So, I am thinking about getting myself a NAS to host mainly Immich and Plex. Got a couple of questions for the experienced folk;
- Is Synology the best/easiest way to start? If not, what are the closest alternatives?
- What OS should i go for? OMV, Synology’s OS, or UNRAID?
- Mainly gonna host Plex/Jellyfin, and Synology Photos/Immich - not decided quite what solutions to go for.
Appricate any tips :sparkles:
This is a fairly common setup and it’s not too complex - learning more about Proxmox and TrueNAS/ZFS individually will probably be easiest.
Usually:
Proxmox on bare metal
TrueNAS Core/Scale in a VM
Pass the HBA PCI card through to TrueNAS and set up your ZFS pool there
If you run your app stack through Docker, set up a minimal Debian/Alpine host VM (you can technically use Docker under an LXC but experienced people keep saying it causes problems eventually and I’ll take their word for it)
If you run your app stack through LXCs, just set them up through Proxmox normally
Set up an NFS share through TrueNAS, and connect your app stack to that NFS share
(Optional): Just run your ZFS pool on Proxmox itself and skip TrueNAS
I already run proxmox but not TrueNAS. I’m really just confused about the HBA card. Probably a stupid question but why can’t TrueNAS access regular drives connected to SATA?
The main problem is just getting TrueNAS access to the physical disks via IOMMU groups and passthrough. HBA cards are a super easy way to get a dedicated IOMMU group that has all your drives attached, so it’s common for people to use them in these sorts of setups. If you can pull your normal SATA controller down into the TrueNAS VM without messing anything else up on the host layer, it will work the same way as an HBA card for all TrueNAS cares.
(TMK, SATA controller hubs are usually an all-at-once passthrough, so if you have your host system running off some part of this controller it probably won’t work to unhook it from the host and give it to the guest.)
Makes sense, thanks for the info