Long, long time ago I wrote this article on setting up my TrueNAS backup of a backup server. It worked great, I can’t say anything bad about it other than that I did it wrong from the start. You see, I set it up bare-metal after testing it on a Proxmox before. I should have stuck with the proxmox-first, TrueNAS-later way of doing it because of the flexibility of the solution. Well, I’ve recently done just that. Having enough spare disk space on all of my computers I managed to empty out the truenas server and wiped it clean. I got a brand new used DDR3 replacement to bump its memory up to 32GB and got a PCI-E SATA controller with 6 additional SATA ports. Oh, and I replaced one of the fans, because it was louder than I was comfortable with.
So now this big, hungry box runs a Proxmox hypervisor with the SATA controller passthrough to a TrueNAS VM. That way TrueNAS has direct access to the drives and enough memory to buffer whatever it needs. And since this setup doesn’t run the entire time, it doesn’t really register on my electricity bill all that much. Oh, and now after playing with Truenas for almost a year, I can honestly say that ACLs are not that bad.
As a bonus, I still have a couple of cores and a few gigs of RAM free on it to run temporary VMs with all Proxmox support. Yes, technically TrueNAS can be a hypervisor too, but… I tried it and I didn’t like it.
I must admit I was postponing this project in anticipation of the mysterious HexOS a certain Linus was excited about and…well… I appreciate what it’s for, but paying not an insignificant sum for a thing just to do TrueNAS with a couple of clicks is not for me. I get that I’m not the target audience and all power to the team working on it, as I believe everyone should be able to control their data and a simple solution like that is important for that, but I’m good with my setup, thank you.
