NAS, UNRAID, and TrueNAS - Which One Should You Use?
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- čas přidán 15. 09. 2022
- This video covers my opinion on 3 different storage technologies (NAS, UNRAID, and TrueNAS) based on my thoughts and experiences. I try and cover the pros and cons of each technology as well as make my own recommendations. If you are not using one of these, are thinking of switching, or just want to learn more, then I hope you find this video helpful.
The links below are Amazon affiliate links, and as an affiliate, I earn a small commission to support the channel without affecting the price you pay,
QNAP TS-453D-4G: amzn.to/3BForvK
QNAP TS-932PX-4G: amzn.to/3Bifkj6
QNAP TS-h973AX-8G: amzn.to/3eO7eaC
Other items in my Network:
QNAP 12 Port Managed 10GbE switch: amzn.to/3td6XiV
10Gtek 10Gbe NIC card (Intel Compatible): amzn.to/2RtDte3
QNAP QSW-M408-2C: amzn.to/35WuxbB
QNAP QSW-M408-2C: amzn.to/35WuxbB - Věda a technologie
Unraid allows me the most flexibility as a lab/home/selfhosted user. Nothing can come close. I can expand or contract my pools and have multiple pools for multiple purposes...all without needing to purchase multiple drives (using JBOD of varying sizes). I can use Desktop hard drives, NAS hard drives, SSD's, NVME's, and combine them together in any shape or form I want and I never lose data and I never have to worry that things will go sideways. I've been running over 2 years on the same array...have expanded it twice and lost 2 older drives and restored them completely without a hiccup. If you're a lab/home/selfhosted user, I recommend Unraid over all options. I gladly paid the top tier and will do so for any and all Unraid boxes I bring online in the future. It's worth it.
Thanks for your input. Great feedback!
@@josephp1592 So can standard RAID? Not sure what the point of this is as I'm not saying this as a 'difference' with unraid...but folks don't really understand the difference it has between standard RAID or even ZFS pools. For performance, the only thing I care about is docker and VM's which run off SSD's on Unraid so I really don't care about file storage speed since my files don't change often and my drives don't even spin up which lengthens their life considerably.
Use what fits your use case...but for a majority of homelab folks that fit my use case (most of the people I know and interact with), Truenas is overkill.
@@DerrickDevineI think he appreciates the flexibility of being able to integrate drives of various capacities which Unraid appears to allow. Standard RAID systems require using same size volumes from each physical drive.
Good comparison summary, Mike. I had been thinking about these different options for a while now and wondered just how practical TrueNAS would be for small business use. Will definitely look at UNRAID in the future. Thanks.
Thanks. If you use UNRAID make sure you use a cache drive.
Thank you for this video Mike! It was very helpful to watch
Thanks the feedback.
Watch it all and watch it all to the end. Lots of great info to help plan for the future. Thankyou !!
Awesome to hear and thanks for the feedback, it is appreciated.
I think it's worth mentioning that in a zfs file system with multiple vdevs, if you lose 1 full vdev due to parity loss, you lose the entire array. It's common with zfs to rebuild an array once you have enough new drives to do so with more parity loss ie changing from a raidz1 to raidz2 or 3 with larger vdevs since it is technically safer. Its also worth mentioning that you are completely unable to remove a vdev once added so any expansion you make is permanent.
Absolutely great points. Thanks for mentioning it.
That's the one that keeps me from zfs for now.
Unsure if all the perks & advantages of zfs is worth risking losing it all, especially if you haven't had the chance to establish a secondary offsite backup.
Thank you. As someone who is very new to making a NAS and home media server, I only have experience with raid at the hardware level from work. Making my own has been a very different experience, and since I'm new, I didn't want to get locked into something I couldn't necessarily grow with ease. This was extremely informative, and it helped me confidently make a choice.
Also, I wanted to say thank you for the approachable tone of the video! In asking around both communities, the bias for unRaid vs TrueNAS has been kind of staggering, and you felt approachable and fair! So thank you for that as well!
Awesome and glad to hear that. Good luck and thanks for the feedback.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on true nas once you’re finished understanding it and gotten comfortable with it. Great to the point video, I like your clear explanations.
Thanks. Still working with all of the will do an update on TruNAS. Thanks for the feedback.
