Why Debian+Samba Beats TrueNAS & Unraid (For My Purposes) - Tech Overwrite (2024)

My Homelab NAS is finally up and running. I have moved all the video content over to it, and this is actually the first video that I produced/edited entirely over my home network. Noice!

When setting up my custom NAS, you might have noticed that I simply installed Debian on it – and not TrueNAS, Unraid or OpenMediaVault. Why was this? Why did I manually configure Debian and then Samba to expose all my media files over the home network, when TrueNAS would do all this for me anyway?

And why did I buy two 4TB drives and NOT run them in RAID? Aren’t I just risking all my precious files.

Well I answer these questions and more in this video.

Video Transcript

Hey everyone, this is the FIRST video that will be streamed and edited entirely over my home network – via my new Homelab NAS build. If you watched that video then (1) firstly kudos to you because it’s 45 minutes long (so thanks for watching!) but (2) my main point is that in that video, you will have noticed that I am running “plain Linux”- Debian – on my new NAS. This build has two four terabyte NVMe drives giving eight terabytes of storage space for my video content, and I’m exposing this to my workstation PC (and my laptop) via Samba – which allows me to mount network drives on Windows and use THESE for editing, as though the video files were stored directly on my PC.

But here’s the thing: there are LOADS of good ready made NAS solutions out there, like TrueNAS, Unraid and OpenMediaVault – so why did I “go it alone” and just use Debian and Samba, and configure everything myself? And since I built a NAS and I put two drives in it, I DEFINITELY used RAID, right? Right?

Well actually no, because I’m a mad lad who likes losing all his files. Kidding, sort of. So in this video I wanted to cover those two points – firstly, why didn’t I use TrueNAS or similar, and why do I have zero disk redundancy?

TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault and Unraid

TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault and Unraid offer some really awesome features – and the first two options are free too, so why didn’t I just use them?

Well let’s start off with Unraid – it’s clearly a powerful bit of software, offering a range of features, a really nice UI and various file systems including both ZFS and XFS. I’ll touch on ZFS later in this video but XFS would actually have been perfect for a media server NAS, due to how well it supports large files. HOWEVER, Unraid comes at a cost – literally. They recently moved to a new license model and I would need to pay at least $49 for a license, and this would only give me OS updates for 1 year. That means that over 4 years, for example, I would end up paying almost $200 – and while good quality software IS worth paying for, I kinda feel like I’d then be better off just going with Synology and getting free OS updates “for life”, compared to paying for Unraid.

Next we have TrueNAS and OpenMediaVault. Now both of these are really powerful, with a range of great features including lots of disk redundancy options – basically allowing you to “group” drives together and share the data in such a way that if one drive fails, you don’t then lose all your files. They both offer GUIs too, allowing you to easily get information on your NAS (and see how it’s doing) and make modifications to its config too. In terms of file systems, TrueNAS offers ZFS which is much better than the “default” ext4 file system of Linux, since ZFS offers a wider range of more advanced disk management features including pool scrubbing, data sets and snapshots. OMV doesn’t offer ZFS although it DOES offer XFS support which would arguably be better for me, since it is just as advanced as ZFS but XFS handles larger files (like video content) a bit better too.

Now that all sounds pretty awesome, right? I mean, who DOESN’T need ZFS pool scrubbing and XFS extent-oriented organization?! Well, me. I’ll discuss ZFS more in a second, but all I really wanted for my Homelab NAS was a simple place to store my media files, I wanted a simple way of backing that up to an off-site location and I wanted to be able to expose the media files over the network via a Windows share.

All of these are simple to do with just a straight Debian and Samba install. Debian helps me to achieve my first two objectives (that I mentioned) because it’s easy and just works, whereas Samba is often really simple. You just install the packages via apt, add a few lines to the bottom of the Samba config file, and then you can jump over to Windows and you can easily access your files when adding a network volume. It’s simple. I have been running this set-up for a week or so now, and it works really well. I don’t need anything extra.

But… You Won’t Get Snapshot Support?

Naturally if I wanted to do a build with 12 data discs and I wanted to group them and RAID them in weird and wonderful ways, then an “all in one” NAS solution like TrueNAS, OMV or Unraid WOULD be a massive help (of course). BUT I mainly want to have super fast storage for my media files, and then expose this over the network. I’m happy just to keep it simple.

Now you COULD argue that I’m missing out on some really neat features like snapshots, and that IS sorta true (even though my NVMe drives are formatted as NTFS, so I could potentially use Microsoft Shadow Copy if I booted into Windows, I guess).

