I'm new - NAS + Windows in same tower

[BorreroMD]

Hi. I am 100% new to servers in general. I just need some direction with a few things

My parents and I share a photography hobby and we've like 20 Tb in photos overall. So far, we all have been keeping our photos in external HDDs but A) it's impractical, especially when we need to share files (mostly because my dad is aging and he just can't use google Drive) and B) we've already experienced the pain of losing a disk with lots of photos before. So i want to build a NAS for us 3.

However, i am also planning on building a PC for them (using some components i already had from my recently upgraded gaming PC)for photo editing (they've been using their laptops but those are quite old and slow and it's really annoying to have to service them like every 3 months because "it's getting too slow").

So what i was thinking in maybe housing the NAS and a regular windows 10 PC in the same tower, to reduce some expenses and (very importantly) save some space (they are moving to a country house... More like a cabin, and it's really small).

I have a bunch of SSDs I'm not using now and i already have basically everything for the windows machine (listed bellow) and would only need to buy the HDDs for mass storage... And maybe a NIC.

Hardware:
AMD Ryzen 5600g
B450 AORUS pro wifi mobo
A nice BeQuiet! Dark rock tf cooler
3 x sata SSD (120, 250 and 256 Gb; different brands and specs... All are DRAM-less)
16 Gb (2X8) DDR4 3200 mhz non-ecc RAM
550w PSU from EVGA (80+ white)
Case: phanteks p400s
Peripherals...
Will be buying: 2 or 3 x HDD 4 tb each

With this stuff as context:
1) is it possible?
2) can i install freeNAS in one of those SSDs and Windows in another SSD?
3) is it really a bad idea (I've read some older posts basically saying this but... Still i want to get my own answers haha)

So... You surely have already notice with those questions how ignorant i am about this stuff, but we all start from 0 i guess.

 

[danb35]

You can't run two different operating systems on the same computer at the same time without engaging in some trickery. Really, the options would be:

• Somehow install two complete computers in the same chassis. Run TrueNAS (FreeNAS was replaced by TrueNAS a couple of years back) on one, Windows on the other
  • I don't expect this is possible, or at least practical, with "normal" computer gear, but it's not too unusual when it comes to server equipment--my Dell PowerEdge C6220, for example, puts four independent computers into a single 2U rack chassis.
  • While this is physically tricky (perhaps impossible?), if you can make it work physically, it's going to be the simplest in terms of software/configuration.
• Dual-boot--have both OSs installed, and choose which one to run at boot
  • With this method, you'd be running either TrueNAS or Windows, but not both at the same time
  • TrueNAS doesn't support this, but you could probably figure out a way to use a USB stick as a boot device, just to the point of giving you a menu to choose the OS.
    • or, as a real kludge, just swap SATA cables--plug in the TrueNAS SSD when you want to boot that, or the Windows SSD when you want to boot Windows
• Run Windows as a virtual machine under TrueNAS
  • You'd want to use TrueNAS SCALE for this, as its virtualization support is more complete. You could, I understand, even pass through a GPU to the Windows VM, which would let you use the keyboard/mouse/monitor at the local machine as though it were running Windows natively.

All of these involve some complication, and all of them suffer from the fact that your hardware just isn't suitable to run TrueNAS on in the first place. It will likely "work", for certain values of "work", but it's unlikely to provide the reliable data storage you're looking for.

The "best"--in terms of simplicity, and in terms of safety for your data--is to go ahead and build a Windows machine with the gamer gear you're listing, and buy or build a separate compact server for TrueNAS. The current best budget option for the latter, IMO, would be the HPE MicroServer Gen8, available used on eBay for under US$400. It's compact and quiet, has decent onboard NICs (not Realtek garbage), supports ECC, remote management, and all the other server-y goodness we like to see, and has bays for four storage drives. Stick it in a closet somewhere and it's good to go.

 

[ChrisRJ]

What is your motivation to use TrueNAS and not either something like Synology, or another open source solution? I am asking because understanding this will be critical to steering you into the right direction.