Skip TrueNAS: A Bare-Bones ZFS NAS With Just zpool and Samba

For anyone who wants network storage without the overhead of appliance software like Synology, QNAP, or TrueNAS, this walkthrough shows that a functional NAS is only a few commands away. The author’s argument is one of fit rather than criticism: TrueNAS is a full enterprise suite, and running a minimal stack you fully understand beats depending on layers of features you’ll never touch. The build targets four Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drives on RHEL 9.

The piece leans on a ZFS property it argues is underappreciated and rarely documented: pools are self-describing. All array configuration lives on the disks themselves, so if the host OS dies you can move the drives to any machine with ZFS installed and run ‘zpool import’ to recover a RAIDZ2 array intact — no host-side config required. The setup steps cover mapping disks to stable identifiers via /etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf aliases (never raw /dev/nvmeN paths, since ordering isn’t guaranteed), creating a RAIDZ1 pool with ashift=12 to match the drives’ real 4KB sector size for performance, and enabling lz4 compression.

From there the author creates separate ZFS datasets for documents and backups, noting that datasets are far more than folders — each carries its own snapshots, encryption, replication, and property set, which is why splitting files into top-level datasets pays off. The final stage shares the pool over the network with Samba, including a dedicated UNIX/Samba user and a plan to configure a Time Machine target for Apple clients. The takeaway: file sharing is orthogonal to ZFS, and the whole thing is approachable enough to be worth understanding end to end.