I’ve got an ancient MicroServer N36L running TrueNAS CORE which I’ve copied the data off today and pulled the (HDD) drives from. It was always functional, but quite slow. This machine has been happily running in the linen cupboard for over 15 years!
My plan is to do full extended diags on the drives and move them over to a spare HP Z220 workstation as a new (well, marginally newer, but much faster) NAS. This is part of a broader “zero cost” 2026 hardware shuffle at home to better match the hardware I already have vs. the workloads going on. There’s nothing critical being stored here, and it’ll primarily be scratch/temp space for the other machines and homelab experimentation. No streaming or transcoding or downloading or anything like that - just a big SMB share + iSCSI target.
Looking through the box of spare drives here, I should end up with 3-4 (depending on diag results) matched drives, and 2x BNIB matched drives of a different size. I was planning on running with TrueNAS SCALE and two separate storage pools given my good experience with CORE, but thought I’d throw the question out to the HLB community while it takes me a few weeks to test all the hardware and do the build.
I’ve never used Unraid - anyone used it before? I can see the appeal to future me of being able to shove random mismatched drives from the spares bin in there as all these 15+ year old ones begin to die. I understand that’s one of the big features of Unraid, but I have never tried it myself. However, I am trying my best to make this a $0 endeavour and not have to buy a licence for something.
Anybody migrated from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE over the past ~2 years and happy/unhappy with the outcome? Any other alternatives I haven’t considered?
Curious to hear your experiences. I know I could roll something myself with Debian, but I’d prefer something more “set and forget” despite the low stakes of the data going onto the box. Primary goals are zero cost and minimal effort 
.