TrueNAS Scale on a Terramaster NAS - Much better…

in my last video I reviewed this two Bay Nash from terramaster in to summarize it in one word the hardware is decent but the software is absolute butt cheeks it's got a quad core Intel n5095 dual nvme slots and is expandable to 32 gigabytes of RAM at a price of 380 dollars it's not cheap but for the form factor and the convenience it's doable if you want to check out that video I will link it down in the description and if you've already seen it then you have to comment I'm a dirty little raid owl Fanboy those are the rules so yeah the hardware is pretty much just a glorified paperweight without proper software and like I mentioned the OS from terramaster leaves a lot to be desired so I'm not really too sure what to do with it but I do know someone who may be able to help hey Brett what's up the sky still there unfortunately yeah yeah so I have this Terror Master 2 Bay Nas and the software it comes with is absolute cheeks so I was wondering if you had any ideas what to do with it yeah I think I have an idea I am all ears okay first step is to take the top off weird request but okay all right now do you have some ddr4 lying around uh yep okay yeah throw it in there done you got some nvme drives I do what if we make it a smoothie what nothing now you're ready to put chunas on it just like that huh just like that all right cool thanks Colton I'll give it a try okay bye okay bye dudes weird all right I know that people have done this before as I have come across Reddit threads of users sharing my same distaste for the Terra Master OS that comes packaged on here so I know what I'm doing is nothing new but I wanted to do this for two reasons one two hopefully get some actual use out of this unit and two to revisit your scale as I haven't really touched it since my original walkthrough when it was first released at this point that was what like 40 years ago I I don't know what is time anyway before getting trunes installed on here I had to make a few upgrades everyone knows that ZFS is a memory hog so we've maxed out the Ram with 32 gigabytes which was a surprisingly cheap upgrade at about fifty dollars I know other users have gotten 64 gigs on here but I'm a good little boy and followed the spec sheet of the device 32 gigabytes is plenty for us don't worry we are also utilizing the two nvme slots by installing two Samsung one Tera drives I'll explain in a bit why this didn't really work out as I initially wanted then it was time to install trueness I initially assumed that I'd be able to plug a bootable USB drive into the back of this unit and tell it to boot from there I I was wrong the way this device works is that it actually ships with the OS installed onto a tiny USB drive it's actually plugged into an internal USB port that you can only access by taking the unit apart which isn't actually that difficult you'll notice that this USB drive is very small and that's because there isn't much clearance in here actually have the USB drive uh right here check out how small it is now don't focus on my beautiful face super tiny I initially tried a regular USB drive that I had on hand with the unit still separated from its PCI backplane but that didn't work so I ordered some really tiny USB drives after getting those in I was able to get triness installed just like any other device now let me explain what I meant before about the nvme drives not going as planned I initially assume that I just run true Nas off of a USB drive but after thinking about it for longer than like five seconds I realized that that's not a good idea this left me with only one other option and that was to use one of my one terabyte nvme drives I didn't like this for two reasons one is because I could no longer use them as a mirrored metadata V Dev and two is that true Nest doesn't allow you to use the rest of the space on your boot drive so I've essentially just wasted nearly an entire terabyte of storage I explained in my other video how to get around this by modifying the installation script but for this video we'll just continue with the default setup if you're going to go with a solution like this then just use a smaller nvme drive to boot from or make the modification that I cover in my other video the other nvme Drive can be used as a cash drive or in my case a single disc pool that I can install virtual machine things to with all of that said let's talk about using true Mass scale on this thing since that's what the whole reason for this video was as someone who is familiar with trunass it was a much nicer experience doing the basic things like configuring a pool setting up a share and setting permissions I also enjoy the dashboard stats and all the Creature Comforts that come with the default true Nas configuration some qualms I had with the Terra Master software is that the backups data migration and snapshot apps were either clunky or just didn't work at all luckily with true Nas snapshots are extremely easy to set up for a data set with plenty of options to ensure your config is exactly what you need rsync was an especially large pain point with the terror Master since it didn't work at all and with true Nas scale I was able to hook into an rsync module that I had set up on my other truenast course server after making a tweak to the user account that it was running as make sure the account you are using matches the name and the uid on both machines or it won't work after that the sync worked as expected and instantly transferred all of the files from my Terra Master at the very least these are features that I just expect to work on a dedicated Nas system I mentioned in my previous video that Nas systems are being used now for more than just data storage and are now expected to host a range of services from media servers virtual machines monitoring systems vpns and all kinds of self-hosted stuff this is where truenast scale wins again but still far from perfect you see trueness scale differs greatly from its older brother true Nas core in that while core is built upon FreeBSD and uses jails to easily configure apps true netscale is Linux based which opens up the world of Docker this is great for the most part but the part that a lot of people aren't super thrilled about is that scale uses kubernetes as its container management platform rather than Standalone Docker