- Joined
- 24 Jul 2009
- Posts
- 2,371
- Location
- -
Had Unraid running a week now. All shares setup, docker containers running (including custom not on the app store). Backup of appdata and user scripts. Works brialliantly.
NAS OS?
- Thread starter The1nonly1
- Start date
Because TrueNAS is geared towards ZFS, and for most home use (e.g. Media storage) ZFS is less space efficient and less flexible when it comes to expansion (Compared to Unraid's parity implementation, and being able to add mismatched sized drives).
While TrueNAS may offer better out of the box performance (i.e. because it is involving more than a single drive for reads/writes), again for most home use, a single drive offers enough performance to stream even 4K media
That says more about who you associate with and your lack of knowledge of the product than the actual product surely? Who wants to fire up a large VDEV just to watch a video or listen to a track, it's inefficient and frankly dumb. With UnRaid you spin up the single disk with the file on, it's not IO limited in terms of writes if you use an appropriate cache strategy, and it's not a problem for multiple clients to stream from the same drive, even while it's being written to, it's literally the most efficient option for media storage allowing easy expansion down the line. Don't get me wrong, I love TNS for heavy IOPS workloads, multi-tier caching, and it's flexibility, it's genuinely an amazingly versatile tool to do a job, but if you are doing the whole media thing or want an actual NAS, it's a poor choice for home use.
As to expanding, they can either migrate to larger drives, add an external DAS (Microservers are easy to convert and cheap), add a disk shelf or just buy a bigger case, they don't need to add the same sized drives, and UR is hardware-agnostic, so full migrations take as long as it takes you to plug the drives and USB in to whatever you are moving to.
Who mentioned a large VDEV? 2, 4 or 8 disks isn't large and doesn't use enough power to **** anyone off unless you're incredibly tight.
I know enough about TrueNAS and Unraid to argue with the likes of you who seems to think that people only use Unraid to stream a video. They aren't, they're generally doing the same as what they'd do with TrueNAS but with the limitations of an OS that you need to pay for to get ongoing support and the relatively ****** performance.
I know enough about TrueNAS and Unraid to argue with the likes of you who seems to think that people only use Unraid to stream a video. They aren't, they're generally doing the same as what they'd do with TrueNAS but with the limitations of an OS that you need to pay for to get ongoing support and the relatively ****** performance.
And yet you'd have still have the same limitations regarding expansion with TrueNAS - not sure what you're point is?
I must be incredible tight then - I certainly wouldn't want 8 disks spinning up unnecessarily.
In most home environments that's exactly what NASes are used for - Plex etc and *Arr stacks.
I must have missed the part where TrueNAS support is free?
And again you keep stating that UnRaid's performance is poor, but in most cases that actually isn't an issue - most home users still have 1Gb or maybe 2.5Gb networks at home, or are using Wifi. Unraid is more than capable of saturating these.
By all means if you are a content creator or whatever chucking around video files for editing, then yes TrueNAS and hardware that can saturate a 10Gbps+ connection is absolutely a no brainer.
Wind the confrontational tone in please - first and only warning
If you don't understand why you should use different tools for different jobs, how to determine the appropriate tool to use, or why efficiency is actually important, you probably shouldn't be telling anyone that you know 'enough', let alone 'enough to argue' with anyone. It just sounds silly.
My Unraid setup has wherever I want to go to expand. I use 3 different sized very old HDD in my array to get me going, with 9 bays spare for my array (with ports and power connected up). I have 2 SSD 1 nvme running Boot/Cache, 1 SATA running docker containers and Home Assistant. I still have 1 M2 socket and 1 spare SATA port too.
I use the Jonsbo N5 case for this
Last edited:
Soldato
- Joined
- 29 Jun 2005
- Posts
- 4,809
- Location
- London
Another Unraid here.
Coming from a catastrophic TrueNas failure, I needed a different option and it's not really let me down, plus I find it much easier to use.
Mine is a basic 2 mirrored drive setup though, so nothing challenging.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 7 Apr 2008
- Posts
- 26,450
- Location
- Lorville - Hurston
What failed in your true nas build?
