Introduction

In my homelab, I need somewhere I can put datas, outside of my Proxmox VE cluster.

At the beginning, my only one physical server has 2 HDDs disks of 2 TB. When I installed Proxmox on it, these disks were still attached to the host. I managed to share the content using a NFS server in a LXC, but this was far from a good practice.

During this winter, the node started to fail, it was stopping by itself for no reason. This bad boy is 7 years old. When it was shut down, the NFS share were unavailable, which was affecting some services in my homelab. Luckily I could fix it up by replacing its CPU fan, but now I want a safer place for these datas.

I this article I will walk you through the entire build of my NAS, using TrueNAS.

Choose the the right platform

For a while I wanted to have a NAS. Not one ready out-of-the-box like Synology or QNAP. While I think these are good products, I wanted to build mine. But I have a huge constraint of space in my tiny rack and the choice for a small NAS case are very limited.

Hardware

I consider full flash NAS. This has several advantages:

• It is fast
• It is small
• It consumes less
• It heats less But with a major drawback, the price.

While the speed is negligible to me because my network can't handle it, the others are exactly what I'm looking for. I don't need a massive volume a data, around 2 TB of usable space is enough.

My first choice was the Aiffro K100. But I couldn't find a way to have it deliver in France without doubling the price. Finally I managed to buy a Beelink ME mini.

This small cube has 2x 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports and can host up to 6x NVMe drives, plus a 64 GB eMMC chip to install an OS. I started with 2 drives for now, 2 TB each.

Software

Now that the hardware choice is done, what I would use as software?

In the past I've heard of several NAS operating system, like FreeNAS, Open Media Vault or Unraid. But I never really dig into the subject.

Here my requirements:

• NFS shares
• ZFS support
• VM capabilities

After comparing the solutions, the choice was made to use TrueNAS Community Edition, which is the new name of FreeNAS.

Install TrueNAS

The installation of TrueNAS didn't go

Configuration of TrueNAS

basic conf

pool creation

dataset config

data protection

Use of TrueNAS

Firewall rule

Data migration

Android application

Conclusion