Youtube would rather be able to track every user and make more profit per person than go big tent all audiences.

True, but consider that Google, Alphabet, whatever, is fundamentally an information broker. All of their services and technologies are simply a means to that end. They have no incentive to go big tent if it means sacrificing their ability to harvest data on individuals and groups.

I’m not saying TrueNAS and ZFS aren’t good. For large enterprise systems, arrays with sufficient redundancy, servers with reliable power management, I can see its advantages, esp. w/ snapshots, etc. I acknowledge that Open Media Vault is mickey mouse in comparison.

I just feel compelled to share my experience when I see people considering TrueNAS for their first foray into building a small home media server, running a z1 array, with no mention of battery backup or power management. ZFS isn’t inherently safer. It’s safer when paired with sufficient redundancy and power management.

When I built my first server, TrueNAS, ZFS, and Raid z1 made perfect sense. And I loved it for the first couple months. Then an update and unexpected shutdown rendered my storage pools unrecoverable. Had backups for most but not all of the files, and spent almost a year of bits of free time here wading in way over my head on highly technical support forum threads & there trying to bring the pools back online. Nothing worked, the array was toast.

I don’t know how tech savvy you are, but here’s the advice I’d give my past self - Take a few weeks to read documentation and play with TrueNAS before filling up your drives with stuff. Peek around in troubleshooting forums, see if the troubleshooting you may have to do is in line with your experience level.

After wiping my drives and starting over, I built around Open Media Vault. It’s less pretty and less feature rich than TrueNas, but it’s also much less fragile in a raid z1 setup and I never worry about it.