I did lots of research between the two and both seemed as good as each other but one was free so I opted for that instead.
Mines a bit complicated as I have 7 hdd 4nvme and another 2 nvme
I spent a lot of time picking between unraid and truenas, and basically when I looked at it from the perspective of what I wanted to do unraid offered everything truenas had plus some stuff it didn't have...
Unraid has multiple options about how they do their drive setups and the user is free to configure it how they want.
I can do ZFS (or another format if I chose) if want with multiple drives of the same size, get the increased power draw... or I could just set up a dedicated SSD pool that will perform faster for those 'high performance uses'.....
I could set up an unraid array where I mix disks or I could have the same setup with matching drive sizes and get the power savings of only spinning up the drives I need. Like I say OPTIONS...
Personally my setup is pretty minimal but I'm still working on getting it exactly how I want it... note the mixture of configs for each array/pool....
Jonsbo N5, i5 13500, 96gb ram (I actually planned build around being able to use truenas if I wanted to) with
10 x Seagate EXOS 18TB drives in 8+2 parity unraid array - bulk/long term media storage - only spins up needed drive
I intend to change the below so they use ZFS in the near future
2 x WD 18 TB Red Pro in mirrored array - 'real time' PC backup - spins up both drives
2x 2TB NVME in mirrored array - my main 'os' cache drive (it's not really an OS drive, due to USB boot but has all the 'os' type stuff)
4x 2TB Sata M2 SSDs in raid 1+0 - cache drives for transferring files over
2x 2TB Sata SSDs in mirrored array - download management tool sends files here
2x 2TB Sata SSDs in mirrored array - not 100% sure on what I will do with this yet but got ideas including handbrake encoding.
And performance isn't always the main metric when it comes to a server... my running costs are literally halved by not having all my drives spun up when accessing my bulk storage... that's a LOT of saving considering cost of electric these days (and I have solar panels too...)
Caporegime
- Joined
- 7 Apr 2008
- Posts
- 26,450
- Location
- Lorville - Hurston
Do you know roughly how much u save from energy bills when drives are not spun up?
VS the monthly cost or yearly cost of monthly
Last edited:
According to Peanut (NUTS plugin) my base power draw from my UPS is 65w (I have an lsi 9305-16i) with my nvme drives active, it's 134w with all drives spun up and nothing really taxing the cpu. I think I have seen about 180w when it's 'doing stuff', I have disabled turbo boost etc.
That is 1.6kw, 3.2kw and 4.3kw respectively but my average draw seems to be around 2kw according to the smart meter, I've checked with server on versus off.
If you take the average kwh price to be 27p, then 43.2p, 86.4p and 116.1p per day... that is £157.68, £315.36 and £423.76 per year, respectively.
My average 2kw would be about £197.10, think the bills maybe gone up by about £100 a year give or take.
Bear in mind this is while I'm still playing around with stuff and I might be able to get it a little lower when I really start fine tuning stuff, zfs might be a little more power hungry too.
Soldato
- Joined
- 29 Jun 2005
- Posts
- 4,809
- Location
- London
I found Unraid way easier to configure, it's probably subjective though.
Soldato
- Joined
- 29 Jun 2005
- Posts
- 4,809
- Location
- London
I had a drive failure, and when I put the replacement drive in TrueNAS flipped out and wouldn't recognise the working drive to resilver from. Then when I tried to get the data from the drive via other methods it was corrupted somehow and inaccessible. Both drives were fine again once formatted.
I still have no idea what the root cause was, but it encouraged me to try Unraid, which I found I much prefer.
You can drop the USB in next version currently in beta, assuming you have a TPM
Caporegime
- Joined
- 7 Apr 2008
- Posts
- 26,450
- Location
- Lorville - Hurston
Interesting because I too had a failure but managed to resilver and never lost any data either. Did it a few times before because I got a bad batch of hdd and two of them failed but at different times
You don't need a tpm, the usb gpuid can still be used as before, just using a pool to boot from instead. Personally don't see a need to use a drive for boot at the moment, it's not like you turn off a server etc as often as a normal pc.