Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, or TrueNAS
How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
I show how to set up a lean ZFS NAS on Debian 12 using OpenZFS and Samba, skipping the bloat of TrueNAS, Synology, or QNAP. By creating a RAIDZ1 pool with NVMe drives and configuring simple datasets, you get a powerful, self-contained storage solution. The best part is that all configuration lives on the disks, so if your OS fails, you can simply move the drives to another machine and import your data instantly.
ZFS filesystem is self contained. If your OS is nuked suddenly, simply take all disks to another machine or install a new OS, install zfs, run zfs import and get back your data.
- Confiks
Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS, but I have been doing so for the last two weeks. Inside a Jonsbo N6 case, which is pretty nice with an 8x SATA backplane and drive bays (unlike the earlier Jonsbo variants).
I ended up on shucking 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. They contain helium drives, the WD140EDGZ in my case, and are about a third cheaper than 4x the 12 TB WD Red Plus drives (which are air-filled). The shucking was easier than I expected too, and the performance seems very comparable. The warranty is a definite downside (European, so no Magnuson-Moss), but I think I can even get them back in their enclosure should they fail during the 2-year warranty period.
I've put some second hand 256 GB M.2 SSDs in there as boot drives. It was a bit of a struggle to get it to work in a way that failure of one of the drives doesn't hold up booting, combined with LUKS, TPM keys and ZFS on root. Learned a lot about systemd-boot which I have never used before, but feels a lot saner to me than grub ever was. So now I have a large script which debootstraps a Debian based NAS into being.
I noticed that there are a lot of ZFS myths and cargo culting. For example TFA mentions ECC RAM, which in some circles is a must-have because ZFS would wreck your pool during a scrub otherwise, which is a myth. It's also very expensive, especially this year. You also don't need much RAM for ZFS, L2ARC doesn't use much RAM at all, to name a few others.
Still doubting about setting `dnodesi […]
- MrDOS
Some other things I find useful on NASes:
Install avahi-daemon. Samba will automatically register with it to advertise SMB/CIFS to macOS and Linux clients over DNS-SD.
Install wsdd2 so that your server will be auto-discovered by Explorer on Windows 10+ clients with SMB 1.0 disabled, too.
Your Linux hostname is probably lower-case, but by default, Samba publishes a capitalized rendering of the hostname to NetBIOS and Avahi. If this bothers you, set “host-name=something” in the [server] section of /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf, and set “mdns name = mdns” in the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf.
If you have macOS clients, you should enable vfs_fruit in your Samba configuration: https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit..... There are some compatibility reasons to do this, but mostly it means you can set the “fruit:model” so that your server has a fun icon in the Finder sidebar.
To avoid the creation .DS_Store files, you can disallow them: https://ryanoberto.github.io/blog/2015/04/01/disabling-the-c.... I think you can also set “fruit:resource = xattr” to store Finder preferences in xattrs, but I haven't tried it.
Although macOS deprecated AFP in favour of SMB years ago (and are slated to remove AFP client support altogether in the upcoming macOS 27), SMB client support in macOS is still pretty miserable. The upcoming macOS 27 is set to drop AFP support, but until then I will continue to run Netatalk side-by-side with Samba. Netatalk also registers itself […]
- a-french-anon
I think it's appropriate to link to my blog post about building such a NAS but with very different technologies: dm-integrity, mdadm and XFS. The reason being that as a C/C++ dev following OpenZFS development closely, I found the focus on ginormous features over general stability and the constant problems due to the SPL/separate page cache too worrying.
Sure, I traded the convenience of kitchen sink (or Swiss army knife for the more charitable souls) ZFS for some initial pain, but I'm very happy with my choice today.
https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/06/nas-setup-l...
- splitbrain
I came to the same conclusion when I built my NAS. Just Nix for the system, zfs for raid and docker compose for any service I might want to run. https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-08/03-diy_nas_on_nixos
- beagle3
I still pay for snooty, and the reason for that is that when a disk goes bad (not if; when) I pop its tray out, replace the disk, pop the tray with the disk back in, click a couple of widgets, and that’s it. I know it will be rebuilt properly.
(And I know I have to do that, because when the disk fails it beeps and lights a led near the bad disk)
It’s easy to build a NAS such as the one described in this article, but in the long run, data loss is significantly more likely.
Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.
- ocd
I'm sure people have reasons for taking these things as far as they do with ZFS, and everything else that goes into what is commonly considered a "NAS." But I've found great convenience in a tight NFSv3 config running from a single high capacity HDD with ext4 on a Linux machine (primary system that's always on anyway while I'm around/awake) making things available to my other devices for the electricity and overhead cost of one machine instead of multiple.
I try to keep my network configuration restrictive by default, so I'm not too concerned about possible security arguments running it from my main machine. I've probably committed some great sin here, but is plain NFSv3 and secondarily Samba (for compatibility) really not enough?
- kartoshechka
I found cockpit to be incredibly useful for managing NAS and VPS. Even though any configuration is not an issue with LLMs, having a dashboard with toggles, formatted logs and such is helpful, and I can even run shell commands on phone without ssh. In the NAS case, you can easily see the results of backup/maintenance cronjobs, manage samba (which is a huge pain in the ass to get to work properly on iPhone), and monitor disk usage
- FireInsight
I used this blog post as one learning resource while building my own NAS a while back: https://xyny.art/blog/2026-building-nas/
Building a NAS from scratch is really fun! A small hinderance, but definitely part of the fun as well, is the lack of a "complete resource" on the topic covering how to do every single thing you need to do. Part of the point of my blog post is actually to bring to the internet yet another opinionated NAS setup "guide" (eventhough I would hesitate to call it a guide, but if I ever had to do the same thing again I would definitely read my own post first).