Excellent video Mike. Thank you for making it. Would it be possible for you to make a video about how you use your NAS drive or drives to be used a the video files source for your video editing software? Thanks again! Keep it up!
Thanks for the feedback. I will certainly add it to my list, had not thought of that. Thanks for the suggestion and appreciate the comment.
Awesome vid this is a great no-nonsense review. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.
Great video Mike. Thanks.
Thanks for the feedback.
Great summary!
Thank you for the feedback it is appreciated.
Very useful, thank you Mr. Faucher.
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.
@@MikeFaucher Yessir, I went with UnRaid and I have a NVMe 1TB for a cache drive which helps a lot.
@@NTATchannelNickTaylor Awesome. Good choice.
Hey, great video Mike, very helpful. One random question, what's that case you show up in 4:56? The one with the hard drive bay facing the outside instead of the PSU
The case is an old Fractal Design XL that I reproposed. The cover that is connected to the PS is just a custom sheet metal cover I made for cable management. Hope that helps and thanks for the feedback.
@@MikeFaucher ohh, I see, thanks for the reply!
Thanks for the video. I have had a QNap NAS for years and I find it impenetrable. Thin Think it's so bloody confusing. It's apps are confusing. On the other hand, I love UNRaid. Just set one up. It's easier. Using an SSD cache even a single one that gets moved each night for editing is plenty fast.
Great to hear. I also like UnRaid and find a good choice for expandable storage. Thanks for the feedback.
You can expand a zfs vdev, there is a setting called autoexpand in the zpool. You can expand and exchange for larger disks in the vdev. I think what you are trying to describe is to extend the vdev. Not the same.
You are correct but adding bigger disks I believe requires that you replace them all. Good point though, thanks.
@@josephp1592 I will have to relook at this as that was my initial experience. Thanks.
Glad you mentioned this, while you do have to replace all the drives to do it it's often not mentioned when people talk about ZFS based storage.
Thanks for insight. What if I had a spare pc and a raid card ? What would be your suggestion in this case? Thanks
I would probably go with UNRAID if you can disable the RAID functionality of your card. RAID is not recommended for either UNRAID or TrueNAS. Both will work but you could run into some issues with drivers and compatibility. My first UNRAID install used a Highpoint RAID card and I used it as a SATA controller. Most RAID cards can be jumped, flashed, or configured in the BIOS to disable the RAID function and be used as a standard SATA controller. Hope that helps.
nice video. yes expanding pool in zfs to add more drives was not possible without starting from scratch, but wasn't there news that in a future zfs update that would be a feature they will add? but when they will add that i have no idea. but until they do, then ya, something like QNAP QTS or unraid would be convenient for adding new additional drives. Thats not to say u can't add new drives for zfs, but u may have to start from scratch versus the other 2 alternatives last i checked.
the other thing is ease of use. They all require some sort of tinkering and initial management. But out of them, truenas is probably a higher learning curve. When i went from QNAP QTS to truenas, i encountered that truenas ROOT s different from the share owner, which is intended for security. But for a new user, you may not have an idea about this and thus requires additional research to figure out how to setup. Whereas in QNAP QTS, it's way easier to do, although admitedly there is a lot of options in the admin User interface to navigate through. Unrad not much to say about that since i never used it, though i did look at what others said about it.
Unraid requires a license purchase which is fair. But truenas is free and has zfs to boot. But the fact that unraid allows u to mix match different capacity drives is a good advantage to have.
QNAP ur not limited to ext4 raid5 on qts, as they do have QUTS Hero which is their openzfs OS variant. I also think that zfs is the way to go ultimately, as it has raidZ checksum auto correction which performs much better than the usual ext4 raid5. though people say performance wise the later is better, but i don't notice the difference. Although if u are comparing between truenas core vs scale, then yes there is a performance difference hence why u should probably stick to core for now if u opt for truenas.
So they all have their pros and cons. but for newbies, i would think that either qnap or unraid would be fine. Truenas is very good if u can manage it and have the time to learn it because it has a higher learning curve but it's worth it, in addition to being free to (though u have to purchase the hardware, which some people may not like to do, and if that was the case, then an off the shelf nas solution like a qnap would probly be better.)
Good summary and thanks for your input.
Adding drives has been on the list for Truenas for some time. I personally don't expect it any time soon but I'd love to be wrong.