The neat thing with TrueNAS and OMV for example is that you can easily click a button, and freeze your files in time – allowing you to roll back to that state in the future if you wanted. The great thing with ZFS and XFS snapshots is that it doesn’t really take up any extra disk space either – because it doesn’t clone the entire disk content, it just “remembers” how your files were stored – and then it keeps track of file changes after that point. This means that if you had any major problems, you could click a button and move your file system state back to that original point – which is really neat. Snapshots have a LOT of potential benefits, but not necessarily for me. I mean, when I shoot a video like this one, I’ll have a few large MP4 video files, and then I’ll go out and collect broll for it. I’ll also have the Premiere Pro project file. These go into a date-based folder so that I can find it in the future, and that’s about it. Once a video is done, I move onto the next one. So it’s very unlikely that I’ll actually say “hey, let’s roll back to a month ago when I didn’t have those 5 other video projects stored”. I wouldn’t really need that.

The only time when snapshots might be useful for me is when I’m doing video editing, because it’s really easy to accidentally do the wrong thing and wipe out a bunch of your tracks. HOWEVER Premiere Pro frequently saves your project files to a backup folder, so that I can easily go back to a previous project state (by opening up that file) – and then I can copy any tracks back over, or whatever I need to do.

So again, I don’t really need snapshot technology here either.

Yes ZFS and XFS do have other nice benefits too, including checksums which can help to prevent data corruption due to bad drives. HOWEVER all my files are stored in offsite locations too, plus checksums and similar features can actually slow down read and write performances a little bit – and I want the fastest speeds possible, since I’m relying on my Homelab NAS for video editing. So while I think that TruneNAS, OMV and Unraid offer some awesome benefits, they just seem a bit overkill for my purposes. They’re much better for people with multiple drives who want seamless redundancy options, in my opinion. If I’m missing something though, please do let me know down in the comments before I lose terabytes of my hard work! Hopefully that doesn’t happen though.

RAID (And Why I Have Zero Redundancy)

Ah, RAID. RAID is love, RAID is life. RAID is the GOAT. At least, according to some people. And it IS true that RAID brings a number of benefits – which is why I actually run my SYNOLOGY NAS in RAID 1 mode, so that if one of the hard drives fails, I don’t immediately lose my personal files and CCTV recordings.

So if you’ve never heard of RAID before, here’s a 30 second explanation. By buying two data drives, you can “group” them together so that the data is replicated on both drives. This is known as RAID 1 and if one drive fails, it’s no major issue because all your files are still on the other drive. This means that you can easily buy another drive, swap out the bad drive, and all your files get synced back over in the background – meaning that you’re back to having two copies of your data again. This is known as data redundancy and it’s really important for servers and NASes, unless you’re a #madlad like me. Kidding.

While RAID 1 (and the other forms, like RAID 5, 6 and 10) ARE pretty useful, there’s one big downside to it: you need multiple drives. If you want to have 4 terabytes of usable disk space to store all your files on, you need to buy TWO drives and then group them together – and you’re then effectively “losing” one of these NVMe drives (in my case). Okay okay, you’re not actually “losing” it because the second drive is protecting against data loss – which is important. But in my case, I want to have as many NVMe drives as possible to give me as much TOTAL storage capacity as possible. With a PCIe to M2 adapter, I can probably have four NVMe drives in my build for 16 terabytes of super fast storage. OR I can RAID them up, and then go down to just 8 or 12 terabytes of storage depending on which RAID method I use. Basically, I’m losing key storage capacity by using RAID.

And here’s the thing: RAID is not a backup. Everyone will tell you that. If you want to make sure that your files stay safe even if you have a house fire (for example), then you NEED offsite backups. RAID won’t protect against a fire. So what I’m doing with my Homelab NAS build is ensuring that my files are backed up to my Hetzner backup area at least once a day. This works better for me than RAID, to be honest.

Yes I WOULD lose some files if one of my NVMe drives died BEFORE the backup job ran, but the video content that I just shot would still be on my camera’s SD cards – so I could just retrieve it from there. In that sense – since I’m using my Homelab NAS for video content – I DO actually have data redundancy, via my SD cards. And then I have data protection through my offsite backup space.

And that’s good enough for me. The alternative would be to spend loads of money on expensive NVMe drives, and then lose up to half this space – for no real world benefit. My Homelab NAS is now fully operational which I’m really excited about. If you didn’t see the build video, then you can check it out here and while it IS 45 minutes long, there’s loads of chapters so you can jump around the video to see the bits that interest you.