Hi all!
I’m in the process of migrating my home server from Unraid to TrueNAS with a ZFS pool, as well as upping storage from 2 6TB drives to 4. Unfortunately, because of either my bad luck or incompetence, it seems like one of the drives has died. So, here’s my question. I’ve read up a bit on resilvering and I know that if I replace the dead drive with a larger drive, the pool will be unable to use that extra space until the remaining drives are upgraded, but would there be any other drawbacks? Especially if the pool was left running in this configuration for an extended period.
I definitely see myself upgrading the pool to larger drives in the future, and it would be nice to save myself buying an extra drive that may end up getting replaced before the end of its life. (Note: I’m aware that resilvering isn’t the safest way of upgrading a pool, but the data on the pool is either backed up or non-essential, so I’m fine with the risks)
Can I ask why you’re migrating to TrueNAS? I have been running unraid for a couple years and have been happy enough. I’m no expert so I mostly use basic features. Am I missing out on something TrueNAS has to offer?
Part of me is starting to wonder, honestly. I will say that the web UI for TrueNAS Scale is leagues better than Unraid’s, which to me always felt confusing and hacked together. ZFS is also really nice, although Unraid did recently add support.
One pain point I’ve run into with TNS is that access to Docker or Kubernetes seems to be intentionally locked down from access anywhere but the built in apps catalog. As someone who works with Docker and various orchestration engines professionally, I much prefer being able to define and stand up my own services to using a list of predefined templates. There are obviously ways of getting around the restrictions in TNS, but with Unraid, I could install something like Portainer or simply drop into the terminal and run docker commands myself. Not having that is frustrating.
Overall though, I think TrueNAS is a much cleaner and more modern user experience, so long as you stay on their rails. Which I suppose is the point.
Truenas is great for creating the zfs pool but I hated that I couldn’t also use the machine as a computer without making a vm, so I ended up exporting my zfs pool and then importing it on a Linux system with cockpit installed to keep a Web interface, definitely recommend looking into it
That sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!