So if I'm building a DIY NAS (mostly for storing tons of random crap and setting up a media streaming library) and I start off with 3 HDDs all different sizes but in the future decide to increase size by a) swapping out smaller drives for bigger ones or b) expand it by adding a 4th HDD (max for my ITX case), would UNRAID be the best for that and give me reliability/recovery in case an HDD is lost?
If you are using random sizes then absolutely.
@@MikeFaucher Thanks. Yeah I'm just doing research (which sees very overwhelming and it's taking me down a rabbit hole) but I have all the stuff to make a NAS/Home Server using B550I/i3 12100/16GB DDR4. I have seen some using Windows 10 to set up a server, is that worth considering?
@@Macho_Man_Randy_Savage Personally, I think you should stick with UNRAID as it is more flexible and optimized for home storage. More options for things like file sharing.
Biggest problem with QNAP, Synology, etc is they're the new big target of ransomware. I mean QNAP got hit twice in less than a year? That doesn't bode well for your data unless you know what you're doing securing your device on your network. On top of considering the NAS at best is the average person's backup solution, or possibly worse, the parody of it is their "backup" solution.
Having just setup a ZFS QNAP NAS(and still in the process of tweaking settings), and with all the ransomware news, I'm personally questioning if I should trust it with my data, or if I should instead turn it into a TrueNAS system.
Good points. One thing to consider is if you configure your QNAP as a basic NAS like TrueNAS, they are close to same. The NAS security is compromised by the extra software. If you try you can make TrueNAS just as bad. Either way the responsibility falls on the user unfortunately. Thanks for your input.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this now that Unraid supports ZFS (if I am right).
I am using it now on UNRAID but only for SSD caching. The issue with all ZFS versions except for the QNAP version, is that there is no drive expansion. This is an issue in applications like unraid if you want to pool your storage. They are supposed to add it in version 7 so I may change my mind when that comes out. Great question.
Great video. I currently have an older QNAP right now. It works fine, but I want faster transfer speeds. Which right now are limited because of the older processor and the 5G USB NIC I am using.
I am about to setup an UNRAID system if I can get it to at least match or faster transfer speeds with caching I will make it my main NAS.
With caching you will. I transfer around 500MB/sec.
@@MikeFaucher Are you using a SSD or NVMe as your caching drive? And are you using 2 for redundancy? With my configuration I could use either.
@@MikeFaucher What size is your cache drive? Also do you have cache on for both read and write?
other than truenas, qnap and unraid, there is also synology and asus stor to consider. currently i use truenas and qnap qts, i'm fine with either. other alternatives also look interesting.
Quick question Mike. I have a qnap tvs-671 maxed out with 14t for Plex and data storage. I am looking to upgrade to unRAID setup of an HP workstation (620?) It has a maxed out 12 core xeon with 24gigs of ECC. I am currently upgrading my PC from a Ryzen 2600 to a Ryzen 5600. I know when Plex is involved the better the CPU is, the better it is. But the passmark score of the i5 in the qnap is 5000ish, the xeon is 8400ish, and the r2600 is 13000ish. Being that I don't have ECC memory, would upgrading to the Ryzen setup be better for unRAID? Or whenever my new video card comes in just take the 1060 out of my current rig and put it in the unRAID box?
This is a great question. With Plex (assuming you have a plex pass) the passmark is only part of the story. The best chip for plex is one of the CPU's that support QuickSync. it will hands down be a better choice for plex. I have tested my older I5 transcoding 14 full res 4K files down to 720 for external viewing. The CPU is not relevant is you are doing direct play inside your LAN as that is mostly limited by network bandwidth. If you really want to transcode video, than the second choice would be to add an NVIDIA GPU to either system and use the GPU for encoding. If you use a GPU, the CPU and hardware become far less relevant. Hope that helps.
@@MikeFaucher I do have Plex pass! As I was typing the last part of that, it hit me that not only would that be the easiest solution...but probably the best. Lol 😅😅 Thanks man! You're awesome!
