I just ordered an Aoostar R1N100 mini PC to replace my aging Synology NAS. Now I’m thinking about what to install on it. It’s supposed to work as a NAS but I also want to host some services on it like papeless-ngx and Jellyfin, which I both run in Docker containers on a different machine right now. Plus anything that takes my fancy in the future. Current candidates are OpenMediaVault and TrueNAS. My priorities are ease of installation and administration, as well as reliability. Which one would you recommend or are there any alternatives I’m not aware of? I’ve also considered Unraid, but I’d prefer something FOSS.
I went from OMV, to TrueNAS, to just mounting the drives directly on my Proxmox host, combining them with mergerfs, and then sharing them from a samba container they’re bind-mounted to.
Unless you have some fairly complex storage needs I’d say go with a good hypervisor over a dedicated storage OS with a hypervisor tacked on.
That sounds complicated.
It’s honestly less complicated in the end. I’d say probably 95% of people don’t really have a need for a dedicated storage OS because everything they want to do is easily accomplished on any Linux install.
If you’re only wanting to use Docker and don’t need to run VMs I’d just use Debian, and even then you could still run VMs if you really want to.
This person is giving you the good input. It sounds complicated because it isn’t just “install this thing”, but it suits your needs and equipment much better.