Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.

[Thread #997 for this comm, first seen 12th Jan 2026, 16:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Hello, I have some experience using Debian in NAS, but none with TrueNAS.

Before anything: BACKUP !

If possible, make a full copy of your pool onto external drives, or another NAS or anything else. If it is not possible to get enough spare storage soace, then at least backup the things your really care about (personal photos, important projects, password database). Just make sure you have a valid backup in case things go terribly wrong ! I am sure everything will go well, but this will give you additional peace of mind.

Setup Debian for NAS use

There are a few things I can think of, many might be obvious, anyway:

1. Install and configure network file sharing protocols: Samba (files sharing compatible with Windows, Linux, Android and others), NFS (more like network drive)
2. Install: S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools
3. Choose and configure filesystem. I have been using BTRFS, but since your pool is ZFS and you probably don’t want to format and start from nothing, I think you are already set on that one. I believe this is extra configuration as it doesn’t come by default on Debian.

More advanced things:

1. Setup SSH for remote connection with the terminal
2. Install htop or btop for system monitoring in the terminal
3. wireguard is a very nice VPN, it’s easy to configure on all platforms in order to access your NAS from outside your home

Power optimization

1. Enable C-stats in the BIOS (warning in case your CPU is a 1st gen Ryzen, do not activate)
2. powertop is an utility to optimize power saving settings (I’ve not bothered with this until now)
3. hdparm is an utility to manage and configure hard drives, you can use this to configure automatic spin-down after some time of inactivity, this is a bit tricky though.

Dashboards, UI, frontends

1. OpenMediaVault is the first one that comes to my mind. It’s actually a Linux distro based on Debian with a web interface that allows you to do all the NAS relevant confirmations from the Webbrowser. It can also be installed on top of an existing Debian install. I have used it a long time ago.
2. CasaOS, similar in concept, I have not used it.
3. Another simple option to get started, get a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Install Debian with full desktop environment and configure everything in person. You can always go headless at a later time

Docker

You definitely want to install docker to run most of your services. Please, also add your local user to the docker group to not have to run everything as root. Useful services I use:

• Portainer: manage containers with a web interface
• watchtower: Auto-Update other docker containers
• Jellyfin: media Manager and player (similar to Plex)
• *arr, transmission, sabnzbd: sail the high seas
• gluetun: route containers traffic through a VPN
• caddy: reverse proxy, to access your container with sub-domain name, example: jellyfin.mycoolnas.net
• vaultwarden: redistribution of the Bitwarden password manager for self-loading with the premium features available.

Graphics cards

It’s been a long time I didn’t have to deal with NVidia. Debian comes by default with the nouveau open source driver, which works but may not give the best performance. I don’t know if it impacts transcoding performance. I suppose it doesn’t give your the NVENC codecs. Anyway, you can install the NVidia proprietary drivers and should be able to transcode.

Conclusion

Debian is a solid option for a NAS, it’s been serving me well for many years. It is set and forget. However. It takes time to setup and the terminal is going to be your main configuration tool unless you go for OMV or another distro specialty made for NAS.

Your main source of information shall be the Debian Wiki. You will find step-by-step guides to install most of the things mentioned above. The Arch wiki is also a good resource, keep in mind that some files may have different locations and package different names across Linux distributions, but configuration should be similar.

Best of luck my friend

For my own curiosity, I decided to check the release notes. I thought it was weird that TrueNAS would remove SMART monitoring, but looks like they didn’t. Just got heavily changed what they’re doing with it. The new recommendation is to use a third-party tool which does what TrueNAS was doing with disk monitoring, but does it better.

The short of it is TrueNAS still has smartmontools binaries installed and still monitors SMART data from drives. Just doesn’t have the dedicated space in the UI anymore. It’ll still alert on SMART failures.

Link to Disk Monitoring in the relevant Release Notes (25.10):

https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/25.10/gettingstarted/versionnotes/#smart-monitoring-and-disk-management-in-2510-and-beyond

This doesn’t answer the question you asked, but take a look at OpenMediaVault. It’s Debian underneath but already has pretty much everything you would need to do built in.

Core or Scale? If running Core I’d say install plain FreeBSD on it. Even if scale I’d consider that in a full wipe - FreeBSD is great as a server and supports ZFS out of the box without problems.

Then grow a long beard (not optional, even if female) so you can be “the old guy who has seen it all”

I ran a Debian nas with cockpit as the interface for a bit. Eventually stopped using cockpit and did most of what I needed from the terminal, just easier and quicker. Only used it for nfs shares, but you can use docker or podman no problem. The great thing about Debian is that it is barebones and easy to add exactly what you need and nothing else. There is nothing special you need to do other than install and set up the disk sharing of your choice. There are specific and special was to set certain things up, like zfs, but everything is usually well documented.