Transitioning from TrueNAS: Choosing My Next NAS Operating System
Hello, I’ve decided that I’m going to transition from my current NAS OS, TrueNAS, to one of three distros—and I’m going to fix my very risky RAID configuration. (I’ll talk about this later.) At the moment, I’m researching different OS options to move to, and I’ve narrowed it down to six candidates. I want to make sure I plan out everything before installation to avoid any issues I might face. The broad choices are here to help me compare them to see which one might be the best for me and my homelab environment.
Why am I switching?
Because I want to move away from turnkey solutions, and I think I have enough skill to move to a more custom-built solution. It would also be a good way to improve my skills. It’s likely that I’m going to face some issues somewhere during this transition that will require troubleshooting. I had a very positive takeaway from TrueNAS with the simple use of its WebUI to set up RAID and the straightforward setup for Docker applications. The only two issues I had with TrueNAS were troubleshooting Docker issues and trying to understand its own permissions system. I would still recommend it to beginners—it’s very simple and it’s free.
What am I switching to and what am I looking for?
For what I’m looking for, I broke it down into my core needs and additional features I would appreciate.
My core needs must be:
- Reliable and stable operating system
- Hardware compatibility
- RAID support with filesystem-level redundancy
- Network file sharing protocol support
- Advanced file permissions using ZFS ACLs
- Secure user management for access control
- Docker application support
- Good community support with documentation
- Greater control than TrueNAS provides
Features that would be nice to have:
- Less reliance on a WebUI
- Less bloated than TrueNAS
- The ability to install software packages directly
- Opportunity to learn Linux and Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
My current options:
Proxmox with TrueNAS VM: Is reliant on a WebUI, but it’s the best of both worlds—still use TrueNAS through a virtual machine while having way more options. The community support is amazing. I’d gain hypervisor experience, and it’s probably the safest option for me.
Debian 12 + ZFS + Ansible: This would be great for me to learn IaC and Linux. I would have to learn a lot, but this is a good start for someone trying to gain experience for DevOps roles.
NixOS: Niche but would be very fun to learn. This would be my option for going all in on IaC. Everything is declared in this distro using a .nix file. This would be a big learning curve and wouldn’t be as good for my portfolio as Debian 12 + ZFS + Ansible, but I would gain cutting-edge DevOps experience.
The mistake I made while configuring my TrueNAS RAID
I have 4x 12TB drives in RAIDZ1 (4-wide). As my coworker with a lot of NAS experience pointed out, the rebuild time for this type of setup would be very long—3-5 days—and the risk of failure during rebuild is significant. With RAIDZ1, I can only lose one drive. If a second drive fails during the multi-day rebuild process, or if I hit an unrecoverable read error (URE) while reading ~36TB of data, I lose everything.
It was my mistake for buying such large drives without doing proper research. They had a sale on 12TB drives and I bought them without much consideration.
My options to fix this:
Since my NAS chassis only holds 5 drives, I have two paths forward:
- Add one more 12TB drive → 5-wide RAIDZ2: This gives me 2-drive redundancy but doesn’t increase capacity (same
31TB usable). It’s the cheapest fix ($90-110) and fits my current chassis. - Buy a 6-bay chassis + two more drives → 6-wide RAIDZ2: This gives me 2-drive redundancy AND increases capacity to
42TB usable. More expensive ($330-470) but better long-term solution.
For now, I’m monitoring my drives closely with SMART tests and backing up all critical data. I’ll be making this upgrade during my OS migration.
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