I’m going to migrate from Unraid to TrueNAS because I no longer need the VM or Docker support of Unraid. Is core still the best option for a pure NAS? Would I be missing anything with from a pure NAS perspective with core?
Thanks
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From a pure NAS perspective you really do not miss anything from running CORE.
The reason that I ended up switching from CORE to SCALE on my build was actually due to a really weird hardware compatibility issue with my HBA’s. For some reason if I had more than 4 SSD’s hooked up to an HBA (they were SAS2/SATA3 LSI HBA’s) on CORE (running freeBSD) I had horrible read speeds (10MB/s). I tried everything under the sun (bios updates, firmware updates, system tunables) but nothing would work. To test I did a boot into SCALE (running linux) and the problem was gone.
Overall I think SCALE (Linux) really just is going to be the best path forward in the future due to its massive compatibility with pretty much all hardware. The advantage of CORE (FreeBSD) is the stability, and in some cases performance, if you dont run into hardware compatibility issues.
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Thanks! For my home needs it sounds like the flexibility of SCALE makes it the easier option for me.
if you really don’t need vm capabilities then running core does let you squeeze a bit more performance out of your hardware, in my case, I am able to run core on an old xeon with 8 gb ecc ddr2 and exos sata drives. I even have a metadata ssd and slog ssd to speed things up.
I’m running a i5-12400 on the unraid server I’m planning to switch to TrueNAS, and Intel has nice low power draw at idle. I think it should be fine with TrueNAS but am also wondering about switching to a low power Ryzen.
Are there other good options?
In all honesty if you are just looking at the file server side of things, you don’t need a very powerful CPU at all to run a 10 GbE file server, even with ZFS compression (LZ4) so I would not worry about it too much. VM’s and docker containers are a whole different beast, but unless you are running something that actually needs high CPU usage, most CPU’s just go underutilized.
That’s what I figured. I was looking for something even more low power but I may have to swap out an i7 to get ECC support, which I would mind having since my motherboard supports it.