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How to install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi
- busybox2000 1y ago[flagged]
- marcosscriven 1y agoI’d really like the TrueNAS UI only, separated completed from an OS or its virtualisation setup.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoI wonder why TrueNAS wants to run as an OS. Surely most of the work of being a NAS happens in userspace?
- xienze 1y agoI would imagine it's because it makes for a lot more fun support possibilities when all the underlying stuff in the stack (kernel, ZFS, Docker, Python, etc. etc.) is subject to the whims of the end user. When you ship the entire OS yourself you can be more certain about the versions of all the kernel+userland stuff and therefore the interactions between them all.
- geerlingguy 1y agoProbably the closest thing that already exists is just running Cockpit[1]. 45Drives even maintains some helpful storage and file sharing plugins for it[2], though some of those are only compatible with x86 for now. [1] https://cockpit-project.org https://cockpit-project.org [2] https://github.com/45Drives?q=cockpit https://github.com/45Drives?q=cockpit
- rcarmo 1y agoCockpit hasn't really improved in a while, though, and although I greatly appreciate 45Drives' committment to it, last time I tried to install their stuff I had a lot of issues with deprecated dependencies... So I just went "raw" smbd and never looked back, but then again I've been running Samba for almost two decades now and configuring it is almost second nature to me (I started doing it as an alternative to Novell/IPX, and later to replace AppleTalk...) In practice, I've found that worked well because I very seldom had to do any changes to a file server once it was set up (adding shares was mostly a matter of cloning configs, and what minimal user setup there needed to be done in the enterprise was deferred to SAMBA/CIFS glue).
- geerlingguy 1y agoQuite true; raw configuration isn't as flashy so you can't make glitzy videos or blog posts about it (well, outside of the HNsphere at least). But that's how 99% of the services I run are set up, just a bunch of configuration files managed by Ansible. The only servers I run in production with a UI are two NASes at home, and the only reason for that is I want to run off the shelf units so I never have to think about them, since my wife and kids rely on them for Jellyfin and file storage.
- rcarmo 1y agoThat’s the plight of the content creator - keep things shiny and interesting enough even if it’s not really what people actually use :)
- zackify 1y agoTrueNAS has been so annoying to use for me. I really wish I just used something else or raw Ubuntu server. The Time Machine backup feature corrupts itself. You can’t have home assistant and Time Machine backups on at the same time. It just feels like a janky UI that has no polish too.
- kilroy123 1y agoWell, there is TrueNAS Scale, which is Debian-based. Which one are you running Scale?
- greyb 1y agoI'm not convinced that TrueNAS Scale is an improvement. I won't make the case that stability and maturity hamper Scale as a whole, but there are definitely discrepancies for SMB performance and limitations in and the use of Kubernetes really overcomplicates things for home users (not saying that TrueNAS Scale Apps were great). I had a version upgrade of Scale catastrophically fail on one system because the Kubernetes implementation couldn't be reconciled during the upgrade (I had no enterprise support, community support had no input, so I was forced to restart from scratch). You also need a dedicated OS Drive for TrueNAS, which is reasonable in principle for critical systems, but doesn't always really meet the needs of home users with limited drive bays.
- kilroy123 1y agoInteresting. I've only run Core for that reason. I wanted something rock solid. I've never tried Scale but was thinking of switching.
- magicalhippo 1y ago> the use of Kubernetes really overcomplicates things for home users They moved away from Kubernetes in favor of Docker Compose. You can add your own custom compose script, or use ones from the "app store". This is for the Scale variant of course, no Docker on Core.
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- tombert 1y agoI haven't used TrueNAS since it was still called FreeNAS. I liked FreeNAS for awhile, but after a certain point I kind of just learned how to properly use Samba and NFS and ZFS, and after that I kind of felt like it was just getting in the way. Nowadays, my "NAS" is one of those little "mini gaming PCs" you an buy on Amazon for around ~$400, and I have three 8-bay USB hard drive enclosures, each filled with 16TB drives all with ZFS. I lose six drives to the RAID, so total storage is about ~288TB, but even though it's USB it's actually pretty fast; fast enough for what I need to for anyway, which is to watch videos off Jellyfin or host a Minecraft server. I am not 100% sure who TrueNAS is really for, at least in the "install it yourself" sense; if you know enough about how to install something like TrueNAS, you probably don't really need it...
