all that high (30-50%)…

my TN Core nas with 5x 4TB spinners will initially spike to 10Gb/s, then once arc is full, drops down to 250-350MB/s…

if the cpu was the culprit, i’d think it would be closing in on 100%

async is off