oh gosh, I am 3 years behind this DIY NAS and finding this thread, but I am glad there is a handful of DIY NAS peeps here!

I have recently been tinkering with Truenas, because of my friend lah, he was asking me for my opinion on what is the best storage solution for his collection of photos.
Long story short, he is not ready to dig deep into his pocket for NAS yet because photography is his side hobby only, not earning much from it, and his internet speed is 1Mbps, not suitable for cloud storage either.
End up he bought a NAS HDD to store his photos first while he slowly progress to getting maybe a Synology NAS later on.

But I didn't stop my research, I stumble upon Truenas and that's how I started this.

Curious to know, which NAS OS are you going to use?

And what is your NAS future path?

I've been using Truenas for a couple of weeks now, and my initial intention was testing to set up a NAS myself and using it as a simple NAS. I got myself a couple of 5400 rpm hdd, and then now I am playing with the plugins and VMs, I wished I have gotten 7200 rpm hdd for better drive performance for those

(also regret selling off my old rig, first gen i7 cpu and cooler master haf case with lots of 3.5HDD bays)

why i say 5400rpm and 7200rpm may make a difference because i started my truenas with 2 x 2.5" 500gb 7200rpm hdd, and the installation of plugins and VMs are significantly faster than when i install on my 2 x 3.5" 2tb 5400rpm hdd. i'm still trying to figure out what is the exact cause of the slowness but for now i suspect the rpm or that the 2.5" hdd is a sshd. and yes, i've gigabit network at home.

my next NAS OS that i am eager to try is Unraid, that one also flexible with mixed capacity drives and the ability to run gaming on VM (but doubt i'll go the route of VM gaming, unless if i have damn a lot of money)

wahrao, i haven't even familiar with zfs or even btrfs yet, you introduce me to so many new fs

are you asking how i discover truenas or how truenas works for me?
Truenas is the first NAS OS i tried because when search "diy nas" in Youtube, a lot of videos on Truenas setup/installation guide. so here i am
and i think Truenas has a little bit of learning curve, i was a bit lost at first but thanks to the many Youtube guides, i manage to play around with it.
so far it has exceeded my expectations, i thought it was only like a simple NAS feature with some plugins, the fact that it can host VM surprises me. manage to create a ubuntu VM to host a DST dedicated server

my truenas rig specs,
Intel Core i5 6400 | Gigabyte GA-B150M-D3H | 1 x 16GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 2666MHz | FSP HEXA+ 550w | 2 x 500GB Toshiba MQ01ACF050 7,200RPM 2.5" | 2 x 2TB Toshiba P300 5,400RPM 3.5"
2 vdev pools, both are stripe since I only have 2 sets of identical drives each.


btw, what's your view on using ECC for NAS? is it absolutely important for long term use? or it's actually a manageable or negligible risks, depending on usage?

also, normal hard disks is sufficient or a proper NAS hard disks is better?

so far i am getting mixed ideas and answers for both ECC vs Non-ECC and normal HDD vs NAS HDD. would love to hear it from you who's into this for many years now

+1 on the research which are CMR/SMR drives and ONLY go for CMR type.

I am using normal grade hdd, not NAS-grade (poket koyak if go for NAS grade, but it's in my future upgrade path)
I did the mistake of using SMR drives (due to not doing SMR/CMR homework) at first and the performance was horrible. After doing research, I sold off my SMR drives (Toshiba P300 2TB 5400rpm) and got the CMR ones (Toshiba P300 3TB 7200rpm).

I can't say anything about long term use yet, but if any of my drives failed, I'll definitely post an update here.