- InTheArena 1y agoTrueNAS on a good bit of hardware - in my case the latest truegreen NAS is fantastic. You build it, it runs, it's bulletproof. Putting Jellyfin and/or plex on top of it is fantastic.
- hunta2097 1y agoSame for me, after a while you just want to do something the "managed" software doesn't support. Now I just run Ubuntu/Samba and use KVM and docker for anything that doesn't need access to the underlying hardware.
- kllrnohj 1y agoI can setup Samba, NFS, and ZFS manually myself, but why would I want to? Configuring samba users & shares via SSH sucks. It's tedious. It's error prone. It's boring. Similarly while docker's CLI interface is relatively nice, it's even nicer to just take my phone, open a browser, and push "update" or "restart" in a little gui to quickly get things back up & going. Or to add new services. Or whatever else I want. Sure I could SSH in from my phone, but that's awful. I could go get a laptop whenever I need to do something, but if Jellyfin or Plex or whatever is cranky and I'm already sitting on the couch, I don't want to have to get up and go find a laptop. I want to just hit "restart service" without moving. And that's the point of things like TrueNAS or Unraid or whatever. It makes things nicer to use from more interfaces in more places.
- jnsaff2 1y agoMan, I hate to ruin a celebration but we have copyparty[0] now. Such wow, much amazing. [0] https://github.com/9001/copyparty/ https://github.com/9001/copyparty/
- kstrauser 1y agoThose aren’t remotely the same class of thing, though.
- InTheArena 1y agoA great exercise, and one that stretches the platform in a way that will inevitably help. That's incredible value and a great public service by jeff. Probably not a great idea given how ZFS is architected for memory utilization and ECC. :-)
- shadowpho 1y agoJeez even less pcie lanes then a n100
- rcarmo 1y agoThis is fun for learning purposes, but even with the PCIe 3 bus the Pi just isn't that great a server when compared to an Intel N-series machine. I have two "normal" NAS devices, but I would like to find a compact N100 board with multiple SATA ports, (like some of the stackable HATs for the Pi, some of which will take 4 disks directly on the PCB) to put some older discarded drives to good use. My go-to solution software-wise is actually to install Proxmox, set up ZFS on it and then drop in a lightweight LXC that exposes the local filesystem via SMB, because I like to tweak the "recycle bin" option and some Mac-specific flags--I've been using that setup for a while, also off Proxmox: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2024/11/09/1940#setting-up-cifs/smb https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2024/11/09/1940#setting-up-...
- j1elo 1y agoThe warning about death of three SSDs doesn't inspire too much confidence to be honest... do you think it was due to the usage patterns of Proxmox default settings for ZFS? Over time and lots of reading random information sources, I got notes about disabling several settings that are cool for datacenter-levels of storage, but useless for the kinds of "Raspberry-pi tied with a couple USB disks" that I was interested in.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
- MezzoDelCammin 1y agoShouldn't it be more of a "why" to install TrueNAS on a RPi? The only reason I can see is "I have one that I don't use". Because otherwise... Idle power isn't all that much better than a low power Intel N100 or something similar. And it's all downhill from there. Network transfer speeds and disk transfers will all be kneecapped by the (lack of) available PCIe lanes. Available RAM or CPU speeds are even worse...
- geerlingguy 1y agoThat's addressed in the second section of the article: > I've found numerous times, running modern applications on slower hardware is an excellent way to expose little configuration flaws and misconceptions that lead to learning how to run the applications much better on more capable machines. It's less about the why, and more about the 'why not?' :) I explicitly don't recommend running TrueNAS on a Pi currently, at the end (though I don't see a problem with anyone doing it for the fun, or if they need an absolutely tiny build and want to try Arm): > Because of the current UEFI limitations, I would still recommend running TrueNAS on higher-end Arm hardware (like Ampere servers).
- esskay 1y agoOn a somewhat related note, would you trust a Pi based NAS long term? I've not tried doing one since the Pi 4 which understandably because of its hardware limitations left a lot to be desired, but that part aside I was still finding the pi as a piece of hardware somewhat quirky and unpredictable - power especially, I can't count the number of times simply unplugging a usb keyboard would cause it to reboot.
- geerlingguy 1y agoI've run a Pi NAS as my 2nd onsite replica for over a year without a hiccup, it's using a Radxa Penta SATA HAT with 4x SATA SSDs, and a 2.5 Gbps USB dongle for faster Ethernet[1]. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/radxas-sata-hat-makes-compact-pi-5-nas https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/radxas-sata-hat-makes...