I very much understand why IX systems would do this as it opens the door for not only home users and hobbyists to run scale but for it to find its way into larger deployments where scaling no pun intended is actually needed k3s will allow multiple scale servers to easily join together and pull their resources for scalability and high availability but everyone who's ever used kubernetes knows that it's a bit more tedious to use than just deploying services with Standalone Docker scale comes with a handful of officially supported apps that you can install all and setup for these is pretty straightforward I can see how you'd need at least a rudimentary understanding of kubernetes verbiage to not be intimidated by some of the options though however if you want even more apps to run you can configure the popular true charts repository it gives you a crap ton of stuff to choose from first thing I wanted to do was get pork Tanner installed I know shocking right a raid owl video where he uses poor tainer never seen that before well this time it's different this is the first time I'm using portaner to hook into a k3s cluster rather than Docker and why am I doing this well I'm a fan of the interface when using with Standalone Docker so I wanted to give it a try with k3s I will say though that while I liked being able to click around and see what's running in different namespaces see my services networking configs and all kinds of stuff again it's not going to be intuitive at all for someone who's never used kubernetes as someone who's use both Standalone Docker and kubernetes to deploy apps Docker is just much more intuitive and easy to use especially when it comes to simple setups which is what like 99 of people running their stuff in their home lab want you don't have to lecture me on the benefits kubernetes gives you over Docker I know trust me I run my own cluster in my lab so relax but yeah the poor Tanner UI for k3s is cool and I successfully deployed a homer dashboard by copying my deployment yambles I have saved on my GitHub to the web-based editor I'll have to spend some more time in here before providing a full review but my first impressions were positive if you want to avoid the kubernetes crap altogether you could actually just spin up a Linux VM and install Docker directly to that you can allocate pretty much all your resources and have that be your main container manager the choice is yours and it's awesome that there's an easy feasible option for those of you who don't want to be bothered by k3s trust me I I get it all right I am I'm talking about kubernetes if you want more go watch my video where I dove headfirst and tried learning it within a week let's move on to how this thing actually performs with some common apps and use cases I first installed everyone's favorite media server Windows Media Center just kidding you should have seen the look on your guys's faces but yeah I I set up Plex I use the official install from IX systems and set my Target locations then boom we were in the performance is going to depend heavily on your Hardware but these celerons are pretty decent transcoders considering they have built-in graphics with quick sync for a local setup that doesn't require much transcoding at all this is going to be plenty enough and even if you do want to perform a couple of simultaneous trans codes at the same time you'll be good now to get all of your movies and shows organized you can use an R stack which is funny that IX systems includes these as official apps I mean I'm a good law-abiding citizen and would never be caught dead pirating the hard work of a multi-billion dollar industry but yeah if you want to use the rstack they have you covered with radar sonar lidar and qubit torrent to get you up and running now of course there's plenty of other apps you can run on here and I'm not going to listen them all as that would be hella boring feel free to browse the true charts website for a complete list of available apps in their repository another cool feature that comes baked into truenast scale is the ability to spin up an open VPN server and a client getting the server setup will allow you to access your truenast system as well as other devices on your network from anywhere in the world then the client can be used if you want to connect your true not system through another VPN whether that's a server you've set up elsewhere or one of the other billion paid options I will say it's not very intuitive to get set up as you have to manually create a certificate Authority a server certificate and a client certificate before you're up and running this is something that the average person is not going to understand how to do so I was hoping there would be some type of wizard to guide you through a setup but as of now there is not let me know if you want a walk through on setting up vpns within scale and for only 10 easy payments of 14.95 I'll consider it so yeah this wasn't really meant to be a full review on using sureness scale but more of how this Hardware can be improved by using a different software you can honestly put whatever OS you want on here sure Nas proxmox asxi Windows whatever Colton over at Hardware Haven just got his hands on a similar unit and is doing just that so head over to his channel and watch his video on that overall I'd say I'm much less disappointed with this terramaster device after giving it a fighting chance with a proven piece of software at just under 400 it's still a bit pricey but if you're someone that cares about Aesthetics 2.5 gig networking and doesn't care to build their own Nas then it's honestly a decent option I would probably recommend going with the four bay unit as for a bit more money you can get much more flexibility with your storage but that's all I have for you in this one if you liked it then be sure to drop a like and if you want to see more content like this then consider subscribing I want to get a huge shout out to my YouTube members and my patreons you guys are my aesthetically pleasing Nas that I can install whatever OS I want on I mean you guys are the bee's knees and if you're still watching I appreciate it thank you so much and I will see you in the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 15,970

Keywords: truenas, homelab

Id: ijhtwyRlezc

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023