My Unraid USB drive failed after 5 years, so I said to myself, it is time to move to TrueNAS Scale. It was the biggest mistake I could make. It felt like comming from a polished experience to a random fan project full of bugs. TrueNAS feels like just a storage, if you want to run apps, you should install docker in VM, because Apps implementation is buggy as hell and TrueCharts is not even close to Community apps on Unraid. One simple example - if you want to create a bridge interface, you can't do it from the UI, it will not work properly. Also you can't pass the GPU to the VM, because Truenas for some reson needs a GPU to run?
I certainly do agree that UNRAI is more polished, I have not been quite as hard on it. I find it harder to use but very stable and fast mainly becuase I only use for storage. My use case may be differnet as I am using it for active storage with all SSD drives and it works well for that. All the VMs and other things go UNRAID as it is much slower. My next build will be UNRAID with ZFS and see if I can combine the best of both. Thanks for the feedback.
I've been running a NAS for nearly 8 years now and it's always been Windows Server with Stablebit as the software JBOD system. I started with 4tB drives and after about 5 years switched to 8Tb drives and then a year later switched to 10Tb drives. I had one drive fail due to exceeding recommended MTBF but since I run most folders in redundancy everything on one drive is generally also on another. I also have 2 UNRAID servers one of which I'm setting up for remote backup so I'm somewhat familiar with that system too. I'm planning on a TrueNAS build for local backup of primarily movies and music. A friend introduced me to Windows and Stablebit and I remember laughing when he told me he had 22Tb on his server. We've both well exceeded that now. My server is storing 173Tb with about 50Tb duplicated. He's been running his system nearer to 12 years with no duplication and no data loss. Knock wood.
Awesome and thanks for the detail. That is a high amount of storage. I tested Stableibit many years ago but at that time I was a hardware raid guy. Stabilbit was very popular on a site called homeservershow.com where I first got into storage. Thanks for sharing your hardware.
unraid has added zfs to their file system options
Yest it has and I will be testing that out in the near future. I am currently using ZFS on a QNAP NAS as well as TrueNAS and the feature set is very different so I am interested in the UNRAID implementation.
Soooo glad youtube allow to change speed 🤣
Thanks for the feedback. I am working on it.
@@MikeFaucher No need to work on it, I'm sure most people are perfectly fine with you talking slowly, can be easier to understand
But I personally like it a bit faster so I put speed at 1.25
Enterprise or small business level, I think TrueNAS is the right solution but for home use... storing movies, keeping home videos and backing up family photos ... Unraid is my favorite solution. I have used it for over 6 years now and have yet to lose a single file. Unraid also now supports ZFS file system as of version 6.12, so you can configure a server with either solution while having a nice, user friendly interface with a shallower learning curve. I remember window's home server (which I used) many many years ago (long since retired), both of these solutions are heads and shoulders above that.
Absolutely agree. Great summary. I also use UNRAID for most of my archiving and backup storage and use TrueNAS with SSD's for current projects because of the speed. Thanks for the feedback!
Hi how can i learn networking all everything You teach on youtube where can i reach you
There are two ways that have worked for me. Formal training or trial and error. Just getting your first pieces and trying things is a long process but worth it. There is no easy answer. Great question.
@@MikeFaucher theres no way to reach You phone or by zoom or email
@@militarygames3691 I can’t disclose my phone number on a public forum but my channel about page has a couple of ways that you can reach me.
I use NAS because my regular WD drive keeps failing.
Thanks for the feedback.
@@MikeFaucher You bet.
forgot to mention, yes some stuff the nas makes easy like in QNAP, they can make ur nas available online pretty easily, but u probably shouldn't. because that exposes your nas and isn't safe.
a more secure method would be setup pfsense vpn on the router f u need to have remote access. this requires more tinkering versus qnaps own easy method in regards to setting up remote access.
Agreed.
Best setup is an overlay network like ZeroTier or TailScale and you don’t open or expose anything to the internet.
Paying for Unraid? Not happening, with so many quality free options/ alternatives…
Thanks for your feedback.
Well, I don't think you spent enough time with TN, hearing what conclusions you came to.
You are right I have only spent a few months, but as I stated, these are just my opinions, and every use case is different. Thanks for the feedback and I am still using it.
@@MikeFaucher This is not about the use case. It looks, that you do not know the full capabilities of this program, especially the possibilities and flexibility of ZFS.
@@costenalolek973 flexibility such as?
@@costenalolek973 plz elaborate.
@@AinzOoalG0wn google
Thanks