- 1y ago
- breadwinner 1y agoI have been using a Raspberry Pi 4 (8 GB RAM) as my NAS for nearly 5 years. It is incredibly reliable. I run the following software on it: Ubuntu 64-bit, Samba, Jenkins, Postgres and MariaDB. I have attached external hard drives through a USB hub (because Pi does not necessarily have enough power for the external hard drive). I git push to public Samba folders on the Pi, and trigger Jenkins, which builds and installs my server using docker in the Pi.
- JdeBP 1y agoOn the one hand it is good to discover that someone is tackling getting TianoCore working on the Raspberry Pi 5. On the other hand, they still have the destructive backspace behaviour, and inefficient recursive implementation, that breaks the boot loader spinners that the NetBSD and other boot loaders display. It's a tiny thing, but if one is used to the boot sequence the absence of a spinner makes the experience ever so slightly jarring. * https://github.com/NumberOneGit/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePkg/Universal/Console/GraphicsConsoleDxe/GraphicsConsole.c#L915 https://github.com/NumberOneGit/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePk... * https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePkg/Universal/Console/GraphicsConsoleDxe/GraphicsConsole.c#L916 https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/MdeModulePkg/U... * https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114658278210981731 https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114658278210981731 * https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114659884938990579 https://tty0.social/@JdeBP/114659884938990579
- JdeBP 1y agoI should add, by the way, that this nicely demonstrates M. Geerling's point here about catching bugs by running things on a Pi. The TianoCore's unnecessarily recursive implementation of a destructive BS is slow enough, on a Pi 4, and in combination with how the boot loaders themselves emitted their spinners, that I could just, very occasionally, see parts of spinner characters flashing very briefly on the screen when the frame refresh timing was just right; which led me to look into what was going on.
- geerlingguy 1y agoWasn't there a post somewhere on HN yesterday about how slowing down your programs can help you catch problems? Using low end hardware is an automatic way of forcing that :)
- NoboruWataya 1y agoI did something like this a while ago, using https://wiki.radxa.com/Dual_Quad_SATA_HAT https://wiki.radxa.com/Dual_Quad_SATA_HAT (though I installed OpenMediaVault rather than TrueNAS). It was a fun project and looked cool but never really worked that well. It was quite unstable and drives seemed to disconnect and reconnect a lot. There are probably better quality connectors out there but I think for a NAS you really want proper SATA connections. I eventually built my own box and went with OMV again. I like it because it's just userland software you install on Debian. Some of the commenters here who think TrueNAS is overkill might want to check out OMV if they haven't already. To be honest I still only have a few TB of storage on it, probably not really enough to be worth all the hassle of building and configuring a PC, but it was more about the journey which was fun.
- yycettesi 1y ago[flagged]
- Havoc 1y agoWouldn't straight ZFS with a vanilla OS make more sense for low power devices? TrueNAS, esp the kubernetes flavour seems to have a decent bit of overhead last I looked at it
- ddtaylor 1y agoI think at that point you get close to the "dropbox problem". The audience/needs for TruNAS are probably looking to not have to do much beyond either turning it on or plugging in an update stick.
- ddtaylor 1y agoI have actually made a Raspberry Pi based NAS and found it was a pain. The SATA controller isn't terrible, but it and other hardware areas have had many strange behaviors over the years to the point of compiling the kernel being needed to fiddle with some settings to get a hardware device to do what it's supposed to. Even if you're using power that is well supported eventually you seem to hit internal limits and get problems. That's when you see people underclocking the chip to move some of this phantom power budget to other chips. Likewise you have to power most everything from a separate source which pushes me even closer to a "regular PC" anyhow. I just grab an old PC from Facebook for under $100. The current one is a leftover from the DDR3 + Nvidia 1060 gaming era. It's a quad core with HT so I get 8 threads. Granted most of those threads cause the system to go into 90% usage even when running jobs with only 2 threads, probably because the real hardware being used there is something like AVX and it can't be shared between all of the cores at the same time. The SATA controller has been a bit flaky, but you can pick up 4-port SATA cards for about $10 each. When my Raspberry Pi fails I need to start looking at configurations and hacks to get the firmware/software stack to work. When my $100 random PC fails I look at the logs to find out what hardware component failed and replace it.
