Hi everyone, I’ve been working on my homelab for a year and a half now, and I’ve tested several approaches to managing NAS and selfhosted applications. My current setup is an old desktop computer that boots into Proxmox, which has two VMs:
- TrueNAS Scale: manages storage, shares and replication.
- Debian 12 w/ docker: for all of my selfhosted applications.
The applications connect to the TrueNAS’ storage via NFS. I have two identical HDDs as a mirror, another one that has no failsafe (but it’s fine, because the data it contains is non-critical), and an external HDD that I want to use for replication, or some other use I still haven’t decided.
Now, the issue is the following. I’ve noticed that TrueNAS complains that the HDDs are Unhealthy and has complained about checksum errors. It also turns out that it can’t run S.M.A.R.T. checks, because instead of using an HBA, I’m directly passing the entire HDDs by ID to the VM. I’ve read recently that it’s discouraged to pass virtualized disks to TrueNAS, as data corruption can occur. And lately I was having trouble with a selfhosted instance of gitea, where data (apparently) got corrupted, and git was throwing errors when you tried to fetch or pull. I don’t know if this is related or not.
Now the thing is, I have a very limited budget, so I’m not keen on buying a dedicated HBA just out of a hunch. Is it really needed?
I mean, I know I could run TrueNAS directly, instead of using Proxmox, but I’ve found TrueNAS to be a pretty crappy Hypervisor (IMHO) in the past.
My main goal is to be able to manage the data that is used in selfhosted applications separately. For example, I want to be able to access Nextcloud’s files, even if the docker instance is broken. But maybe this is just an irrational fear, and I should instead backup the entire docker instances and hope for the best, or maybe I’m just misunderstanding how this works.
In any case, I have some data that I want to store and want to reliably archive, and I don’t want the docker apps to have too much control over it. That’s why I went with the current approach. It has also allowed for very granular control. But it’s also a bit more cumbersome, as everytime I want to selfhost a new app, I need to configure datasets, permissions and mounting of NFS shares.
Is there a simpler approach to all this? Or should I just buy an HBA and continue with things as they are? If so, which one should I buy (considering a very limited budget)?
I’m thankful for any advice you can give and for your time. Have a nice day!
I would probably shy away from passing the raw disk. There are a few dozen ways to skin that, But in the end I would probably just mount the disc through NFS,smb, whatever it takes. Reading that smart data is paramount for your situation. You could have a bad cable and never know it.
You could run a couple of VMs K8S and longhorn the data, It’s capable of backing up to an S3 compliant storage.
For my home stuff at the moment I’m running unraid with a BTRFS and a parity disc. The first every month I run a scrub if I had any corruption it would find it for me and alert me. It’s slow as balls but more protection is better than less. You can also buy some recycled discs and keep a offline store. I don’t love the recycled discs but for backup purposes that aren’t running 24x7 they’re better than nothing.
The problem is that I’ve never worked with Kubernetes, and it wouldn’t allow me to port over my current docker instances, afaik. And I’m not ready to pay for Unraid, I’m sorry, I need to set up the server as frugally as possible. Still, thank you for the info, I’ll keep it in mind, while I decide how to move forward.
The chances of corruption from passing virtualized disks in truenas is lower than passing raw disks. I’d move them to virtualized disks.
As far as your SMART data, make a ventoy+debian live usb, boot your host off that and install smartmontools and use smartctl to read your SMART data. You host should still have access to that data. If you have smart errors, you’ll need to fix those first.