Manolis Poniris

Switching to TrueNAS

'TruNAS gives me all the control over how my data is stored and on the hardware that I choose'

Introduction

Recently I have just made the switch from Synology to TrueNAS Scale in light of Synology’s new policy regarding consumer grade NAS systems being locked in to first party drives. This is something I will talk about later, but firstly I want to talk about what made me invest in a NAS System in the first place.

Some History

Back in 2020 during lockdown I decided to start learning how to use 3D software, namely 3ds MAX, so during this period I started to really enjoy sitting for hours designing new homes and making little animations. As I stepped up my game and started rendering my animation sequences using .exr files and in 4K, project sizes started to balloon. Along with the project itself, asset sizes for 16K HDRI’s and 4K PBR assets were a huge strain on disk space.

Additionally for years we had backed up decades worth of old digital photos to an External Hard Drive, which was something I was not happy with as there was no redundancy or backup of the backup.

So in June of 2021 I took the leap and bought a used ds716+. Initially I had it configured in RAID 1 with 1.8Tb of usable storage and this served me well for a while until I replaced the ageing drives with 2X 4Tb Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives, giving a usable capacity of 3.6Tb in RAID 1.

Synology’s ecosystem of hardware, OS and Mobile apps made the whole process of viewing, managing and tagging photos extremely simple and intuitive. The same goes for Music streaming and configuring services such as Plex.

The photos app impressed me so much, with it being nearly comparable to photos app on iOS, that I recommended it to a couple of photographer friends. They use their Synology systems as a bulk photo storage and a way to show off their pictures when on the go using the QuickConnect service.

Latterly I installed PostgreSQL on the system via Portainer and Docker as this was something I wanted to learn how to use and the whole process was relatively simple.

The Downfall

Unfortunately in 2025 Synology announced that their consumer grade NAS systems would require first party drives. While my system was not in need of being replaced this move is something that prompted me to move away before it was too late and my only option was migrating to a new Synology.

TrueNAS

Sat under my desk, collecting dust, was my old gaming pc, having a 6Th Gen Core i5 and a GTX 1070 it was completely unusable for playing modern games.

So, I bought a 2U rack case from servercase.co.uk (exact specifications listed below) and a 2U compatible Noctua CPU Cooler and sold the graphics card.

While deciding what software to run I eventually settled on TrueNAS Scale, which was largely regarded as complicated but the best NAS Operating System. Although it seemed daunting, the copious amount of documentation made the transition rather smooth.

Copying the data over

So initially I thought the easiest way was to setup a SMB Share and drag and drop the data over from the Synology to the new server… That was a terrible idea and did not work for more than about 20 minutes.

SSH And the dreaded Terminal

So, despite being relatively tech savvy, I had never ventured into any form of terminal system or CLI in any advanced way.

SSH took me a comically long amount of time to figure out but, once I had actually managed to get connected, the rest seemed to come to me relatively quickly. mv, find, rm -rf and all the other basic commands seemed surprisingly intuitive.

The Future

Currently I am still moving across all the files and services that have been running on the Synology system and then I will start finding replacement apps for thing such as Synology photos so I will update this as I progress.

Server Specifications