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Home Server Update 2026

Time for a server upgrade, this time I decided to go with a TrueNAS running on Ugreen NAS.

My philosophy for this build was to keep things as simple as possible. While it was nice to tinker with many different services in my last server, this time around I decided to only setup services that I actually use.

Hardware #

  • Ugreen DXP 4800
  • 4 x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf
  • 2 X 1TB Samsung SSD

The NAS has 3 SSD slots, one of them with preinstalled OS. I decided to keep the original OS and installed two 1 TB SSDs. One for TrueNAS and the other for application pool.

For HDDs I use 4 X 8TB disks in a RAIDZ2 configuration, with available stogare of around 14 TB and two-drive redundancy. I configured two pools one consisting of hard drives that I use as general storage and the second one on SSD that I use for applications.

Software #

The only BIOS setting I had to change was disabling the watchdog and change the boot order to boot off a different SSD. From there everything was very straightforward, boot from iso usb and install on the selected SSD. I chose to not wipe the internal SSD as there doesn’t seem to be a way to restore it.

As for other applications I scaled back a lot since previous server, while it was nice to try different services I didn’t really use a lot of them daily.

This time all services are installed as TrueNAS Apps. Each app needed additional volumes (for config, cached, transcoding) all of those volumes are created on the SSD/App pool.

TrueNAS #

I tried to spindown the disks while not in use. As I don’t constantly access the data it seemed like a good idea. I was able to get them to stay spun down for a long time but occasionally they would be accessed by something on the system even when not in use. Eventually I decided not to track it down any further.

And of course there is plenty of opinions whether it causes additional wear on the drives vs the power and noise that you save. 😅 For me I don’t keep the server on 24/7 so noise is not a concern.

Here are the settings I changed for spindown:

  • Move system pool to ssd if not already set.
  • Moved apps from storage pool, (if you like me and setup HDD pool first it will default to it).
  • Change smart to level 1 and set time to spindown.

Jellyfin #

For hosting some media in my home network I use Jellyfin, it may not be as feature rich as PLEX but I don’t notice it in my use. The performance is good as this Ugreen NAS supports hardware transcoding with Intel QuickSync (QSV). The only settings I needed to change was to selecting QSV in the Jellyfin settings and enabling GPU passthrough in the TrueNAS App settings for Jellyfin app.

Photos #

My photo setup is pretty simple, I don’t have any photo sync between a NAS and my phone/camera. Instead I just manually upload new photos and organize them in folder by years/events/trips. Because of this number one priority was to find an application that will work with my folder structure and just be a nice UI that I can use for viewing. For this I tried two applications Photoview and Immich, and chose Immich in the end.

Photoview is a really nice choice as it really feels like it is just a UI layer on top of whatever folder structure you point it to. But I had some problems with HEIC files and Live Photos (at the time of writing the version in the TrueNAS store was older version, newer versions should have it).

Immich enforces its own structure on the library but it is possible to add your existing photos as an external library which maintains their structure. And has more features like face recognition (all done locally), Text recognition, Live Photos support, mobile app. This app also required GPU passthrough.

Front led lights #

In order to make front LEDs work under TrueNAS I followed this script

Future plans #

Specifically for photos I would like to add an offsite backup. Since I don’t need to quickly acess this backup and the size of data ~92 GB currently, this is meant as a way to recover photos. I’m exploring Scaleway Object Storage Glacier for this long term infrequently accessed backups similar to AWS S3 Glacier.

This is still in progress as I have both ‘finished’ folders from vacations that will not get any updates and the ones that are ‘in progress’ like random photos from year 2026 that get continuously updated. Because of this structure I’m looking for semi-manual way to mark folder as ‘ready for backup’ and then they will be archived and backed up.