What is the BEST DIY NAS Operating System?

If you want to install a third-party NAS operating system, find out what is the BEST DIY NAS Operating System by comparing TrueNAS, Unraid, and OMV.

DISCLAIMER: The information in this video has been self-taught through years of technical tinkering. While we do our best to provide accurate, useful information, we make no guarantee that our viewers will achieve the same level of success. WunderTech does not assume liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to damage caused directly or indirectly from its content or associated media. Use at your own risk.

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0:00 Intro
0:30 Prebuilt NAS OS vs. NAS OS
1:09 Focusing on NAS Official Operating Systems
2:07 TrueNAS
2:28 Benefits of ZFS
2:55 TrueNAS Core vs. TrueNAS Scale
4:31 TrueNAS Hardware Requirements
5:50 ZFS Expansion
7:02 Unraid
7:54 Unraid Arrays
9:47 Unraid Drive Options
10:45 Unraid Read/Write Performance
11:56 Unraid Apps
12:21 OpenMediaVault
12:54 ZFS on OpenMediaVault
13:41 Recommendations
13:47 OpenMediaVault
14:35 Do you want to use ZFS? TrueNAS
15:40 Flexibility / Expansion: Unraid
16:24 Final Thoughts

#nas #truenas #unraid

[Collectible_Andy]

New Ugreen 6-bay NAS user here with TrueNAS Scale OS installed. It’s been a wonderful experience so far!

[burkec]

Great, straighforward descriptions of file structures and RAID/backup protocols. Thanks.

[eliasalcazar]

I'm using "Raid 10" in my TN Scale machine with 4 16TB drives and I'm more than happy. I can saturate my 2.5Gb connection and sometimes I'm even bottlenecked by it. It is also a nearly silent machine. I perused multiple forums and watched countless videos and they ultimately led me to purchase 2 WD RED PRO 16TB drives, and then I added in 2 Manufacture recertified WD ULTRASTAR 16TB drives. With all 4 drives spinning all I can hear are the case fans unless I put my ear against the case.

[demorez]

i am a long time OpenMediaVault user, while is certainly has its drawbacks, I really like its flexibility. Gave TrueNAS several tries, but I dont like it forcing me to use exclusively the UI and making me feel wrong everytime I try to do stuff via the shell (and probably breaking all those stuff I did from shell with the next bigger update).
TrueNAS is definitely an excellent "bare" NAS, but with it I would need to run most of my apps from a separate VM for better manageability. Thus I prefer a "simpler" NAS in form of OMV where I can do everything on the OS level

[JoshuaYoungsma]

I used OMV for a few years and it does have a learning curve but is quite stable and works very well with docker. Linking to folders is a PIA. I switched to truenas scale last year and while initial network setup was funky it is much easier to set up containers/apps. I never tried unraid because they charge money for a license.

[Sapious]

I know I'll get blasted for writing this, but I'm still a fan boy of BTRFS, and I like that I can mix drives easily, with snapshot support.

[nadtz]

There is one more option to 'expanding' a zfs pool, though it can be painful. You can swap drives one at a time and rebuild until all drives are replaced and expand to use the resulting new space. To do this in one shot you would still need all the drives up front so the cost part is still the same.

Solid overview even though I'm biased towards TrueNAS Core. I only use my NAS for storage (have a proxmox server for the rest) so I'll stay on core as long as it's supported.

[ericandrews]

You can use individually zfs formatted disks in an UNRAID array. And you can add individual drives to the array anytime you want.

[try-that]

I'm sticking with OMV, when I first looked for NAS software, Truenas scale wasn't available and Unraid wasn't free, but it wasn't as expensive as now.
At the moment I run mostly docker and I think at this time, it's easier to use docker on OMV than scale, yes I know scale is changing later, so we'll see.
Everyone complains about the plugins, but it means you just add what you want. Also the forums are pretty good as well. Plus my system is a JBOD system.
Finally for me, scale looks a lot harder to get going for a simple home based user.
Good video by the way.

[CoreyPL]

iX System indirectly showed, that it will migrate to develop Scale in the next years, while leaving Core more of a legacy stable system. Latest Core update versus what is planned for the 24.10 update for Scale showed that rather well. Furthermore Scale is more preferable when dealing with a NAS built from a mix of different classes of hardware. Linux kernel just handles it a lot better. So if you plan to deploy TrueNAS, go with Scale.

[steffengerlach]

Great breakdown of these OS possibilities. Thank you! I have an Unraid license, I am fiddling around with TruNAS core and scale and even Proxmox. Keeping my data "originals" on large HDDs on my several PCs I am still looking for the ideal OS for my usecase (centralized storage pool, Nextcloud, pfsense). I saw videos about using Proxmox and installing TrueNAS as VM (or even OMV) there. Wish you had included Proxmox to your breakdown. I may be going with TrueNAS on my main storage server (DIY with 8 hot swap 3, 5 HDD bays, 6x hot swap 2, 5 bays, 2x Nvme slots + 2x 2, 5 SSD slots possible, 10Gb NIC, 128GB ECC RAM, Ryzen AM5 platform). Maybe I wil just add a low power Dell Mini PC with Proxmox for VMs/containers and all that and just leave the main "NAS" simply as a stable bare metal TrueNAS core system. 😇 Still not sure.

[Ebisuo]

I have old TV Set top box. I installed Armbian on it and put CasaOS inside. It works best for budget NAS

[kgujjip]

I use unraid, easy to install apps and they have virtual dsm run on docker

[AN-irsr]

OMV can also have similar features and flexibility as unRAID in terms of array / pooling and mixed drives by leveraging the mergerfs (pooling) and snapraid (snapshots / parity for redundancy) plugin combo. Also pretty easy to set up and free.

[RockTheCage]

Excellent Summary thanks. I still really enjoy my synology but i'm getting a server & probably will virtualize unraid. In the end i want a great place to backup my synology without having to spend a gob of money on cloud backups. I don't want to have to buy another synology just for backups.

[peteratkin]

I use 512GB ECC on Truenas scale, and it's needed as I'm using 8TB NVME U.2 Drives, still getting used to it, a real bummer not being able to upgrade the raid without first backing up the data, then recreating raid from scratch and restoring the data, I'm liking the sound of unraid.

[penguinjoe]

TrueNAS electric eel (currently 24.10 RC-2) release has now single drive Raidz expansion capabilities.

[bufordmaddogtannen]

I'd throw Rockstor into the mix, as it handles a few things better than OMV.

[leeblack]

I love TrueNas! Just remember to build a pool comprised of SSD drives for your applications or you will run into many problems 😢

[philippemiller]

Soon to need updating concerning raidz expansion coming to electric eel. Also Memory bit flip doesn't automatically result in error on disks as there also is a checksum of the file being verified before writing to disk if I remember correctly.