It's been a long time since I started using a NAS at home, and until recently, my needs were handled by a succession of Synology devices. The operating system felt like a desktop environment, so the learning curve felt lower, and once I upgraded to a better CPU, could handle self-hosted apps with ease. But then, features I relied on in DSM, Synology's OS, started to disappear, others changed names, and the company moved towards locking its hardware down further.

I've tried a few open source NAS OS options with a few spare smaller drives, and while most did well, I decided on TrueNAS Scale virtualized inside Proxmox. Much research and decision-making went into this, and the combination of TrueNAS features, my familiarity with Proxmox, and the ecosystem of both sealed the deal. Now I'm using TrueNAS for my primary network storage, and will eventually use the Synology box as a network share for home lab use, so I'm not creating e-waste while moving platforms.

Time to remove some vendor lock-in

TrueNAS gives me more room to breathe

Recent business decisions aside, the Synology enclosures have worked well for me, but it's time to move on. I don't want my NAS vendor to specify which drives I can use, or to be able to put its weight into any decisions that have to do with my data. It's mine, and all I expect from the OS developer is to provide functionality and bugfixes, things I can't manage myself or by adding applications to the OS.

And that's a crucial distinction between TrueNAS (formerly iXsystems) and Synology. Both companies use the same operating system on the consumer side as their enterprise offerings, but only one has restrictions when you're not an enterprise customer.

The extra grossness of this is that Synology preloads DSM on its hardware and locks it down, so you can't replace the OS even if you tried. TrueNAS runs on a massive variety of hardware, isn't locked down in the same ways (although it does have some limitations to keep the OS more stable), and doesn't try to micromanage the user.

It's been an adjustment

As with all changes, it has taken some getting used to. Not as much as I expected, because TrueNAS is a better UI to navigate, but the way I set things up inside Proxmox took some elbow grease to get working correctly. Passing through PCIe controllers and HBAs to the TrueNAS VM wasn't hard, but it needed a plan and careful implementation (both things I struggle with).

Then getting Proxmox to do backups of the VM, some scripts to handle ZFS snapshots on TrueNAS, a UPS for backup power, and a few other tweaks took time. Still, I now have a system that allows me to restore the OS or the data at any time while being able to use Proxmox for other VMs, including a permanent Ubuntu installation to manage Docker containers.

I now have a NAS OS that works for me, with the containers and VMs I want running on the same hardware, but not taking up the resources dedicated to the NAS. It's the best of both worlds, and I wish I'd done it sooner.

Now I have choices everywhere

Which drives, how to pool them, what hardware to use, and which apps to add

Part of the draw of TrueNAS is that it's built to use the ZFS file system. That means I get self-healing provisions, snapshots, and a whole bunch of other NAS-centric features. It also means I can use the drives I already have, as long as I follow some sanity checks when making vdevs, and have SSD pools on the same machine as my hard drive pools. I couldn't do that on Synology. While I had a couple of 1TB NVMe drives installed, they were striped for cache use only.

But it's more than the initial choices. I can transfer those drives and the ZFS pools on them to any other device able to run TrueNAS, or any other Linux distribution. My data is no longer bound to the operating system, and I'm all the happier for it. I mean, I have no plans to move from TrueNAS currently, but the future might have other ideas, and I'd rather be able to transfer the drives than to buy new drives to put in the new system and copy the data over the network.

TrueNAS is full of handy apps

Currently, 281 apps appear in the TrueNAS application store when I log in. There are alternatives for everything I was using on Synology, and things that were a pain in the butt to get working with some of the design choices Synology made. Things that I already use, like Copyparty, Calibre and Frigate. I don't plan on adding many apps to TrueNAS because most will be installed in Proxmox instead, but I love that the store already has my favorite open-source apps.

Synology was fine — until it wasn't

Synology was the best option for me when I started using a NAS, with a user-friendly interface integrated in hardware, I didn't have to think about putting together. With transcoding disappearing from new NAS enclosures, I needed to figure out an exit plan because I was already nearly filling my Synology storage pool, and upgrade time was looming.

When I only used the NAS to store my Plex library and photo album backups, I had no incentive to swap to another OS. Perhaps mentioning Plex is appropriate because it's another user-friendly company until they started making things more difficult. And now I'm replacing both, and voting with my wallet.

I don't regret moving to TrueNAS in the slightest

Moving my data to another system was hard to envision, before I did it, because the thought of transferring that many Terabytes filled me with dread. Now that it's done, I'm glad I can transfer the ZFS pools instead, making the next upgrade much easier to accomplish. And at some point soon, I want to build a rackmount server to store my data and handle the self-hosted applications I use, which will feature TrueNAS for the storage portion.

I also don't regret the years of using Synology. It was the best choice at the time, but the market has changed, and so have my preferences and skillset, and I want more out of my NAS than it was providing.