One piece that sits at the heart of my Homelab is the NAS I have. This is actually the same NAS I have written about years ago, looking back on that post brought back memories of the pervious system and Server 2008 that I didn’t recall. In the last year I have added several drives and a new network card to this box, I thought that as well as my experience running FreeNAS, now TrueNAS Core, over 8+ years was worth discussing.

When I built out that box, I had 5x3TB drives, each around $125 dollars. Now those same drives are $40. The rough rule of thumb I was always told is 1GB of RAM for ZFS for every TB of storage you have. So I maxed the mini-itx motherboard out at 16GB of RAM to get as close as I could get. This let met run basic services and I was running a few small VMs/Jails on the box. This did cut into the RAM I had available, but was a nice feature. This allowed me to run the Unifi controller without another system running. Back then, Raspberry Pis came with 256MB of RAM, making it not ideal to run too many services. I later would end up moving all of those to dedicated Raspberry Pis then later VM hosts.

These 5 disks served me well for a while; I every year or two would have a drive die, and it got cheaper and cheaper to replace them. I use this NAS for backups from my Windows desktop, and Macbook. Time Machine backups over the network to Macs works very well with TrueNAS. I ended up getting a smaller version of this box for my parents home, and sister, you can run the OS off a USB with a single or 2 small hard drives in a box like an Intel NUC, then have it always backup their PCs. Reminding people “plug in that USB drive” to backup seems to never stick. TrueNAS offers one click updates, with optional automatic checkin; this makes keeping the system up to date easily.

There have been reports of recent corruption with 12.0, but I have not seen that. Also there was a bug where you could get a banner saying “THIS IS A TESTING RELEASE NOT FOR PRODUCTION” on a production branch, so that is fun. These days those backups, and my Veeam backups are done to the NAS. I tried to use it as a iSCSI and then a NFS target, but the IO was a bit too much for these old spinning drives. Now I use vSAN, as mentioned, which has performed well for VMs, that leaves the NAS just as dumb storage for Veeam. Veeam is a good product that makes it very easy to backup VMs, I will probably write an article on it later. The software has a free 10 VM backup license for Homelabs.

• 

• 

In 2020 I was using a high percentage of the storage for backups and VMs, and was pondering upgrading. I didn’t want to throw down enough money to build a whole new system, and I liked this case a lot, so I started to look at what I could do to add to it. I was using 5 drives, but the case technically supports 7, with 2 being on the bottom. The issue was, I didn’t have enough SATA ports to add to the system. This brings me to one of the scariest, worst, best, cards I have bought. This card, adds 4 ports through a mini PCI-E connection. It actually works really well, with the drives coming up like any other, it gives you 1 PCI E Lane at roughly 2.5Gbp/s for my version. I have 2 drives of the now 7 I have in a RAIDZ2 (RAID 6), and for over a year it has worked well. The one other thing I added to the box was a 10GB networking card, I did a push a bit ago to move most of the Homelab server stuff to 10GB, and this box was part of that. TrueNAS is built on FreeBSD, and has good hardware compatibility, I got an old Intel X520 for compatibility and ease. I have seen it get near 5gbit/s, averaging closer to 2gb/s with writes.

• 

• 

• 

First of all, yes the card is at a slight angle, but it works fine and is secure, so we will ignore that. I also used this time to upgrade the CPU. If you look for 7 year old CPUs on eBay, they are actually not that much money. I went from a Celeron from when I bought the system to a i5-4590. With this new CPU (and breaking a leg on the stock cooler) I ordered a new CPU cooler. That turned into an issue because they sent me the wrong version for an AMD instead of the Intel mount. You can see the very very tiny clearance that the CPU cooler has to the chipset heatsink. I also had this system in the office, since with adding disks to ZFS you need to destroy the pool and rebuild. I had to move all the data off to another system, destroy the array, then move it all back. Dynamically adding disks is always a dream ZFS has had and is always around the corner. Hopefully with OpenZFS 2.0, and the merging of the Linux and Unix code bases, we will get shiny new features like that.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Overall the system has worked well for the last 8 or so years, I have 4TB which is about 30% free still. I could probably clean it out more if I tried. I also have been using OneDrive to backup critical things like family photos, which slightly lowers my need for the system. The homelab AD has all the machines automount a chunk of storage as a shared drive, which makes normal home things and transferring files easier. I will continue to run this, and see how vSAN works for me going forward. I am a bit wary of vSAN running into issues on the consumer level gear I have, so having a whole backup of my VMs on the NAS gives me some peace of mind.

The years of using FreeNAS/TrueNAS were a good jumping off point as we recently got new Netapp Appliances at work, and I was tasked with learning them. Netapp ONTAP uses very similar concepts; instead of zVol you have FlexVol, instead of Datasets you have FlexGroups. Netapp also does some weird things like using Raid-4 or Raid-4 with added protection, instead of a traditional Raid-5/Raid-Z. If you work for a company that has a Netapp and want to learn more about it, I would push you to get the Netapp Simulator. It is a VM image that contains a virtual Netapp to play around with. It’s much better to break a virtual Netapp than a production one.