I put together some hardware months ago for the purpose of building a NAS box. I have yet to install anything but i was shooting towards TrueNas.
Is there a best practice on attaching it to the network? My network is comprised of pfSense router with three vlans > cisco sg300-10 switch > OpenWRT AP. It’s only to be used locally and I have no intention of needing remote access to the NAS at this point in time, if ever.
Best practice is putting the NAS on the network where the data will be accessed and not routing any NAS traffic through the firewall as that creates a bottleneck.
I really think you need to clarify this. There is only time you wouldn’t route the traffic is if this was an iscsi target or NFS for backend storage to VM’s. Otherwise if the is NAS is used for shares then it would be routed.
You should not route SMB shares either.
So if your in an environment where there are separate VLAN’s with workstation how do you expect to reach said shares?
You will obviously be routing the traffic, but you will probably not be using the edge firewall for that, especially if that firewall is a Soho firewall (which of course it won’t be in an enterprise environment), and you probably won’t be using a small business layer two-and-a-half switch like the SG300 for routing either 
That being said, as a home user, I do route SMB traffic through my pfSense box and it works perfectly fine. I get near line speed (1Gbps) when copying files. So I guess for normal file sharing in a (very) small business it would work as well if the router/firewall can handle the traffic.
However, especially with inexpensive routers/firewalls, even with only a few concurrent users you’re likely to reach certain limits very quickly, especially if you’re also using the same device for things like VPN access, IDS/IPS, reverse proxy, etc. Therefore, the better solution in such a scenario would be to use a separate network interface on the NAS for SMB and then put that on the same network segment as the clients.
I have solved this a bunch different ways in the past (all experiments really): Routing through the firewall, using two dedicated NAS boxes- one on each VLAN, Using two network connections on one NAS box- each on different VLANs, then instead of an SMB share, I used NFS, and restricted by IP address. My current favorite is that I run Proxmox on my storage server in a VLAN aware set up, and I have 2 Debian VMs serving SMB, each with their own drives, and on their own VLAN
None of these is probably the best, but I am in a home lab and just experimenting with non-critical workloads.
I’m trying to make a point. If someone is going to use it for SMB shares then only a few scenarios is it only servers with a separate NIC or virtual NIC on the said non-routable VLAN would benefit from that. But that wouldn’t be the case for the majority. Most users will need access from workstations, which would mean it would need to be routed. The OP didn’t even specify how exactly they were going to use it so we cannot say to set it up a certain way without know the full scope.
And what would prevent those users from binding the SMB service to a NIC that is connected to the same subnet as the workstations that need to acces those SMB shares?
Probably not an enterprise or particularly high-performance scope, based on the equipment listed in his post. So I’d say he’ll probably be fine, even if the traffic is routed through the pfSense.
And yes, we need more information to be able to give any meaningful advice.
Sorry folks. Just trying to come up with a solution to offload media off of phones in the house. Have tons of photos since the early 2000s that I should backup. I been lucky so far.
I use Nextcloud and the Nextcloud Android app for this, but I have no experience with Nextcloud on TrueNAS or the TrueNAS apps in general. Another way to automatically get the photos from your phone to the TrueNAS box would be Synchthing.
As far as the network is concerned, maybe you let us know how your current network is structured. What are the the three existing VLANs used for, i.e. what kind of devices are located in which VLAN?
Thanks. I’ll take a look into it.
The modem, router and switch are in the basement. The dumb AP is up in the dining room area doing its thing broadcasting the vlans . The three VLANs are guest, kids and iot. My computer,xbox and printer are the only things on the main lan. Guest for guests. The kids is for all their stuff with a schedule to kill the internet and resume at set times. Iot for all the tvs and other junk. The vlans can’t ping each other and only the main lan has access to router, switch and AP gui. I did recently set up openvpn as a convenience for when I’m traveling so I can watch the local tv networks.
Out of curiosity, What’s a good option for my basic no frills home use? I’ve had this sg300 for quite a while now and I know it’s reached it end-of-life support.
I have eight ethernet drops throughout my house. I thought about running one to my garage to set up another AP.
In my opinion, the SG300 is still perfectly fine for home usage.
The only reason to buy a new switch (apart from maybe any advanced layer 3 features, which you probably don’t need in a home network) would be if you need more ports and/or want to go beyond 1Gbps.
A little off topic but you should consider building a NAS that can backup to the cloud. If you’re a cheapskate like me, I’ve found it cheaper to have my NAS for storing everything (family photos, plex, files, etc…) and then a second NAS that runs Windows using storage spaces and Backblaze. Backblaze is $7 a month for unlimited storage. I use the Windows NAS for essential stuff such as family photos.
I would exactly call it off topic. That’s where I am at. I’m cheap. I converted an old amd fx system to use as a NAS. I have four 4TB exos drives. I’m sure its not the most energy efficient but it’s what I had laying around except for the drives.
Just trying to figure this TrueNas stuff out and to secure it at this point. I just want networked storage for the family and to be able to set up on their devices to use it. The wife wants some security cameras eventually so maybe do some video surveillance? Then to back up the backup. Looks like I have a lot of reading and watching to do. I would pay for a seamless basic guided setup.
I was able to map the drive on my laptop the other day. I have a question about he overall storage pool. 6.91 TB of storage is available as of now. Can this be split up among users or is the whole pool available to users and apps?