Best NAS Software: TrueNAS vs OpenMediaVault vs Unraid

Building your own NAS using a second-hand PC or a Raspberry Pi can be fun, educational, and save you money! Once you have the hardware, you will need some software. You could do it or manually or you could use a NAS specific solution based on Linux on FreeBSD. In this video I compare TrueNAS with OpenMediaVault with Unraid.
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00:00 Intro
01:44 Why build your own NAS
02:59 Hardware requirements
06:45 TrueNAS
08:47 HexOS
09:43 OpenMediaVault
10:31 Unraid
12:12 My recommendation
12:36 Outro

#garyexplains

[paulscarlett]

Build a OMV Nas about 4 years ago replacing a Microsoft Home Server V1. First real Linux box at home. Worked well with Windows 10 and 11. Have since moved to Linux Mint as daily driver --- no issues using OMV.

[kooldad]

I use unraid because you can mix and match any size hard drives. So if you have random spare drives, why not use them for storage. This is even more appealing since it offers parity to protect the data if one of the old drives fail. I have gradually replaced and upgrades my drives and not had to worry about matching drives. None of the other solutions can do that. The unraid community is active and awesome!

[nadtz]

I've been DIY'ing my NAS since ZFS support was added to FreeBSD. Manually configured at first, then used napp-it until FreeNAS came out and still using TrueNAS Core now. With Core effectively end of life at this point I've been playing with Scale and XigmaNAS to decide what I want to move to when that time comes but it's great that there are so many options now a days (be it off the shelf or DIY) that suit different needs for home/SOHO use.

[PatrickDKing]

I'm still undecided. For now I'm running Synology boxes.

[HatStand]

I use OMV on an ODroid HC4... costed £80... works really well.

[peterpv]

Although I like the idea of these simple ready-to-go NAS solutions, in my view there's always some functionality missing that I currently use on my NAS. My NAS is a custom-build PC from cheap old hardware (3 rd generation core i5, 16 GB RAM) running Linux Mint. As Mint is just Ubuntu which is just Debian I can install almost anything I want. Configuring those services can be a pain when it is my first time but in the end I uslly get it the way I want it. And when it works I know HOW it works which is a plus for me.

[mughug]

Have been using TrueNAS for a couple of years as a home network NAS supporting desktop and mobile PCs, Macs, Linux and Android machines, . First on a Raspberry Pi 4 and then an old HP Z230. Running 2 x mirrored SSD for system and 2 x mirrored HDD for data. Never had an issue and the e-mail notification setting keeps me up to data. Cheap, cheerful and dependable.

So much so that if I had to replace the current system I would go the same way again. :)

[sheldonkupa]

I wanted to make a case for a simple selfbuilt linux/sambaserver with cockpit: I use proxmox since many years. My harddisks with zfs and btrfs reside in this server. Nas software in a vm was not my taste. So I tried to install samba on a debian lxc container. After struggeling a while with file ownerships and user rights, i got samba customized to my needs. You could do that also bare metal with a linux distro of your choice. If you dont need the bells and whizzles, and dont have many nas users, i recommend that over a nas os. First you learn samba, and second you are able to troubleshoot much better. Just keep the smb.conf small and clean.

[VN_]

I used truenas years ago and being NOT a power user it took me a bit to get it up and running and never really understood what was I doing. Then I heard of unraid which the fact that I had different drive sizes around my office was a huge plus for unraid, what I didn't expect was how user friendly it was for me compared to truenas. I've been using it for around 3 years now and I love it with a passion. I'm dying to test HexOS since the focus was home inexperience users and the base was truenas, that would be a great game changer although, the ability of unraid to spin down individual hard drives and expand your storage and user different drives sizes with ease, is a major feature that others don't have, not even HexOS.

[alcorza]

I built a TruNAS Scale system with a Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G, 128 GB ECC RAM with a modest storage array. 1 x RAIDZ1 4-wide @ 10.44TB usable storage, 1 x RAIDZ1 3-wide @ 25.31 TB usable and 1 x Mirror 2-wide @ 500 GB usable (for apps and so on).

They are replacing K8 with Docker in the upcoming Electric Eel version which is now available in RC.

Very good OS. Stable and perfect for a home lab. Recommended though for users who are a bit more technically inclined. I learnt a lot during my journey with TruNAS.

I used to use Unraid. Also a good OS... Biggest advantage is if your array dies, you don't lose all your data. You can still pull an individual drive and get all the files of it. You can't do that with TruNAS. But if you have ZFS configured right your data should be pretty safe.

[esra_erimez]

I have had good luck with TrueNAS, I tried Unraid but could never figure it out. I've head of OpenMediaVault never used it.

[markmonroe]

Been rocking OMV in my test lab and have been very happy with it. I would have no issues with using it in commercial production. I have or have had most of the big names in commercial production and really like OMV.

[Smittron]

Thanks for the video Gary. I'm running OMV as a local storage supplement to cloud storage for storing some of my more important files. I'm using a Celeron mini PC with 8 GB RAM, 128 GB boot drive and a single 1 TB SSD storage drive.

[DIYglenn]

HexOS looks promising! Didn’t know about that one.

[superangrybrit]

I have a CM4 8gb ram Lite with a fresh official RPi 64gb microsd card coming in next week. Ima try my hand at OMV. Cheers! 👍

[Winnetou]

3:30 HDD, or SSD or M.2. But I want DVD, or OCD or SATA. ok ok, I guess I already have the OCD

For those that didn't got the joke, he's putting in the same list two disk types and a connector+form factor. What you put into an M.2 slot is (in the overwhelmingly amount of cases) also a SSD

[AlanKlughammer]

I have used Unraid for a long time. I like the UNRAID array system as I can mix and match drive sizes. You can make separate RAID or ZFS pools. I also like that it can be used as a server solutions with dockers and VM's. I found OMV too simplistic for my needs, and I found TrueNAS much more fussy in hardware requirements (you need matching drives. You need more ram for ZFS, preferably ECC, etc)
No it is not free, but IMO, you get what you pay for.

[brandonchappell]

Truenas all day bby !! Now with docker (well stable is a couple weeks away, im on RC2), and its free

[Andy_Panda]

I use OMV for Samba file shares and CasaOS for container management on my Seeed Studios reServer.

[LordApophis]

I started with a QNAP and once I got used to it switched to TrueNAS Core. But to have more versatility I installed it in a Proxmox VM with passing through the SATA controller. Now I can play with other things and let TrueNAS do what it’s best at: storage server