Tales of moving from QNAP to TrueNAS Scale

[andyjay777]

First, thanks to the members of this forum for their posts and guides. Without asking a single question it made this daunting journey mostly successful after lots of reading.
I am not asking any questions, but thought I would post for others who are considering moving from QNAP to TrueNAS.
Background
I have been using a NAS for ~15 years. 2 bay Synology to 4 bay Synology, to 8 bay QNAP (plus an 8 bay expansion unit). The QNAP was actually going OK for me use, but the increased number of ransomware attacks was starting to concern me. What was more concerning was the lottery of firmware updates. You needed to apply them to keep "safe" from the ransomware, but they often broke stuff (e.g. lost all my containers, all cloud backup jobs stopped and had to be recreated, storage pools missing).
Use case
Storing photos, music, documents etc. Plex. Unifi controller. CCTV NVR.
Hardware
Xeon W-1370
Gigabyte W480 Vision W
64 Gb ECC
2 x LSi9207 HBAs
1 x Intel X540 NIC
Corsair RM1000x
Fractal Define 7 XL
Pool Setup
Boot = 2 x 500GB M2 SSD, in USB enclosures
FastPool = mirrors of 2x2TB + 2X1TB Crucial MX
BigPool = RaidZ2 of 6x16TB Exos + 6x10TB Ironwolf
CCTVPool = Intel 760P NVME
Plus a bunch of single drives for backup
The build debacle
Issue 1: My original CPU was a Xeon W-1350 and a used ASRock W480 creator mother board. I could not get the system to post. Took it into a PC shop and it posted with an i3-10100 and an i3-11100. Updated firmware, but the W-1350 still didn't post. Faulty CPU right? Had to get a W-1370 as a replacement at twice the cost of the W-1350 (I got a good deal on the 1350). And that didn't post! So either I was very unlucky with two faulty Xeons in a row... or it was the motherboard. Ordered a new motherboard and it posted first time. Lesson learnt: there are areas to save money and the motherboard is not one of them.
Issue 2: power supply sizing. Originally I got a 750W power supply. I was looking for the number of SATA power connectors to be 5. Then found the power supply guide, did the calcs... 748W... hhmmm. Stressed about it for a month and upgraded to a 1000W supply. My UPS tells me start up power load is ~400W. At least I can sleep easy knowing power will never be an issue!
Software Install and Setup
This was the part I was most worried about.
- Install = OK
- Pool creation = OK
- Dataset creation = OK
- Permissions = needs some reading to set ACLs, but the principle is OK
- Apps = hhhhmmm... had a bunch of issues with plex for no explained reason. Worked OK the 3rd time. Unifi worked first time.
- Win10 VM = OK after watching a good you tube video and trying it 5 times.
- Network bridge (so VM can access SMB shares) = total debacle. Took me ages and had to disable DHCP on the bridge initially to get this to work.
- SMB shares key lesson is stop and re-start SMB service when making changes.
- Cloud backup = OK
- CCTV = using Milestone Xprotect via the Win 10 VM = OK.

Summary
It's probably too early to tell. Seems like TrueNas is a good foundation for a NAS, that you can add on apps and VMs etc as needed. QNAPs approach is a lot of stuff for everyone which you have to turn off and disable.
Interface is much snappier... but I have moved from a 4c ARM to 16c Xeon.
Impact of ARC is very clear. 64GB of RAM is good, 128GB might have been better

 

[wsoteros]

Awesome write-up, thank you for sharing! Great choice on the 1000W PSU, future-proofing FTW!

How are you liking TrueNAS so far? I am interested to hear your thoughts.

Happy NASing,

Will

 

[ChrisD.]

I too have just moved over from QNAP. So far so good apart from an iSCSI issue I'm trying to get to the bottom of.

Better than the quite frankly wonky performance I was getting out of QuTS, QNAP's questionable dev team leaving in hard coded weak password plus ransomware issues. Also, you want to uninstall some software from your device? No chance!

I much prefer having control!

 

[andyjay777]

I too have just moved over from QNAP. So far so good apart from an iSCSI issue I'm trying to get to the bottom of.

Better than the quite frankly wonky performance I was getting out of QuTS, QNAP's questionable dev team leaving in hard coded weak password plus ransomware issues. Also, you want to uninstall some software from your device? No chance!

I much prefer having control!

I can’t claim to have had wonky performance from my QNAP, but the frequent security issues and rolling the dice with firmware upgrades were enough to make me build my own and move to TrueNAS. And the hardware was a LOT cheaper building.

I like the TrueNAS approach of starting with a good platform and then let you add applications to suit your needs.

 

[andyjay777]

Awesome write-up, thank you for sharing! Great choice on the 1000W PSU, future-proofing FTW!

How are you liking TrueNAS so far? I am interested to hear your thoughts.

Happy NASing,

Will

Good so far… but I am keen to get some more hours logged before responding. I will add to this post in a few months.

I didn’t write this in my original post, but I somehow totally broke my install trying to get the network bridge working. I managed to roll back to RC2, boot and then upgrade to 22.02. I then imported my pools just fine. That gave me a level confidence I never had with QNAP.

 

[wsoteros]

That gave me a level confidence I never had with QNAP.

Glad to hear that! Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

We are happy to have you here!

 

[andyjay777]

Generally running smoothly for the last few months, with a few (notable?) exceptions:
1) The server just stopped responding one day. No way to contact it. Had to hard reset it to bring it back to life. (yes I logged a ticket - related to high CPU usage when refreshing the catalogue). Bit scary if I was away from the house.
2) I seem to be suffering from the Scale memory leak issue. Services grow from 8Gb to 24Gb over 3 weeks. Decided to restart at that point.

Looks like fixes for both are on the way, so will just keep updating.

 

[andyjay777]

Now for the positive. I have changed my DVR over to AgentDVR (aka iSpy) with Deepstack doing the AI object detection.

Initial install issue: Agent and Unifi share the same STUN port, so could not get Agent to load. The TrueCharts discord helped me out with that one!
(had to change the STUN port on Unifi)

With this configuration I get very few false alarms now. I was worried about Deepstack and CPU usage (it can't utilise my iGPU) and detection times, but I am typically getting 60-70ms and up to 140ms when there are 3-4 different objects to detect.
A lot of the forum posts on Deepstack are from BlueIris users on windows, where they see 600-800ms without a Nvidia GPU. Seems the Linux version of Deepstack works a lot better.

Total CPU usage 5-7%.

 

[andyjay777]

I have been running Scale 22.02 now with 91 days uptime.
There is still a small memory leak in the services, but nothing like the 1GB/week of 22.01.