- wtallis 1y ago> probably because the real hardware being used there is something like AVX and it can't be shared between all of the cores at the same time. That's not the right explanation; each physical core has its own vector ALUs for handling SSE and AVX instructions. The chip's power budget is shared between cores, but not the physical transistors doing the vector operations.
- ddtaylor 1y agoThank you for the correction.
- c-hendricks 1y agoWhat's the power usage like?
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- hhh 1y agoI use a pi5 w/ an m.2 ssd for piracy and it just crashes all the time. Randomly locks up, haven’t been able to fix it.
- dwedge 1y agoI feel like that article took longer than it should have done to say that your storage probably won't work
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago"One glaring problem with the Raspberry Pi is no official support for UEFI" GTFO, as you re-key your installations this fall with Microsoft's permission. =3
- bpye 1y agoSecure boot isn’t mandatory, and if you want secure boot you don’t have to use Microsoft’s keys, you can enroll your own. Lanzaboote for NixOS for example doesn’t use shim - https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote .
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoSometimes certain product lines act like they consider customers on rare occasion... But most manufacturers try to lock the firmware down, and users only get a small subset of configuration menus. For example, the Gigabyte rtx based laptops require patching a machine specific bios to even gain access to the oem firmware areas. Mostly the modern builds just created a bunch a problems nobody wanted, and didn't improve anything as Asus, Gigabyte, and Razer recently showed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4er6kD-pxZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4er6kD-pxZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhfqhCxqpQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhfqhCxqpQ8 If you are running signed code on many machines. YMMV... Raspberry Pi avoided the signed code features built into most Broadcom ARM chips for good reasons. =3
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- 0x457 1y agoAmazing that you can build a career out of making useless things with RPi. I don't mean it as a negative thing about the author, but rather this kind of content. It's a rare case when jack (RPi) of all trades is not at all better than master of one or even other jacks of all trades. Running anything but official distro is pain. Managing official distro is pain. Even you it wasn't it doesn't have enough raw power or I/O to do anything really useful. It's an amazing "temporary" solution because it's so awful that you will actually replace it with a proper one.
- atentaten 1y agoI've used Open Media Vault (OMV) as a NAS on a Raspberry Pi, which served as storage for my Jellyfin server, for a few years.
- jsd1982 1y agoWhat's the most cost-effective NAS hardware/software combo lately?
- TechSquidTV 1y agoTrueNAS is confusing and difficult to setup. I went with Ubuntu and ZFS.
- jama211 1y agoWhy don’t people just use like, their computer? I just turn mine on if I want to watch something
- geerlingguy 1y agoDoesn't scale to n+1 users.
- jama211 1y agoTbf I wasn’t clear, I meant the computer as a network box. When we use the tv and want to watch a stored video, as long as the computer is on the media is accessible.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoI you are the only one using it then yes that is enough. But lots of people have families. And everybody wants to watch something else.
- jama211 1y agoI have a family, people can watch different things at the same time just fine
- transpute 1y agoQNAP TS-435XeU is a $600 1U short-depth (11") case with quad hotswap SATA, dual NVME, dual 10GbE copper, dual 2.5GbE, 4-32GB DDR4 SODIMM Arm NAS that would benefit from OSS community attention. Includes hardware support for ZFS encryption. Based on a Marvell/Armada CN9130 SoC which supports ECC, it has mainline Linux support, and public-but-non-upstream code for uboot. With local serial console and a bit of effort, the QNAP OS can be replaced by Arm Debian/Devuan with ZFS. Rare combo of low power, small size, fast network, ECC memory and upstream-friendly Linux. QNAP also sell a 10GbE router based on the same SoC, which is a successor to the Armada 388 in Helios4 NAS (RIP), https://kobol.io/helios4/ https://kobol.io/helios4/ No UEFI support, so TrueNAS for Arm won't work out of the box.
- _mikz 1y agoThat TrueNAS ARM fork is great. I've set it up in VMWare Fusion on Mac mini M4 and it runs! With Thunderbolt 4 M.2 NVMe enclosure, you can plug in M.2 SATA adapter to connect 8 SATA III drives. Little Pico PSU to power the HDDs and it makes a really low powered NAS. My plan is to give TrueNAS a spin with two drives and if it is stable, move everything into it.