If you are really sure about the disk space requirements you can easily get one of the endless mini PCs with a N100 or a small Intel on it and chuck two NVMe's in it and let these run as RAID1.
Have a decent backup plan,though.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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I personally use a dual core pentium with 16GB of RAM. When I first installed TrueNas (FreeNas back then), I only had 8GB of RAM, but that proved to be not enough to run all the services I wanted, so I would suggest 12-16GB. Depending on the services you want to run any multi-core x86 CPU that allows 16GB of RAM to be used should be adequate. I believe TrueNas recommends ECC RAM, but I don't think using consumer grade RAM and hardware has caused me any problems. I'm also using an old SSD for the system drive, which I is recommended now (I used to use 2 mirrored USB thumb drives, buy that's not recommended anymore). Very importantly, make sure the HDD(s) you get are not shingled drives; made that mistake initially, and performance was ridiculously bad.
If you want to roll your own, I've had good luck with ASRock Rack motherboards.
Probably just go with SSD storage because 2T is fairly low for hard drives these days. Still a pretty good idea to do a mirror.
Pretty much any CPU that isn't a raspberry pi will comfortably max out a gigabit Ethernet connection.
I have a UGreen NAS (6800 Pro) and the hardware on it has been great. I added a new system drive and have been running Proxmox since day 1.
The install process would be the same, enter bios, enable boot from other drive, disable UGreen OS drive, and then reboot to install whatever OS you want.
NASCompares did a video review of the UGreen NAS with TrueNAS installed and had nothing but good things to say.
I got mine during the Kickstarter campaign, but I still think they have some good value at retail vs competitors.
I’ve owned QNAP and Synology, the one area that has been an issue has been around the CPU being the bottleneck and slowing down transfers. This was on the lower end models.
I really really would love them...if only they would allow ECC RAM and more RAM in total. Then they would have built a killer device.
Consider how the NAS will be used. Is it just file storage, or will you want to stream from it?
If just file storage, you can use lighter hardware.
I'm running a 5 year old Dell Small Form Factor desktop as my NAS/media server. It's power draw is under 12 watts unless I'm converting files. There's room for 3 data drives (boot drive is M2). It has no problem streaming, unlike my consumer NAS. And it cost way less.
It will be used just for file storage. But what exactly do you mean by "lighter hardware"? april said anything more than a raspi, so better than the quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor @ 2.4GHz from the raspi 5? (ik that truenas is for x86 and not arm)
I did the opposite and used it as an excuse to upgrade my main PC, with the parts that got replaced being inherited by the new server.
Perhaps an unwise move due to it not being optimised for power savings, and looking at your particular use case it wouldn't be a smart move.
Depending in where you want to have this NAS, one of the more important factors to consider is how quiet you can make it. If you only have a few HDDs they're not too loud, but ssds are silent. It can also be worth getting some good fans and making sure you can mount them in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary vibration to have it be real quiet.
Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.
If you're set on TrueNAS, then just build a box to do that.
If you want a low power solution, go with Synology or Qnap.
My TrueNAS setup uses a used Ryzen 3200G and mATX motherboard I got off of ebay for about $100 total. Honestly, any CPU with integrated graphics should be fine, so maybe something like the Intel 8500T, which was specifically a low power SKU could also work. Unless you plan on doing a lot of video transcoding, then you might need something more powerful (or a low end GPU like the Intel Arc A310 or a Radeon 6400 to go with it)
I'm not so sure how TrueNAS Scale determines how much RAM to allocate for ZFS, but at least with Proxmox, the wiki says you want to have at least 2GiB + (1 GiB/TiB of storage) of RAM to be able to be allocated.
If you're looking to use 2TiB of storage, that would be at least 4GiB of RAM dedicated just to ZFS cache, so 8GiB of RAM would probably suit you. You might need to get more RAM in the future if you want to go with more storage at that time.
As for a case, anything will do as long as it can hold however many hard drives you ultimately wish to put in it.
I believe the RAM calculation is less important for ZFS these days. I capped mine at 16GB for 64TiB useable pool and had no issues. (This was zfs on linux which i think Truenas Scale is based off anyway).
Regardless unless the same data is often being accessed the caching aspect may not be that important.
General consensus ive been seeing recently agrees with you that you really can get it running on surprisingly low end hardware these days, and finding less than 8gb of RAM in the ddr4 or 5 era is perhaps difficult enough that my above point is moot
For the CPU: I have a AMD Ryzen 5 8600G in my TrueNAS Scale box, I use the integrated graphics for hardware transcoding in Jellyfin. If you don't need transcoding it's probably overkill.
For TrueNAS you'll also want a lot of RAM, as ZFS (the filesystem) gets faster with more ram by using it as a cache. My box has 32 GB, but 16 GB should also work, especially if you're going with SSD storage.
And don't go cheap on the power supply, get an efficient one from a good brand (I prefer BeQuiet).
Get a $100 used Dell mid-tower which can hold 4 HDDS/SSDs and jam as much RAM in it as it can hold (16/32/64), hook it up to the router via CAT5, take a nap. You'll need two drive sleds / adapters for the two 5.5 inch bays and a fan for the same. That's it, you're done. I personally prefer HGST / WD Gold enterprise drives, or WD Red if cost is a factor.
I couldn't really tell you about which hardware to get, but its worth considering a 35w CPU as this machine will be on all the time. Also adding a network card, having more bandwidth is really handy for a NAS
I agree with using TrueNAS, I currently have a Fujitsu Futro S920 that can host two mirrored SSDs, it is a cheap build if you don't have to host any services, you can found details here: https://pietro.in/en/posts/futro-s920-proxmox/
For more powerful hardware but still staying in a cheap build take a look at an HP 800 G4 mini or a ThinkCentre M910x both can host two NVME disks