Unraid runs from a USB drive if that impacts your decision.
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Really? I don’t know how I feel about that. I guess that’s ok? It seems many people use unraid and like it. If I installed it as a vm would it run off a thumb drive? I made the decision to switch to bare metal unraid as it seems to fit my use case better than truenas. I’m currently moving everything to my older server.
This isn't a limitation of TrueNAS, but rather of ZFS itself. A new ZFS feature that allows expanding the pool one drive at a time has been in the works for a long time now and is supposed to be rolling out really soon (as it has been for the past 2-3 years I think), but as of right now it can't be done on any NAS solution that uses ZFS.
As you noted, UnRAID can do it - because it uses a different kind of data+parity system (you can continue to add a drive at a time as long as the largest drive has your parity data, I think). If you were comfortable running TrueNAS in a VM then you should have no problem running UnRAID the same way. In fact, it will probably be faster just because it's less resource intensive (and certainly less RAM intensive than ZFS)
You can "expand" it by increasing the capacity of each disk, but that can get costly.
Depending on how you have your vdevs set up, you could just add another.