Help me to get into TrueNAS

[Xizz3l]

Hi, all. I am completely new to this topic, so I hope you can help me out.

Where I am coming from:​

I have gathered data over the last 15 years. Personal photos and videos, documents, dvd and blue ray rips, all kind of stuff.
My data is and more than some still is stored on external pc hard rives ranging from 250GB - 4TB drives. I use a total of around 33TB atm.
Two years ago I bought some drives and put them in an old pc of mine and gave unraid a shot. It works ok to this day, but I think that I want to give TrueNAS a fair trail first before going all in with unraid.
I have average understanding of pc hardware and I am not scared of using the terminal.

What are my goals?​

My goal is to build a single system (home server) that for the first time is the place for all my data.
It should be kind of energy efficient.
I want to run TrueNAS Scale, since it is based on linux.
It's dual purpose is to be my homelab, running all my docker containers and 3 vms.
I aim for around 60TB of usable Storage, so that it will hold some time.

What am I looking for?​

I don't think that it's fair to assume that all that information that I need come from commands in this thread. Although some tips for the right hdds would be great, since I am completely lost since there are so many models.
So can you recommend me some courses (in English or German), so that I can teach myself what I need to know? It's ok when they cost a fair amount of money, good learning materials that are well structured don't come for free.
Or some good and detailed written guide?
I wan't to learn the needed knowledge of what TrueNAS is and what it does. How I configure it right for my goals.
What drives I should by and what combination would be the best and how I combine that all in one case.

 

[danb35]

What drives I should by

Many of us have had good results from buying USB external drives (particularly from Western Digital) and "shucking" them, or removing the drive from the enclosure--that, at least in .us, often results in much lower cost per TB than buying bare drives. Or WD or Seagate's "Enterprise" drives (WD Gold, Seagate Exos) often seem to be more economical than their "NAS" drives.

what combination would be the best

I'd probably vote for 6x 20 TB disks in RAIDZ2, which would give you about 80 TB of capacity and two disks' redundancy. But you might find that you want to put VMs on a separate SSD pool.

how I combine that all in one case

You find a case that has room for all of them and provides adequate cooling, and then install them.

In terms of hardware, many of us find that it's much better (and more economical) to buy and repurpose used enterprise gear rather than building a system from scratch. That gives you proper server-grade hardware with helpful features like ECC RAM and remote management, and really would be helpful for any NAS where you care about your data (regardless of OS), though we tend to emphasize solid hardware more than users of some other NAS OSs. Edit: the Dell PowerEdge R730 looks like it'd be a pretty decent choice, with eight or twelve 3.5" hot-swap bays and otherwise pretty featureful.

Or some good and detailed written guide?

Lots of guides, though you haven't given much specificity on what you want a guide for--"how to use TrueNAS" is pretty vague. But there's the documentation, linked at the top of every page in this forum. There's also the Resources section, similarly linked. I'm kind of fond of (and I host, though I didn't write) Uncle Fester's guide, which I link in my sig, though it's not too current at the moment.