Store It Right: ZFS Pools, TrueNAS, SMB and NFS Shares, Snapshots, Scrubs and Disk Health for a Homelab NAS That Keeps Working

Store It Right is a practical guide to the part of a homelab where mistakes are permanent: the storage. It starts with the three honest ways to run a NAS on a Proxmox lab, set out as a decision table rather than a religion: ZFS directly on the Proxmox host, a TrueNAS VM with the disk controller passed through, or a separate bare-metal NAS. Then it builds the storage layer one decision at a time. Disks and controllers that ZFS can actually see: CMR rather than SMR, an IT-mode HBA rather than a RAID card, and pools built on /dev/disk/by-id names. Pools laid out for five years: mirrors or RAIDZ2, ashift=12, lz4, atime off, dedup off, an ARC cap that leaves room for your VMs, and the truth about SLOG and L2ARC. One dataset per kind of data, each with its own record size, compression and quota, wired into Proxmox's storage.cfg. Snapshots run on a sanoid policy, and syncoid pull replication copies them to a second box, with raw sends for encrypted datasets. TrueNAS SCALE runs as a VM with its HBA passed through. Shares cover SMB with Time Machine and Previous Versions, NFSv4 with systemd automount, and bind mounts into unprivileged LXCs, including the UID-mapping trap. Disk health covers SMART, scheduled scrubs, zed alerts to email and ntfy, reading zpool status, and replacing a failed disk calmly. Capacity planning includes usable space per layout, the 80% rule and RAIDZ expansion step by step. Every version, default and flag was checked against the official OpenZFS, Proxmox VE, TrueNAS, Samba and sanoid documentation in October 2026. No prices or speed claims.

What you get

• Before you buy anything: ZFS on the host vs a TrueNAS VM vs a bare-metal NAS, as one decision table
• Disks and the HBA: SATA, SAS and NVMe; why RAID cards are wrong for ZFS; IT mode; CMR vs SMR; disk IDs; PCI passthrough of an HBA on Proxmox VE 9
• ZFS the right way: vdevs and pools; mirror vs RAIDZ1/2/3; what OpenZFS 2.3 RAIDZ expansion does and doesn't do; ashift, recordsize, compression; the zfs_arc_max limit on a Proxmox host; SLOG, L2ARC and special vdevs
• Datasets, not folders: a layout per use, quotas and reservations, zvols vs datasets, case sensitivity for SMB, and Proxmox zfspool and dir storage entries
• Snapshots and replication: zfs snapshot, rollback and .zfs/snapshot; a sanoid policy with templates; incremental, raw and resumable zfs send/receive; syncoid pull replication; replicating to TrueNAS
• TrueNAS SCALE as a VM: the VM spec, importing a pool, and the pool to dataset to share flow; why apps belong on Proxmox; config backups
• Shares: smb.conf essentials with the fruit and shadow_copy2 modules; NFS exports and automount; the unprivileged LXC UID trap; pct bind mounts
• Disk health: the SMART attributes that matter, smartd schedules, scrubs, zed alerts to ntfy, reading zpool status, replacing a disk, and what to do when ZFS reports permanent errors
• Capacity and growth: usable-space tables, padding, the 80% rule, four ways to grow, moving a pool, and a monthly storage review
• A complete reference build as commands, plus the config bundle, a storage checklist and a cheat sheet

66 pages, 24 diagrams plus a chapter-opener graphic for every chapter, a storage checklist and a cheat sheet. PDF and EPUB. Homelab the Right Way, Book 11.

Not sure yet? Read the free sample first: the cover, the full table of contents and all of Chapter 4, "Snapshots and Replication" (copy-on-write explained, snapshots by hand, getting files back and rolling back safely, a sanoid retention policy, incremental, raw and resumable zfs send/receive, syncoid pull replication, replicating to TrueNAS and a restore test), at https://payhip.com/b/6wIkQ

Also in a bundle: Everything Bundle: every ebook in the store, $89 · Homelab Bundle, $59.